My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't.
It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you.
Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice.
I don't think its important. I think these comments are more annoying than ai prose. You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. Adapt.
> You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process.
These comments are even more annoying. Sides that are winning don't have to constantly tell their opponents that they're losing. I have no idea why you and so many others seem to have attached their ego to the use of a tool that you feel the need to attack people who have complaints about the output it's often used to generate.
Hacker News is so annoying about this. It really feels like sour grapes that people are shipping cool projects without one of the Y Combinator-type software engineers blessing the project with their handwritten code.
Also, to congratulate the author feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager for a project rather than the skills and knowledge of a programmer
It’s cool they’ve managed various agents to get their end result but I’ve always been interested in coding, computer science and maths rather than tech savvy management
And perhaps tech savvy manager will replace programmers but if I wanted to get into management and business analysis then I would have done so
FWIW by this point, many of us are in deep symbiosis.
Useful or not, another Amiga / Unix fan probably had fun and some learnings too.
At the very least, the real-world impact is that tokens have been spent, the outputs open sourced.
It would be nice to hear their voice survive the loops of agentic abstraction of course but I don't know if that is even possible at that higha level.
Maybe it's that, maybe it's "just another issue of alignment"? Potentially serious in aggregate and over time..
I personally don't mind the imo little "neuralese" (is that what we call it now?) here specifically. In any case it's good for you that you can (still?) tell?
Why not applaud the playground time/energy/token budget directed? Especially as a decades long NetBSD (and Amiga:) fan I do appreciate multitudes; maybe here not exactly the case in tone of writing but in relatively cheap, fun experiments / projects during the agentic take-off of 2026. The whole
trend reminds me a bit of remix/DJ culture; the "producing DJ"?
It's not important at all and I wish people would stop mentioning AI. If you have criticisms on the docs or code, by all means make them but they shouldn't concern "AI vs human" considerations. Humans have written plenty of bad and documentations, too, it really doesn't matter who wrote what to what extent, what matters is whether it's the right quality.
That attitude unfortunately leads to people criticizing something without having enough evidence about it in the first place, like criticizing a book and later admitting you've only seen the cover and read the summary on the back.
I've written a lot in my life so far, including books and novels, and never used AI for it. I don't see the parallel. If you were right and it was the same as plagiarizing, then the use of AI should be prohibited entirely. However, to me it appears more akin to using tools like spell checkers, CAS pocket calculators, and Grammarly. It's another tool. I don't really get the fuzz people make about AI. I'm also fond of judging the content of texts regardless of the author. Has that idea come so much out of fashion?
Because plagiarization is not illegal. It’s just unethical and dishonest, and in certain contexts where your work is directly related to your status or compensation, it gets you in trouble. Copyright violation is a specific type of plagiarism that is illegal, but LLM output is not and, in current legal understanding, can not be copyrighted.
Using the services of a human editor is not plagiarism, and mere editing is not considered coauthorship. Mentioning or thanking the editor is just a courtesy, or a contractual obligation at most. LLMs don’t need thanks so most people probably agree it’s fine not to mention it in a casual blog post if its part really is just editorial, brainstorming aid, or similar. (But context-specific terms and conditions apply, obviously.)
What is absolutely not editorial use is making a hundred-word prompt and asking an LLM to expand it to a thousand-word blog post, or a thousand-line computer program, just like it wouldn’t be to ask or pay another human to do it for you. At most you’re then a coauthor of the LLM. This should be obvious, really, we have literally hundreds of years of history on the ethics and norms of assigning authorship on creative works. LLMs should change very little of that.
And then there’s the quality issue. If there were a human author that ghost-wrote blog posts or program code for people, and their output would always have the same known quality and accuracy issues, I’d want to be warned rather than having to spend time on figuring it out every time. Reputation matters.
Your arguments aren't convincing. LLMs do not have authorship, they aren't persons. These ramblings about plagiarism are irrelevant, they're a classic case of "topic missed."
The same for human editors, about whom I have slightly more nuanced view. I do believe that some of them are offering services that amount to ghostwriting and are often unethical. I've seen people make careers in the humanities where I'd say the paid editor (who also had studied the subject area) would at least be a co-author, if not the person who in the end deserved most of the credit. I've seen that with my own eyes as someone who worked for 20 years as a researcher in academia. That's why I've always rejected private editors that many of my colleagues have employed. It's a deeply unethical practice, not at all as harmless as you describe it.
That being said, the comparison to editors also doesn't apply because, again, LLMs aren't persons and do not have authorship. They neither are persons and authors in a legal sense, nor does it makes much sense from an ethical perspective to grant them personhood and authorship. If that made sense, then I'd agree with you that they should be mentioned as co-authors or authors. I'd have no problem whatsoever with academic and other works written by LLMs and giving credit to them. However, I don't see we're there yet.
Regarding the quality issue: What I'm saying and what my stance is is exactly that the works of persons or LLMs or persons who use LLMs for writing code or texts must and should always be evaluated the same, namely based on the merits of the content alone. That would be even more important if LLMs were persons and could be attributed authorship -- but they can't.
You arguments don't work because they're based on incorrect assumptions about what LLMs are. They are tools. You might find it dishonest when people use them without stating that, and that's fine, but then you shouldn't base your views on unrelated issues like plagiarism, copyright, and editors. My hunch is that people like you simply can't cope with the change, and, again, I'm saying that as someone who barely uses AI for programming and has never and will never use it for writing. Please stop the whining. I'll be honest, to me personally, these anti-AI rants are intellectually insulting because they seem to imply that humans cannot stand against AI by the quality of their own works and require some extra protectionism.
Obviously LLM-generated text generally doesn’t have the right quality. People aren’t just annoyed by it being LLM-generated, they are annoyed because the writing is bad in a soulless way.
The GP writes "me and many others think ...". I find that many of the complaints about the way LLMs write come from people who are illiterate and haven't been exposed to much literate writing before.
This is the 3rd time I am reading such a comment on HN within a day and I absolutely agree. It comes off as instantly disingenuous and a ‘turn off’ for someone to use an LLM for basic writing stuff. Not to mention it ends up being distracting in a meta sort of way.
As I’ve also repetitively said, it’s simply dishonest and plagiarizing to offload most of the work you (explicitly or lying by omission) claim as "yours". I can’t understand people who think it’s just fine.
LLM generated text lacks a certain "soul" to it, and it becomes more and more empty the more places one reads it.
It has a certain quality to it that, when read again and again, feels hollow. That hollowness comes not only from the text itself and the same sentence structures and turns of a phrase, but also (and yes, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#Not_just_X,_but_also_Y" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) that it suggests that the author didn't do more than massage the text with their eyeballs (as my high school Latin teacher accused me of doing).
And so, why should I (a human mind running on wet stuff and fueled with caffeine and various sugars from my morning soda and breakfast roll) pay any significant amount of my limited attention during a day on something that shows no indication that it was ever had its human co-author think about a single word that was put into the page?
And sometimes, the text belies that it wasn't written by a human as it misses things that are part of the human experience (or adds things that are not). "Keymap, disk, partition sizes, package set — then it shows you what it is about to do. Real time, with the long waits taken out." No human would write that. No human proofread it.
There is a deluge of content out there. Far too much for me to read everything that might be interesting. Text that looks like it's written entirely by an AI is more likely to be uninteresting than something that was crafted by a human.
If the page itself hasn't shown indication of a few seconds or minutes of a human touch... how much time should I spend reading it to see if it might be interesting to read more or look into the project?
jchw · · focus · HN ↗
It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you.
Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice.
I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.
tim-projects · · focus · HN ↗
canelonesdeverd · · focus · HN ↗
UpsideDownRide · · focus · HN ↗
wolrah · · focus · HN ↗
These comments are even more annoying. Sides that are winning don't have to constantly tell their opponents that they're losing. I have no idea why you and so many others seem to have attached their ego to the use of a tool that you feel the need to attack people who have complaints about the output it's often used to generate.
peder · · focus · HN ↗
Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
tarkin2 · · focus · HN ↗
It’s cool they’ve managed various agents to get their end result but I’ve always been interested in coding, computer science and maths rather than tech savvy management
And perhaps tech savvy manager will replace programmers but if I wanted to get into management and business analysis then I would have done so
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
A good, tech savvy manager is the stuff of legends, like the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot.
DANmode · · focus · HN ↗
This is an observable spectrum with which can influence the kind of team you have in your landing spot.
musha68k · · focus · HN ↗
Useful or not, another Amiga / Unix fan probably had fun and some learnings too.
At the very least, the real-world impact is that tokens have been spent, the outputs open sourced.
It would be nice to hear their voice survive the loops of agentic abstraction of course but I don't know if that is even possible at that higha level.
Maybe it's that, maybe it's "just another issue of alignment"? Potentially serious in aggregate and over time..
I personally don't mind the imo little "neuralese" (is that what we call it now?) here specifically. In any case it's good for you that you can (still?) tell?
Why not applaud the playground time/energy/token budget directed? Especially as a decades long NetBSD (and Amiga:) fan I do appreciate multitudes; maybe here not exactly the case in tone of writing but in relatively cheap, fun experiments / projects during the agentic take-off of 2026. The whole trend reminds me a bit of remix/DJ culture; the "producing DJ"?
Brian_K_White · · focus · HN ↗
It's annoying how many people think they have discovered the cheat code to collect Manhattens for trinkets.
yjftsjthsd-h · · focus · HN ↗
Post has 143 points at this writing; a noticeable number of people seem to feel differently
Brian_K_White · · focus · HN ↗
jonathanstrange · · focus · HN ↗
steve1977 · · focus · HN ↗
jonathanstrange · · focus · HN ↗
Criticisms should have substance.
steve1977 · · focus · HN ↗
jonathanstrange · · focus · HN ↗
kdjdkcneixj · · focus · HN ↗
Can you do that? You absolutely can. Does everyone do that? No, absolutely not.
It’s not a black and white issue. And, honestly, it’s quite narrow sighted and narrow minded to think so.
The dev is not the middleman because Claude is not the author. Claude is the tool.
steve1977 · · focus · HN ↗
Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
jonathanstrange · · focus · HN ↗
Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
Using the services of a human editor is not plagiarism, and mere editing is not considered coauthorship. Mentioning or thanking the editor is just a courtesy, or a contractual obligation at most. LLMs don’t need thanks so most people probably agree it’s fine not to mention it in a casual blog post if its part really is just editorial, brainstorming aid, or similar. (But context-specific terms and conditions apply, obviously.)
What is absolutely not editorial use is making a hundred-word prompt and asking an LLM to expand it to a thousand-word blog post, or a thousand-line computer program, just like it wouldn’t be to ask or pay another human to do it for you. At most you’re then a coauthor of the LLM. This should be obvious, really, we have literally hundreds of years of history on the ethics and norms of assigning authorship on creative works. LLMs should change very little of that.
And then there’s the quality issue. If there were a human author that ghost-wrote blog posts or program code for people, and their output would always have the same known quality and accuracy issues, I’d want to be warned rather than having to spend time on figuring it out every time. Reputation matters.
jonathanstrange · · focus · HN ↗
The same for human editors, about whom I have slightly more nuanced view. I do believe that some of them are offering services that amount to ghostwriting and are often unethical. I've seen people make careers in the humanities where I'd say the paid editor (who also had studied the subject area) would at least be a co-author, if not the person who in the end deserved most of the credit. I've seen that with my own eyes as someone who worked for 20 years as a researcher in academia. That's why I've always rejected private editors that many of my colleagues have employed. It's a deeply unethical practice, not at all as harmless as you describe it.
That being said, the comparison to editors also doesn't apply because, again, LLMs aren't persons and do not have authorship. They neither are persons and authors in a legal sense, nor does it makes much sense from an ethical perspective to grant them personhood and authorship. If that made sense, then I'd agree with you that they should be mentioned as co-authors or authors. I'd have no problem whatsoever with academic and other works written by LLMs and giving credit to them. However, I don't see we're there yet.
Regarding the quality issue: What I'm saying and what my stance is is exactly that the works of persons or LLMs or persons who use LLMs for writing code or texts must and should always be evaluated the same, namely based on the merits of the content alone. That would be even more important if LLMs were persons and could be attributed authorship -- but they can't.
You arguments don't work because they're based on incorrect assumptions about what LLMs are. They are tools. You might find it dishonest when people use them without stating that, and that's fine, but then you shouldn't base your views on unrelated issues like plagiarism, copyright, and editors. My hunch is that people like you simply can't cope with the change, and, again, I'm saying that as someone who barely uses AI for programming and has never and will never use it for writing. Please stop the whining. I'll be honest, to me personally, these anti-AI rants are intellectually insulting because they seem to imply that humans cannot stand against AI by the quality of their own works and require some extra protectionism.
layer8 · · focus · HN ↗
jibal · · focus · HN ↗
ilt · · focus · HN ↗
seba_dos1 · · focus · HN ↗
Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
shagie · · focus · HN ↗
LLM generated text lacks a certain "soul" to it, and it becomes more and more empty the more places one reads it.
It has a certain quality to it that, when read again and again, feels hollow. That hollowness comes not only from the text itself and the same sentence structures and turns of a phrase, but also (and yes, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#Not_just_X,_but_also_Y" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#... ) that it suggests that the author didn't do more than massage the text with their eyeballs (as my high school Latin teacher accused me of doing).
And so, why should I (a human mind running on wet stuff and fueled with caffeine and various sugars from my morning soda and breakfast roll) pay any significant amount of my limited attention during a day on something that shows no indication that it was ever had its human co-author think about a single word that was put into the page?
And sometimes, the text belies that it wasn't written by a human as it misses things that are part of the human experience (or adds things that are not). "Keymap, disk, partition sizes, package set — then it shows you what it is about to do. Real time, with the long waits taken out." No human would write that. No human proofread it.
There is a deluge of content out there. Far too much for me to read everything that might be interesting. Text that looks like it's written entirely by an AI is more likely to be uninteresting than something that was crafted by a human.
If the page itself hasn't shown indication of a few seconds or minutes of a human touch... how much time should I spend reading it to see if it might be interesting to read more or look into the project?