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jampekka • today at 1:45 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

> LLMs write better than most journalists.

I used to think this, but now that I've been trying to use them to help with writing, it turns out they are not necessarily that great on the deeper level. The grammar and the surface style are impeccable, but they often struggle with continuity and carrying on a point or an argument.

Replies

riskable • today at 2:57 PM

I've come to trust their grammar corrections implicitly. So much that I've setup a "Fix Grammar" command with Obsidian Copilot that I'll just let it run on a whole chapter (YOLO mode):

    Proofread the following text for grammar, punctuation, and typos while
    strictly preserving the author's voice, pacing, and intentional stylistic
    choices (such as sentence fragments or character dialogue quirks).

    Rules:
    - Correct objective spelling errors, misused words, and unintended punctuation mistakes.
    - Smooth out unintentional syntactic snags without homogenizing unique phrasing.
    - Retain all Markdown formatting.
    - Return ONLY the corrected text with no intro, summary, or explanations.

    Text to edit:
    {selection}
About a year ago, all three big AI vendors could end up with strange "corrections" that would throw you off, but not anymore. As far as I'm concerned, they've solved "the grammar checking problem."

The complexity in this command is there for phi4:14b and qwen3:14b which I run locally via ollama. If the text doesn't have any Obsidian callouts or similar, fancy stuff I just use either of those and they do a fantastic job in seconds. For Big AI (e.g. Gemini, GPT-whatevs, Claude) you can literally just tell it, "fix the grammar." No need for the lengthy command.

NOTE: I am decent with English grammar so most of what needs fixing is typos I didn't spot or misplaced commas and periods inside/outside of quotes (I always screw that up without thinking—even though I know the rules! LOL). Occasionally, Big AI (Gemini, specifically) have disagreements about whether a comma is necessary in a particular spot but it's always of no real consequence.

CrimsonRain • today at 2:44 PM

With current LLMs, the continuity/carrying/context management is _your_ task. When AGI is achieved etc...