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How to Write with an LLM

769 points · 420 comments · joeriddles

  1. zan · · focus · HN ↗
    Thank you for writing this.

    This is gold

    > Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you.

    Over the last week-ish I turned around 2 product announcement blogposts within ~24hrs. Both written manually by someone who doesn't do product marketing for a living. It actually felt incredibly satisfying to focus and smash something out that was 100% human (despite praising the benefits of agentic systems, oh the irony).

    My flow has been: Go for a walk, record all of the thoughts on the topic with speech to text, and have LLM organise my thoughts into what I call "facts" - simple sentences of fact, and point out open questions and inconsistencies ("you are a product marketing expert helping me organise the content for an upcoming feature announcement" ...).

    After some back and forth of inconsistency bashing I have a large pile of short sentences in the vein of "Feature X is for Y because Z", that I use to manually build a narrative with headings, and then write the actual copy covering a subset of them.

    I also agree that light style LLM edits are fine, and that I don't let LLM do anything other than ordering and filler words removal and provide structural comments.

    1. jjude · · focus · HN ↗
      > Go for a walk, record all of the thoughts on the topic with speech to text I have been doing this. I think better when I walk (so much so, even within the confines of my home, I walk when I have to think).

      > organise my thoughts into what I call "facts" - simple sentences of fact, and point out open questions and inconsistencies Would appreciate little more details of how you do this.

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