alt Hacker NewsLLMs are far from great writers. They struggle to form long coherent sentences and lean on punctuation like emdash and semicolon to ensure grammatical correctness when splicing together short phrases.
This makes me wonder if the reason why agents love weird punctuation is because the labs run the base models through a RL training step that forces them to correct their grammar; but instead of rewriting short spliced sentences into long coherent sentences, they just learn to splice them together with punctuation that passes the automatic grammar checker.
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I mean yes, but the vast majority of people aren’t even good writers. Claude writes better than most of my coworkers and we’re all highly educated. Most of us could probably beat it if we really tried, but then we could also prompt it to be a better writer too and none of us are beating that. I think the short pithy phrases that are so common are all post training stuff that the labs add because most people don’t want long sentences.
They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.