"LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output"
The best advice for writing for other humans is: don't use LLMs.
If you're writing for machines, liking coding, then fine go for it. If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures, information, that sort of thing, then also ok to use LLMS. But if you're writing for a human mind to ingest and extract meaning from, then LLMs are poison.
the author can ask the same question - why should I write something if you're just going to use a LLM to summarize it ?
This is an unnecessary argument both ways. Whether you use a LLM or write it yourself or read it yourself (and then comment on it), you're putting your signature beneath it. I don't care whether you use your natural brain or an artifical brain (LLM)
Because it's an asymmetric relationship? If you write something it can be consumed with value at many different levels, and an llm summary is valid. If we could trust llms to get the details right, creation of technical content would also be valid, but for now IME the editing and proof reading required outweighs any gains.
> the author can ask the same question - why should I write something if you're just going to use a LLM to summarize it ?
I wouldn't. LLMs don't summarize things very well. If you don't care if someone wrote it, and you don't plan to read it, why are you even here?
Slop is slop of course, but I don't 'read' manuals so much as I look stuff up in them. So I only need the information to be clear and style doesn't matter so much. Provided the LLM knows its writing a manual it can do a fair job of presenting the info in a good enough manner. Granted, if someone had used the tool incorrectly and its spouting out flowery prose in a manual, then that is indeed bad.
Interesting way to put it because it means in most professional software development contexts, it is also NOT appropriate for coding since other human will work on the same codebase, at least review the submitted code. So... according to this (IMHO pragmatic) heuristics it's only acceptable for coding alone, e.g. weekend project that won't be pushed online. Unless code has no meaning beside the output it produces, which does exist but I would wager is rare.
When you review code, you're not taking it all in end to end like an email or memo or blog, you're looking for important symbols, recognizing structures and patterns, jumping between different files at different levels of reference and abstraction, and building a model in your head of the principles that make it work and their consequences for the overall procedure.
Code is "meant to be read" in the same way as a law, blueprint, policy document, or manual is, ie: jumping between relevant sections to get small pieces of information relevant to some task. The act of "reading" never starts at the beginning, it starts with a ctrl-f or flipping through an index or table of contents for a specific relevant symbol that is the only reason you are looking at the document.
Code is invention, not art (and should be covered by patent law, not copyright law, I will die on this hill)
It is not the same yet it requires reading which in turns requires interpretability, trying to make sense of what was read within a very specific, maybe explicit context, e.g. specifications, and that can be optimized for an audience, or not.
For example the code I would write for somebody who just started to learn programming will not be the same as the code who is an expert even though both will pass the specifications.
Consequently taking into account who (if anyone) will actually review, and thus read, the code changes the code itself.
Manuals, laws, and dictionaries are not designed to be read, but they are designed to be interpreted. In fact interpretability is what they maximize for. And interpretability isn't an absolute value, it is relative to an audience, this is why household equipment often comes with separate owners, installers, and service manuals, and why Webster publishes Elementary, Collegiate, International, and Mass-Market versions of its Dictionary.
Documents that are "meant for human consumption" in the way the top comment intended generally don't optimize for interpretability like code, manuals, and dictionaries do. Novels, letters, emails, internet comments, blogs, articles, nonfiction books, etc often forgo interpretaiblity for practical, expressive, or rhetorical effect. The best moments of these is even when they are confusing on purpose, because imprecise language is a gateway to deeper levels of meaning through fourth-wall breaks, metaphor, analogy, and humor. (all things that LLMs are notoriously bad at and don't seem to be improving on over the years)
Those other types of writing are intended to be read in full, every word, end-to-end, in order to educate, entertain, inform, or influence the reader who, and i think this is the critical part, does not drive the experience.
When I'm reading a news article, and you realize that you're reading the voice of chatgpt, I'm annoyed because it means that i've been strung along by a stupid machine that somebody else handed me off to to keep me occupied.
When I'm reading code, and I notice that it seems AI written for whatever reason, I might then choose to apply more scrutiny, maybe I try to suss out what the prompter intended to happen, so that I can validate whether that actually happened and if it was accomplished in an optimal way. But it's not insulting in the same way, because I'm still in the driver's seat of the experience, deciding on my own which parts to read and which parts to ignore as irrelevant to my investigation, because the only thing I want to get out of it an understanding of a part of the mechanical system that the code creates.
> The best moments of these is even when they are confusing on purpose, because imprecise language is a gateway to deeper levels of meaning through fourth-wall breaks, metaphor, analogy, and humor.
I don't agree. Because those metaphors and other word plays reach deep into the human mind (at least for the purported audience), while most technical writing try to be more explicit.
Here is the introduction for Laravel Socialite
In addition to typical, form based authentication, Laravel also provides a simple, convenient way to authenticate with OAuth providers using Laravel Socialite. Socialite currently supports authentication via Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Google, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Slack.
And this is the marketing blug of Shadows of the Gods by John Gwyne
A century has passed since the gods fought and drove themselves to extinction. Now only their bones remain, promising great power to those brave enough to seek them out.
As whispers of war echo across the land of Vigrid, fate follows in the footsteps of three warriors: a huntress on a dangerous quest, a noblewoman pursuing battle fame, and a thrall seeking vengeance among the mercenaries known as the Bloodsworn.
All three will shape the fate of the world as it once more falls under the shadow of the gods.
One is direct, with not a lot of imagery, but rather use specific concepts which has precise meaning. The other is just as clear, but use concepts that ties to bigger ones. They are not imprecise, they just let you be aware there's a bigger canvas than the literal interpretation.
That comparison isn’t automatically valid, because the criteria for what makes acceptable code are very different than for natural language prose.
It’s perfectly possible to consider e.g. working, LLM generated, human approved code acceptable, while considering LLM writing that hasn’t undergone major human editing unacceptable because of its repetitious, formulaic, marketing-oriented style - a criticism that doesn’t even make sense for LLM generated code.
> If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures, information, that sort of thing,
Yeah... no. The people doing this lack the communications training, see the output has the necessary information, and regurgitate it with no effort or care. This needs to stop.
We spent decades format building to make it easy quick and easy to get through something like a runbook. If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong. If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop.
This is a hill I will die on or absolutely start slaughtering people on. I just refuse to deal with this crap.
I used an LLM a year or more ago to generate a description of our SDLC for a compliance certification. Perfect application of LLMs IMO. Do you want to die on that hill as well?
A lot of documentation generated in corporations has marginal real value.
> If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong.
That’s easy to instruct an agent to do. Put it in a skill.
> If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop.
Using an AI doesn’t absolve the user of their responsibilities. This is an easy problem to solve, just make sure teams know what’s expected of them and encourage everyone to push back (professionally) against offenders.
If someone sends me AI slop, they're getting chewed out and told I'm not doing it and I'll even tell my boss "no" and why. If I got fired over something like that, then it tells me everything I need to know about company and the leadership's priorities. I'll die on that hill.
To be completely fair though, I'm against the behaviors in information transfer I've been seeing. I've pass along AI generated runbooks, but they look nothing like the default outputs of these models. It's because I took time to apply all the writing knowledge I like to see in my curation. If people are doing this, I can't even tell it's AI writing. My work is done in minutes instead of deciphering so BS pseudo language they developed in their AI workspace (people really need to turn off those memory features).
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Edit: Also if I'm the guy receiving a security report and it's AI generated and poorly formatted, I'm failing you short of producing something for a human to parse. Simple as that.
If a security report is written for any particular human at all, I’d consider it to be a failure as an enterprise policy document. It should be written for The System, not for the boss; and LLMs are perfect for producing ritual boilerplate.
We're probably just going to disagree here. These LLMs are built to serve humans. They either need to make the system transparent for the operator or be limited in use to tasks that can be proven in whole (with code that can't be revised without human approval).
Should you think it is wise to trust the machine that can't differentiate subject matters in a chat styled context, you have fun with that fluster cluck when it blows up.
Like Fable is highly useful, but it's really bad at keeping it's responses straight.
In fact, that "it's not X it is Y" pattern always crops up when it reasoned about the idea of X and I never fed it that. It's literally doing that because it can't predict that I'm a different entity despite it being able to say I am a different entity.
Edit: Clarification by removal of incomplete sentence fragment. Edit2: Clarification on the "proven in whole" thing.
> Also if I'm the guy receiving a security report and it's AI generated and poorly formatted, I'm failing you short of producing something for a human to parse. Simple as that.
It’s clear that you’ve never worked for a compliance company and probably have never been involved in a compliance project. As such, you don’t have the context needed to participate usefully in this discussion.
In fact, post-LLM quality monitoring is a huge time trap.
I can't write anything for humans using LLMs, because there is so much to change that it ends up like the Ship of Theseus, I would have been faster writing it myself than delegating the task.
completely agree. i will admit to taking llm phrases when i am really trying to refine every last detail and it just makes a suggestion that is too good to unsee. but in general it doesn’t feel like it helps directly with the “word choosing” part of the writing task at all (if you are someone who cares about word choice), which is… definitely a pretty big part of the job, lol.
it is great at analyzing the argument, finding inconsistencies, helping you think through what parts should be cut, helping you refine examples or fix the occasional “how do i get this phrase to work correctly in this transition?” kinds of stuff. but anything where LLMs are the prima materia… that stuff literally only makes sense _to me_. which makes sense, because it is written _for_ me, no matter what instructions i actually give it, bc of memories and a million other things. and i say this as a complete maximalist wrt. trying to use llms for absolutely every last thing they possibly can be used for, just to see what it’s like.
i guess i would say that it does very, very little to make the writing process meaningfully faster; it _can_ do _plenty_ to help make your output better though, which is definitely something— just isn’t the thing most people are looking for.
I've had some success writing certain explicitly technical documents, with a style guide provided to the LLM that it can match, and then going over it by basically iterating on every sentence in the document and asking "can this sentence be removed?".
Style guides are a big tools people are missing out on. It isn't enough to say "write concisely and technically". Give them a sample. Yea verily these many 5 or 6 years ago, "style transfer" was a big thing that early LLM tech was doing. It's still very good at it.
That said I still tend to cut out at least 25% of the resulting verbiage and adding back another 10% or so more of my own original content even under those circumstances.
Where it has been really helpful is that I tend to want to write in a conversational style that doesn't seem to match most people's expectations of a technical document. The LLMs let me write my way and style-shift it into something closer to what people expect. And LLMs, since let's be honest they're the primary audience nowadays. Which I am not even upset about; I'd rather 5 LLMs read the architecture document than the amortized .2 or so humans I could expect in the same circumstance 5 years ago.
Which also implies, in many cases, I am feeding the AI as much text as I expect to come out, or in some cases, even more, as I am describing context, reasoning, and other things that may impact the writing but are not necessarily repeated in the final text. I factored out a lot of the context into my user-level CLAUDE.md which has helped cut that down a bit.
Having the style guide and proofreading it and linking it is more effort than the lazy slopulists want to put in, so your writing will reach far better than theirs will
You have to assume that in many situations a human is asking an LLM about the content you've provided, even if they or another human reads some or all of it themselves too. So it's valuable to proactively ask your own LLM in the same way, so you can see what the other person will get out of it. And tune the verbiage until the LLM tells them what you want it to :)
Sorry if this comes off as critical, but are you seriously doing that? I can't imagine optimizing my writing for people choosing to mangle it through a LLM rather than for the people reading it as-is.
Also the word "verbiage" ticks me off as a LLM-ism on the level of "delve" or "smoking gun". Are its users aware that in addition to its usage as somewhat of a synonym of "idiolect", it more commonly means "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content", i.e. slop?
I wrote a contract proposal a few months ago and I absolutely did a few rounds with an LLM to get the result I wanted. Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters. You know that HR has a pipeline set up with a prompt like "here's the job description, here's the candidate's info, rate the candidate on a scale from 1-10" so you can do the same and learn how to boost your own signal. I have zero qualms about doing this.
As for "verbiage", I guess that's too bad, I'm going to continue using it anyway. Interesting factoid about the word though. I will say that "utilize" is one of my pet peeves (99% of the time the word you actually want is "use") and I've excised it from my spoken vocabulary, but I like(d) how verbiage rhymes with foliage so I'm more reticent to give that one up.
Fair enough, cover letters and contract proposals are more marketing than actual information, so that's fair game I suppose. Good trick. I wouldn't use it in something meant to transmit actual information though, like a manual or something.
> Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters
Sadly people lost the skill to write a standard form concise 3-paragraphs-of-3-sentences cover letter even before keyword-based ATS initiated the beginning of the end. It wasn’t supposed to be a summary of a CV and an essay about your lifelong passion for automated ad-bidding quality checks or some other shit employers delude themselves into believing someone might organically be really into.
This is the real crime of llms on writing. They’ve taken perfectly reasonable verbal ticks (the one I miss being able to use is scaffolding) and caused the audience to rebel against them en masse. Verbiage is a great word. I refuse to give it up. It’s load bearing even.
I agree and disagree. Yes, it turns into the Ship of Theseus, but I feel it helps jump start things. This was actually the way some writers work I.e. just write fast expecting garbage. Keep molding it like clay until you get what you want.
So much of my time right now is completely rebuilding tutorials that the devs had generated because except for steps like open and save its just wrong and it doesn't work and customers are not going to let that slide.
This has started to be an issue at my work with code. Everyone started using the thermo-nuclear-code-quality-review skill and, while it does a great job finding consolidation opportunities and architecturally-weak code, it also continues to expand PRs well beyond their scope until you end up revamping far more than you intended...
hey thanks for mentioning that skill, I hadn't heard of it before but I just ran it on a non trivial codebase I've been planning to refactor and it did a great job.
I don't use a lot of "skills" so if there are others you've started using frequently I'd be curious to learn about them.
Too simple, too dogmatic
at the start and at the end (“don’t use LLMs” and “then they are poison”). The middle section is all good.
Writing with a LLM is a boon if you are trying to write while mastering a new field. Imagine a neuroscientist entering robotics or an electrical engineer trying to enter the field of neuromorphic systems. In these cases a human will need help from an LLM to think and write more deeply AND broadly. I sure do.
You could object that this form of human-LLM collaborative writing is just for one reader; the writer. True at the start but not true toward the end.
I do agree that even the frontier models do not touch a really strong human writer. Way too much gimmickry. They do not yet match individuals such as Leslie Lamport, Terry Winograd, John MacArthur, Richard Rorty, Humberto Maturana, William James, Rodney Brooks. They don’t have the depth of understanding to simplify. But give them a few more years and excursions in the real world and a concept if “now” and the situation may improve.
I often ask Fable and Opus to explain difficult topics to me as if I were the canonical dog Rover. It works.
No, you need to learn the new field you’re entering enough to write about it. Having incomplete knowledge and writing for others utilizing an llm that you do not know enough to fact check is about the worst way I can think of to use an llm for writing.
A person isn’t becoming a master in the new field if the LLM is doing all that for them.
New areas are where it is most dangerous to use an LLM, as a person can’t tell when it doesn’t align with their views (because they don’t have any yet), is misleading, or flat out wrong.
If I want to know what an LLM thinks, I’ll ask an LLM. If I’m reading a paper from a human, it’s, because I want to know what that human thinks. If they need the LLM to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, then they don’t know enough to write about the topic yet. Doing that work to write something themselves could help move them learn enough to write something that is hopefully worth reading.
This is explicitly the problem people notice with LLMs. The text they produce sounds fine only if you are so ignorant of the subject that you can’t properly read it yourself. That’s not a “boon” it’s a flaw.
100% disagree. The more you don't know an area, the more LLMs will lead you astray.
Explaining difficult topics or summarizing to you is fine. But that's a world of difference from having an LLM write for you. You THINK the LLM is helping you write above your level, but that's because you are not in a position to tell it's bad.
Actually I am in a very good position to tell. And who said “write for you”? How about “write with you as a collaborator?”.
Writing is a form of thinking and writing with an LLM makes the argumentation, discussion, and progress toward goals faster and often better in my situation.
I am stating an opinion based on 2.5 years of intense interactions and writing with Anthropic models on a difficult topic related to asynchronous computational systems.
Background: I am a neuroscientist and behavioral biologist (45 years of experience) who understands the biology of behaviors fairly well but I need to translate this background into hardware architectures that get beyond current asynchronous system (e.g., this recent neuromorphic paper in Nature Communication by Li et al., 2025, A deterministic neuromorphic architecture, doi.org/10.1038.s41467-025-65268-z).
Working AND writing with Opus and now Fable has been a blessing of sorts.
A more facetious way to put "don't use LLMs": share your input prompt. The people who don't want to read LLM output won't have to see it, and those who do can enjoy using an LLM the same way the author would've. This actually saves a loss/noise step as the consumers won't need to deploy an llm to summarize the authors llm expanded output.
Absolutely correct. No matter what the detractors say, your writing will get glazed over and you will lose the focus of readers if your AI output sounds like all the AI output your readers have read before.
You just should not do things that human beings are good at with automated processes. Things such as: creative writing, painting, dancing that is not pre-programmed, going with the flow, living the moment, having sex, wrestling, cooking, acting, connecting with your loved ones... and so on.
Word chains these programs produce are inherently meaningless. They do not feel so, because WE people are amazing at bringing meaning to any old string of symbols: <a href="https://www.ubu.com/sound/lin.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ubu.com/sound/lin.html
They are very useful machines indeed, but they do not help you write well. They mathematically cannot. They just try to guess what is the next tokern you might want to read.
I would stay away from it for manuals and documentation as well. AI tends to like inserting meaningless and confusing clarification that is at best a waste of time.
Also if you don't understand what you are documenting enough to write the docs that is a problem.
Hallucinations don't really work that way. They happen when you ask an LLM to generate new material. Not so much reviewing existing material.
But there's always the "ask a second LLM to get two opinions" technique which gets you pretty close to error free.
And... now that I think of it... even if it was terrible and missed 50% of the errors... wouldn't that still be better than using no LLM which catches 0% of the errors?
LLMs exclusively hallucinate. That is the sole mechanism their reasoning is based on. The fact that they are ever correct is a happy coincidence.
You can reduce the likelihood of incorrectness by adding the real facts to the context, which is what LLMs do. But that in and of itself is not a guarantee that the LLM will be correct. Because its fundamental process of reasoning is probabilistic word-by-word hallucination.
And it would be an odd way to describe all the extremely useful things they discover. Are you suggesting they're taking "magic" mushrooms of some kind?
On the balance of probabilities, the CRISPR thing is a hack job. AI did not do it. It's likely the AI-assisted work of researchers white labeled as AI.
Do you just believe every bit of press release that you read? These companies have an enormous amount of pressure on them to make profit. They can and will lie to try and convince you that AI is better than it is.
Is there any evidence outside of these companies that AI is breaking new ground on literally anything? No. It can help a little with a lot of different types of work– none of it novel.
Personally I think every single medium to long form piece of writing should go through an LLM grammar check at the minimum (they are great at catching stuff like correcting “reign in” to “rein in”, not to mention their/they’re and so on) although I don’t think they generally have the self control to make the corrections themselves without screwing stuff up.
I can see being lazy and skipping it, but refusing to use them even for more minimal advice purposes seems crazy to me.
Eddy_Viscosity2 · · focus · HN ↗
The best advice for writing for other humans is: don't use LLMs.
If you're writing for machines, liking coding, then fine go for it. If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures, information, that sort of thing, then also ok to use LLMS. But if you're writing for a human mind to ingest and extract meaning from, then LLMs are poison.
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partyficial · · focus · HN ↗
This is an unnecessary argument both ways. Whether you use a LLM or write it yourself or read it yourself (and then comment on it), you're putting your signature beneath it. I don't care whether you use your natural brain or an artifical brain (LLM)
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0c3ca83 · · focus · HN ↗
I wouldn't. LLMs don't summarize things very well. If you don't care if someone wrote it, and you don't plan to read it, why are you even here?
partyficial · · focus · HN ↗
Not in full. I plan to read the LLM's summary. Most people could benefit from brevity.
author : writes the summary (prompt). LLM expands it to article.
reader : LLM summarizes the article. reader reads it.
both author and reader are free to use, or not use LLM. I don't see the big deal here.
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hannasanarion · · focus · HN ↗
When you review code, you're not taking it all in end to end like an email or memo or blog, you're looking for important symbols, recognizing structures and patterns, jumping between different files at different levels of reference and abstraction, and building a model in your head of the principles that make it work and their consequences for the overall procedure.
Code is "meant to be read" in the same way as a law, blueprint, policy document, or manual is, ie: jumping between relevant sections to get small pieces of information relevant to some task. The act of "reading" never starts at the beginning, it starts with a ctrl-f or flipping through an index or table of contents for a specific relevant symbol that is the only reason you are looking at the document.
Code is invention, not art (and should be covered by patent law, not copyright law, I will die on this hill)
utopiah · · focus · HN ↗
For example the code I would write for somebody who just started to learn programming will not be the same as the code who is an expert even though both will pass the specifications.
Consequently taking into account who (if anyone) will actually review, and thus read, the code changes the code itself.
hannasanarion · · focus · HN ↗
Manuals, laws, and dictionaries are not designed to be read, but they are designed to be interpreted. In fact interpretability is what they maximize for. And interpretability isn't an absolute value, it is relative to an audience, this is why household equipment often comes with separate owners, installers, and service manuals, and why Webster publishes Elementary, Collegiate, International, and Mass-Market versions of its Dictionary.
Documents that are "meant for human consumption" in the way the top comment intended generally don't optimize for interpretability like code, manuals, and dictionaries do. Novels, letters, emails, internet comments, blogs, articles, nonfiction books, etc often forgo interpretaiblity for practical, expressive, or rhetorical effect. The best moments of these is even when they are confusing on purpose, because imprecise language is a gateway to deeper levels of meaning through fourth-wall breaks, metaphor, analogy, and humor. (all things that LLMs are notoriously bad at and don't seem to be improving on over the years)
Those other types of writing are intended to be read in full, every word, end-to-end, in order to educate, entertain, inform, or influence the reader who, and i think this is the critical part, does not drive the experience.
When I'm reading a news article, and you realize that you're reading the voice of chatgpt, I'm annoyed because it means that i've been strung along by a stupid machine that somebody else handed me off to to keep me occupied.
When I'm reading code, and I notice that it seems AI written for whatever reason, I might then choose to apply more scrutiny, maybe I try to suss out what the prompter intended to happen, so that I can validate whether that actually happened and if it was accomplished in an optimal way. But it's not insulting in the same way, because I'm still in the driver's seat of the experience, deciding on my own which parts to read and which parts to ignore as irrelevant to my investigation, because the only thing I want to get out of it an understanding of a part of the mechanical system that the code creates.
skydhash · · focus · HN ↗
I don't agree. Because those metaphors and other word plays reach deep into the human mind (at least for the purported audience), while most technical writing try to be more explicit.
Here is the introduction for Laravel Socialite
And this is the marketing blug of Shadows of the Gods by John Gwyne One is direct, with not a lot of imagery, but rather use specific concepts which has precise meaning. The other is just as clear, but use concepts that ties to bigger ones. They are not imprecise, they just let you be aware there's a bigger canvas than the literal interpretation.antonvs · · focus · HN ↗
It’s perfectly possible to consider e.g. working, LLM generated, human approved code acceptable, while considering LLM writing that hasn’t undergone major human editing unacceptable because of its repetitious, formulaic, marketing-oriented style - a criticism that doesn’t even make sense for LLM generated code.
SamInTheShell · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah... no. The people doing this lack the communications training, see the output has the necessary information, and regurgitate it with no effort or care. This needs to stop.
We spent decades format building to make it easy quick and easy to get through something like a runbook. If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong. If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop.
This is a hill I will die on or absolutely start slaughtering people on. I just refuse to deal with this crap.
antonvs · · focus · HN ↗
A lot of documentation generated in corporations has marginal real value.
> If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong.
That’s easy to instruct an agent to do. Put it in a skill.
> If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop.
Using an AI doesn’t absolve the user of their responsibilities. This is an easy problem to solve, just make sure teams know what’s expected of them and encourage everyone to push back (professionally) against offenders.
SamInTheShell · · focus · HN ↗
To be completely fair though, I'm against the behaviors in information transfer I've been seeing. I've pass along AI generated runbooks, but they look nothing like the default outputs of these models. It's because I took time to apply all the writing knowledge I like to see in my curation. If people are doing this, I can't even tell it's AI writing. My work is done in minutes instead of deciphering so BS pseudo language they developed in their AI workspace (people really need to turn off those memory features).
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Edit: Also if I'm the guy receiving a security report and it's AI generated and poorly formatted, I'm failing you short of producing something for a human to parse. Simple as that.
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SamInTheShell · · focus · HN ↗
Should you think it is wise to trust the machine that can't differentiate subject matters in a chat styled context, you have fun with that fluster cluck when it blows up.
Like Fable is highly useful, but it's really bad at keeping it's responses straight.
In fact, that "it's not X it is Y" pattern always crops up when it reasoned about the idea of X and I never fed it that. It's literally doing that because it can't predict that I'm a different entity despite it being able to say I am a different entity.
Edit: Clarification by removal of incomplete sentence fragment. Edit2: Clarification on the "proven in whole" thing.
antonvs · · focus · HN ↗
It’s clear that you’ve never worked for a compliance company and probably have never been involved in a compliance project. As such, you don’t have the context needed to participate usefully in this discussion.
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marcelo-earth · · focus · HN ↗
I can't write anything for humans using LLMs, because there is so much to change that it ends up like the Ship of Theseus, I would have been faster writing it myself than delegating the task.
keeganpoppen · · focus · HN ↗
it is great at analyzing the argument, finding inconsistencies, helping you think through what parts should be cut, helping you refine examples or fix the occasional “how do i get this phrase to work correctly in this transition?” kinds of stuff. but anything where LLMs are the prima materia… that stuff literally only makes sense _to me_. which makes sense, because it is written _for_ me, no matter what instructions i actually give it, bc of memories and a million other things. and i say this as a complete maximalist wrt. trying to use llms for absolutely every last thing they possibly can be used for, just to see what it’s like.
i guess i would say that it does very, very little to make the writing process meaningfully faster; it _can_ do _plenty_ to help make your output better though, which is definitely something— just isn’t the thing most people are looking for.
jerf · · focus · HN ↗
Style guides are a big tools people are missing out on. It isn't enough to say "write concisely and technically". Give them a sample. Yea verily these many 5 or 6 years ago, "style transfer" was a big thing that early LLM tech was doing. It's still very good at it.
That said I still tend to cut out at least 25% of the resulting verbiage and adding back another 10% or so more of my own original content even under those circumstances.
Where it has been really helpful is that I tend to want to write in a conversational style that doesn't seem to match most people's expectations of a technical document. The LLMs let me write my way and style-shift it into something closer to what people expect. And LLMs, since let's be honest they're the primary audience nowadays. Which I am not even upset about; I'd rather 5 LLMs read the architecture document than the amortized .2 or so humans I could expect in the same circumstance 5 years ago.
Which also implies, in many cases, I am feeding the AI as much text as I expect to come out, or in some cases, even more, as I am describing context, reasoning, and other things that may impact the writing but are not necessarily repeated in the final text. I factored out a lot of the context into my user-level CLAUDE.md which has helped cut that down a bit.
aprilthird2021 · · focus · HN ↗
skydhash · · focus · HN ↗
saulpw · · focus · HN ↗
streetfighter64 · · focus · HN ↗
Also the word "verbiage" ticks me off as a LLM-ism on the level of "delve" or "smoking gun". Are its users aware that in addition to its usage as somewhat of a synonym of "idiolect", it more commonly means "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content", i.e. slop?
saulpw · · focus · HN ↗
As for "verbiage", I guess that's too bad, I'm going to continue using it anyway. Interesting factoid about the word though. I will say that "utilize" is one of my pet peeves (99% of the time the word you actually want is "use") and I've excised it from my spoken vocabulary, but I like(d) how verbiage rhymes with foliage so I'm more reticent to give that one up.
streetfighter64 · · focus · HN ↗
DrewADesign · · focus · HN ↗
Sadly people lost the skill to write a standard form concise 3-paragraphs-of-3-sentences cover letter even before keyword-based ATS initiated the beginning of the end. It wasn’t supposed to be a summary of a CV and an essay about your lifelong passion for automated ad-bidding quality checks or some other shit employers delude themselves into believing someone might organically be really into.
kasey_junk · · focus · HN ↗
TomGarden · · focus · HN ↗
imnotr0b0t · · focus · HN ↗
chaostheory · · focus · HN ↗
Razengan · · focus · HN ↗
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GarnetFloride · · focus · HN ↗
lubujackson · · focus · HN ↗
strix_varius · · focus · HN ↗
I don't use a lot of "skills" so if there are others you've started using frequently I'd be curious to learn about them.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
robwwilliams · · focus · HN ↗
Writing with a LLM is a boon if you are trying to write while mastering a new field. Imagine a neuroscientist entering robotics or an electrical engineer trying to enter the field of neuromorphic systems. In these cases a human will need help from an LLM to think and write more deeply AND broadly. I sure do.
You could object that this form of human-LLM collaborative writing is just for one reader; the writer. True at the start but not true toward the end.
I do agree that even the frontier models do not touch a really strong human writer. Way too much gimmickry. They do not yet match individuals such as Leslie Lamport, Terry Winograd, John MacArthur, Richard Rorty, Humberto Maturana, William James, Rodney Brooks. They don’t have the depth of understanding to simplify. But give them a few more years and excursions in the real world and a concept if “now” and the situation may improve.
I often ask Fable and Opus to explain difficult topics to me as if I were the canonical dog Rover. It works.
bradishungry · · focus · HN ↗
al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
New areas are where it is most dangerous to use an LLM, as a person can’t tell when it doesn’t align with their views (because they don’t have any yet), is misleading, or flat out wrong.
If I want to know what an LLM thinks, I’ll ask an LLM. If I’m reading a paper from a human, it’s, because I want to know what that human thinks. If they need the LLM to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, then they don’t know enough to write about the topic yet. Doing that work to write something themselves could help move them learn enough to write something that is hopefully worth reading.
taco_emoji · · focus · HN ↗
aprilthird2021 · · focus · HN ↗
jscd · · focus · HN ↗
brianpan · · focus · HN ↗
Explaining difficult topics or summarizing to you is fine. But that's a world of difference from having an LLM write for you. You THINK the LLM is helping you write above your level, but that's because you are not in a position to tell it's bad.
robwwilliams · · focus · HN ↗
Writing is a form of thinking and writing with an LLM makes the argumentation, discussion, and progress toward goals faster and often better in my situation.
I am stating an opinion based on 2.5 years of intense interactions and writing with Anthropic models on a difficult topic related to asynchronous computational systems.
Background: I am a neuroscientist and behavioral biologist (45 years of experience) who understands the biology of behaviors fairly well but I need to translate this background into hardware architectures that get beyond current asynchronous system (e.g., this recent neuromorphic paper in Nature Communication by Li et al., 2025, A deterministic neuromorphic architecture, doi.org/10.1038.s41467-025-65268-z).
Working AND writing with Opus and now Fable has been a blessing of sorts.
max__dev · · focus · HN ↗
$ chatgpt make this comment more glib
aprilthird2021 · · focus · HN ↗
combobyte · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
delis-thumbs-7e · · focus · HN ↗
Word chains these programs produce are inherently meaningless. They do not feel so, because WE people are amazing at bringing meaning to any old string of symbols: <a href="https://www.ubu.com/sound/lin.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ubu.com/sound/lin.html
They are very useful machines indeed, but they do not help you write well. They mathematically cannot. They just try to guess what is the next tokern you might want to read.
int0x29 · · focus · HN ↗
Also if you don't understand what you are documenting enough to write the docs that is a problem.
maxerickson · · focus · HN ↗
Charitably, they can be thinking that it's fine to have LLMs organize information intended for LLMs.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Don't you think they're useful as fact checkers?
tenuousemphasis · · focus · HN ↗
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Hallucinations don't really work that way. They happen when you ask an LLM to generate new material. Not so much reviewing existing material.
But there's always the "ask a second LLM to get two opinions" technique which gets you pretty close to error free.
And... now that I think of it... even if it was terrible and missed 50% of the errors... wouldn't that still be better than using no LLM which catches 0% of the errors?
devilsdata · · focus · HN ↗
You can reduce the likelihood of incorrectness by adding the real facts to the context, which is what LLMs do. But that in and of itself is not a guarantee that the LLM will be correct. Because its fundamental process of reasoning is probabilistic word-by-word hallucination.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Well - that's not how the term is used.
And it would be an odd way to describe all the extremely useful things they discover. Are you suggesting they're taking "magic" mushrooms of some kind?
devilsdata · · focus · HN ↗
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Are you not aware?
devilsdata · · focus · HN ↗
Do you just believe every bit of press release that you read? These companies have an enormous amount of pressure on them to make profit. They can and will lie to try and convince you that AI is better than it is.
Is there any evidence outside of these companies that AI is breaking new ground on literally anything? No. It can help a little with a lot of different types of work– none of it novel.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
My friend, I use AI every day. I am fully aware of how fucking amazing it is.
When you can no longer clamp your ears and eyes shut, come find me. I'll love the apology.
cheesecakegood · · focus · HN ↗
I can see being lazy and skipping it, but refusing to use them even for more minimal advice purposes seems crazy to me.
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