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Stwernertoday at 12:16 AM2 repliesview on HN

Thanks! Yeah there were a couple I decided to leave in rather than try to rework as I wasn't trying to hide that it was written with AI, more trying to add more variety to the storytelling. I'm sure as I do more of these I'll be able to recognize them a lot easier. I have been toying with the idea of working them more into character's dialogue in the future, as I've already noticed some people I know speaking in LLMisms.


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furyofantarestoday at 12:21 AM

I'm particularly allergic to LLM-isms, if you look at my comment history I'm constantly complaining about LLM-written text. I am genuinely quite surprised to have read that much LLM-generated text and been happy to do so.

I am also extremely interested in thinking about where software development is going, so I really appreciated the ideas that went into this.

Since you seem open to feedback, I want to add that I felt the generated images were a negative addition. Maybe they wouldn't be if they also got a little polish - the labels in them were particularly bad.

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bostiktoday at 8:27 AM

I would have preferred to see a disclaimer at the top about how this story was Put Together[tm], but I also agree that it is a pretty fine piece of writing overall. Which brings me to my initial point...

> Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project [...] about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.

The amount of work and walltime expended sounds about right. You have discovered / stumbled upon the relatively well known but little appreciated job of a publishing editor. It takes a lot of nitty-gritty work and built up domain knowledge ("world bibles") to direct a piece of writing - and its author - to a level where you confidently believe that you have captured the intent and desired tone of the piece, while keeping it sufficiently tight, engaging and interesting / non-patronising enough for its audience.

Disclosure: did ~decade of freelance writing around the turn of the millennium, and have had the privilege of being schooled by a small group of good old-school journalists. And then had a publishing editor assigned for a separate project, from whom I learned even more about writing.