"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.