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sparsethotsyesterday at 9:37 PM2 repliesview on HN

It’s interesting how easy it is to tell ai was used to write this despite it having none of the obvious mannerisms. I wonder what I would have thought of this article before 2022, or if I just don’t like this style because of overexposure or something


Replies

wassimansyesterday at 9:58 PM

You are free to think like that, and I respect your feeling. The reality is that it took me almost a year to get the config details right and days of preparation to ship that article. I took inspiration from this article if you’re curious: https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/posts/writing/.

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iLemmingyesterday at 11:02 PM

Oh, come on. I get when people complain about AI-assisted writing. It's mostly about signal-to-noise. Yes, AI makes it trivially cheap to produce "correct but empty" content - articles that are technically accurate, well-structured, and say absolutely nothing a reader couldn't get by prompting an LLM themselves.

Yet sometimes you do need to see a genuine human struggle, ideation, and a real problem behind the article. Let's try not be dismissive off the bat. I understand your style objection is a proxy. Your actual complaint is probably the feel of absence of a specific, earned perspective. Perhaps, it "doesn't speak to you" because you have not encountered the overlapping problems that article may help you with.

That isn't prose - it's educational, informational, well-structured and has code snippets. Let's not devalue someone's genuine work only because they decided to use AI-assistance - there could be legit reasons, from language barrier to lack of time. Good writing is hard. With and without AI. Not everyone commands the skill of writing, let's not rob them of the opportunity to cultivate it. Sometimes, it starts with dull, spiritless paragraphs.