Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
It's funny, i push back on pull requests because there is too much description now - a 20 line change has pages and pages of generated description, rationalisation for why it is safe, defense of each design decision, analysis of risks and side effects. People are indignant, you're rejecting my change because there is too much documentation? And my response is, I don't have time to read it and you put me in the position where I can't afford not to - because approving the PR implies I did and accepted it. The investment to read all that for the value of a code change that I'm one prompt away from doing myself if I cared is just not high enough. So it's rejected.
I'm going to be a bit contrarian here. In general, I 100% agree, just send me the prompt; however sometimes I feel an LLM can help structure thoughts. It can be a good sparring partner. If you proofread your LLM content, re-prompt until it sounds right and no longer like AI content, and feel that it actually conveys the information incredibly well, then I'm happy.
One of the instructions I've hammered into Claude is "Write like a human. I don't want this to sound like AI content. Your standard style of writing would fail miserably if it was reviewed by an English teacher. I want you to write prose that is nice to read. For example, write full sentences instead of bullet points."
It works wonders. Suddenly, my plan documents are something I actually understand, and something I'd be happy to share as an RFC. They still need iterating every time before they're ready to share, but I no longer have "the honest truth is" and other BS in my output. It's so refreshing for my brain to be able to actually focus on the content.
I've noticed this with my partner, too. She used Claude to draft a strategy document and felt completely overwhelmed. A classic moment of "AI did all the thinking for me, but now I don't know what I'm presenting". Once I helped her prompt Claude into writing the strategy in proper English, she understood what the AI was proposing, rejected large parts of it, iterated several times and ended up with a draft document where she edited the finishing touches herself and felt that it was truly hers. The AI was still incredibly useful: it helped her with the blank slate problem, and tremendously sped up her workflow.
So yeah, if you proofread and iterate on your AI's output until you feel you'd be proud if you had written it yourself, I'm happy to read it, too.
> People who rarely produced original writing are suddenly producing
these posts are beginning to make me wince. ai is giving voice to a lot of folks we probably wouldn't even be hearing from otherwise - because not everyone does their thinking in articulate prose, and extracting their realizations as shareable language takes effort, or long, embarassing iterations with ai "workshopping" to get to something they can read back and go yes this is what I am trying to say.
now the sentiment is that whatever these people had to say they could have just come out and said it - and that would be more passionate and less disjointed - no, not necessarily, and the more it gets repeated the more it's sounding elite and pompous to me. for example this:
> I had someone write me a personal message about a sensitive topic that was clearly workshopped with AI in an effort to nuance the conversation and not offend me. But the message became impersonal, dispassionate, and disjointed. It had all of the parts, but it didn’t make sense as a whole. I wasn’t interested in reading it, or responding.
this reads as someone choosing to ignore a personal message about a sensitive topic - because of an assumption they made about their writing: that they workshopped it when they should not have - because whatever it was they were struggling to say they should have isntead trusted the author to be able to understand the precise meaning of their raw, inelegant thoughts no matter how embarrassed they might be to share them in that form. they're complaining about a message they probably weren't otherwise going to see.
I appreciate the direction of this article, and commend the author on publishing work, but the first sentence in the first paragraph is exactly what they lament.
> A pattern I see is that people use AI to build something new, then they use AI to retrospectively summarize what they have already built into a design document. Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.
We're at a point where I assume that whatever I read is something the "author" endorses, but may not have written. And that may be more important than the specific words an author may have chosen themselves. I doubt we can ever go back.
What should worry us is that AI may introduce a slant that the prompter assimilates during their conversation with the tool, which could introduce a subtle control lever over public opinion.
There's a lot of misunderstanding here. The quality of LLM writing has not plateaued, it has dropped significantly. They've cut it to the point where people start noticing.
Do a search on "Claude Sonnet 4.5" on Reddit and you'll see lots of disappointed users [1]
On the note of imperfections... My preference is now strongly towards reading someone's stream of thought thrown down at speed over than that same stream of thought shat through the digestive track of an AI agent. At least that feels human.
To me, it also seems like they AI digestion is getting actively worse? As best as I can tell, all the agentic nature and reasoning for code is now making writing actively worse, as the agent pulls across your whole knowledge base and will take that one thought and eagerly join and context it thinks is relevant, with the reasoning spread throughout the page.
“Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.”
— Arthur Koestler
We do not experience the world as words. Words and language are already an hallucination on top of reality and LLMs are an hallucination on top of language.
There are many use cases for LLMs that will help humanity progress. Putting AI in between yourself and the people you want to build productive relationships with is not one of them.
My take here is, I think the real issue is AI pretending to be human by mocking a human style.
I'd always rather read an actual person's thoughts, clearly communicated and written down in their voice. But, there's clearly a subsection of people who don't want to (or aren't confident in / etc) writing their ideas fully.
If they have a bullet point list, and they want to use AI to neaten up the bullet point list and present it back, that's fine by me. I wouldn't have minded reading their thoughts in a messy list, but AI is serving to make it more readable.
What I think everyone hates, is AI being used to convert the list into pseudo-thought-out-prose. It just contains a bunch of bloat that wastes people's time.
So my advice if you use AI to write and don't want to change: keep going, just stop seeing the desired output as human prose. Just neaten up your bullet point list / promot / whatever, and send me that.
A good code or commit comment should succinctly explain the subtle details or motivation not obvious from the content itself. AI comments tend to wax poetic about surface details.
The same goes for articles. I want the author to distill the material using their own voice and hard earned expertise. I don't want a generic text which sort of tells the tale.
> I would much rather someone be themselves and write with their own voice, or with some passion
I recently had a fairly successful article here on HN. The common thread among comments was appreciation for the passion and it being "hand-crafted". I am thrilled my passion shone through despite the dry subject. Still, it's sad that something simply being written by a human has become such a rare compliment.
I think AI can write good already. It’s all up to the prompt. Strong guidelines. Without them, it will sound like an AI because, just as the article said, the language reflects the writer.
It’s funny, this pattern is very similar to how I write code with AI these days.
I write almost every line but I have one or more agents always running against the changes alongside me evaluating correctness, suggesting approaches, auditing test coverage, etc.
I’ll also use it for grunt work refactors, scaffolding, resolving merge/rebase conflicts, etc.
AI-generated writing does not bother me, unless it is intended as prose writing, where the flow communicates as much as the specific facts that are described. For technical writing, I usually just scan for important information anyway, and in that sense the only thing that bothers me about AI-generated writing is if it's too verbose and obscures the important information by leaning ineffectively on jargon and high-minded verbiage. I find that Claude Opus is very guilty of this, whereas GPT 5.6 variants are not.
To me it is just a bittersweet irony: people who don’t know what a book is for 30-40 years or in earlier days got the RTFM (gif smiley not included) treatment dump one liners to produce a giant load of text corpus that needs to be processed by an AI to get the gist out of it with sometimes quite some refinement by asking many questions.
So there it is: cruel people who don’t even read their own prompts while happily believing others read their text load and pat the genius on the shoulder for being such a great guy in writing, while in essence it turned the RTFM movement on its head: UUOAI - “Use your own AI.”
People cannot communicate better by using the digital equivalent of logorrhea.
I've always wanted to write this essay, but now I no longer need to. My title would have been pretty similar: If You Want Me to Read It, Please Write It.
One minor addition: when a (conscious) human writes a proposal, a question or a request, they'd instinctively choose words with which they can express their uncertainty in some of the details. I as a reader can detect these uncertainties and I can choose to do more research assert or correct them, if it feels appropriate. AI-generated texts miss those cues, therefore they are much harder to read and connect to.
I feel the same way, and yet I'm also guilty of this. I'm trying to reach out to an expert, and because of the stakes, I want to write it exactly right. I'm using Claude to write it, but I don't like how Claude writes, so I rewrite it in my own words, and I still don't like it. I've iterated over this for several days. Finally I talk to my wife, she gives me some pointers, and I just write it down perfectly.
And yet, every person high up in business that I talk to, including my wife, advises me to use Claude for this sort of thing. I don't get it. Claude text sucks, and it hurts my eyes when I'm forced to read it.
These last few days, there has been a small stream of blogposts on HN expressing similar things, and I have enjoyed them all.
My question recently has been how to broach this subject with colleagues who really enjoy producing prose with AI. There is not yet a better cultural shorthand for this sort of thing than "slop" which is a harsh-sounding word and itself sort of a thought-terminating cliché. "I don't want to read what you didn't write" is maybe closer — but it needs a pithier and somewhat more encouraging encapsulation, like "I want to hear it from you".
Has anyone had good experiences setting up professional boundaries or team norms around AI-written docs?
this is intended as a silly observation and not an actual accusation, but for an article about not writing with AI, the following is one AI-ass sentence:
“Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.”
I don't disagree with the main points of the article. But I feel like soon with all the writing that's been hating on AI writing recently on HN, the LLMs are going to be really good at writing articles about how bad AI is for writing...
This sentiment gets echoed over and over. While I can certainly see the value in human-created creative works, if the subject is pure facts, there are only so many ways to state the facts without being caught in the weeds and missing your entire point.
Moreover, people are finding it hard to differentiate what is an is not AI-generated with newer models, often attributing original work with those of LLMs. It has just become an easy scapegoat for lazy comprehension and a desire to do less. You are jumping at AI boogeymen.
Just about the only thing here I can level with you on is, yes, AI is far from perfect and will continue to advance. Otherwise, so much of this reads as fruity prose to excuse apathy.
I'm finding that executives at work are generating AI slop and sending it at each other and teams that are then meant to digest it, without any critical thought. Often these are sloppy and contain broad mistakes that aren't relevant to our company's setup.
I ask coworkers point blank to send me a non-llm version of their slop sagas. The initial exchange can be a bit awkward, particularly with new hires, but consistently asking for human prose has worked for me.
And I don't want to read the millionth iteration of some old man complaining about the kids these days, written by a human or not, yet here we are.
If you don't like AI slop. Don't read it. But wasting your time generating human slop to complain about AI slop is so obviously futile that it immediately identifies the writer as lacking the capacity for reason or emotional clarity, or merely seeking attention for their self-promotion with clickbait.
I’m fine with reading something you didn’t write if it has the information I need. I’m not fine with reading something you didn’t read and will just waste my time.
> Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing
I stopped reading here. I’ve become so sensitive to LLMism, I don’t want to go on. Tip; omit the needless ”it’s not X, it’s Y” and just write ”it’s Y”.
As an educator in university I have found the project proposals of students have become longer, to some degree more well written and quite certainly have LLMs involved.
This becomes problematic when it turns out people haven't even read what they sent me.
To clarify: this is about voluntary projects that do not win them extra points.
> I don’t want to live in a world where you use AI to summarize something important into unreadable text, and then I use AI in an attempt to decipher it. I want to hear you, imperfections and all.
It doesn't fundamentally change the equation if I use AI to prepare and then write it myself. If I'm using AI effectively, it's likely that you won't be able to tell.
This sort of post is increasingly coming off as high and mighty, where the user thinks they are being exceptionally creative and other people who are using AI are using it mindlessly.
“Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.”
I’d be curious whether the author composed this sentence himself or it was the output of AI. Personally I often find myself “it’s not X it’s Y” and then recoiling in disgust and rephrasing it simply because AI has made it so grating from overuse.
Also, writing, indeed any making activity, forces you to think clearly. Often that is the deepest purpose of prose, even code - forcing the author to confront the problem and sharpen their own understanding of the world we share. That it then communicates something to another person (or to a machine), is a happy bonus.
The problem is that whenever someone writes something they are accused of using AI. I know people who are accused of this because they know how to use em dashes, or even just write bullet-points. Reminds me of the bores who accused me of using Google Translate for something, and I had to show them that the language in question wasn't even on Google Translate.
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I don't want to read what you didn't write
(blog.colinbreck.com)693 points by mooreds 11 hours ago | 278 comments
Comments
Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
One of the instructions I've hammered into Claude is "Write like a human. I don't want this to sound like AI content. Your standard style of writing would fail miserably if it was reviewed by an English teacher. I want you to write prose that is nice to read. For example, write full sentences instead of bullet points."
It works wonders. Suddenly, my plan documents are something I actually understand, and something I'd be happy to share as an RFC. They still need iterating every time before they're ready to share, but I no longer have "the honest truth is" and other BS in my output. It's so refreshing for my brain to be able to actually focus on the content.
I've noticed this with my partner, too. She used Claude to draft a strategy document and felt completely overwhelmed. A classic moment of "AI did all the thinking for me, but now I don't know what I'm presenting". Once I helped her prompt Claude into writing the strategy in proper English, she understood what the AI was proposing, rejected large parts of it, iterated several times and ended up with a draft document where she edited the finishing touches herself and felt that it was truly hers. The AI was still incredibly useful: it helped her with the blank slate problem, and tremendously sped up her workflow.
So yeah, if you proofread and iterate on your AI's output until you feel you'd be proud if you had written it yourself, I'm happy to read it, too.
these posts are beginning to make me wince. ai is giving voice to a lot of folks we probably wouldn't even be hearing from otherwise - because not everyone does their thinking in articulate prose, and extracting their realizations as shareable language takes effort, or long, embarassing iterations with ai "workshopping" to get to something they can read back and go yes this is what I am trying to say.
now the sentiment is that whatever these people had to say they could have just come out and said it - and that would be more passionate and less disjointed - no, not necessarily, and the more it gets repeated the more it's sounding elite and pompous to me. for example this:
> I had someone write me a personal message about a sensitive topic that was clearly workshopped with AI in an effort to nuance the conversation and not offend me. But the message became impersonal, dispassionate, and disjointed. It had all of the parts, but it didn’t make sense as a whole. I wasn’t interested in reading it, or responding.
this reads as someone choosing to ignore a personal message about a sensitive topic - because of an assumption they made about their writing: that they workshopped it when they should not have - because whatever it was they were struggling to say they should have isntead trusted the author to be able to understand the precise meaning of their raw, inelegant thoughts no matter how embarrassed they might be to share them in that form. they're complaining about a message they probably weren't otherwise going to see.
> A pattern I see is that people use AI to build something new, then they use AI to retrospectively summarize what they have already built into a design document. Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.
What should worry us is that AI may introduce a slant that the prompter assimilates during their conversation with the tool, which could introduce a subtle control lever over public opinion.
I hope this was an in-joke but my fingers still reflexively closed the tab as soon as I saw it and I had to go reopen it again…
Do a search on "Claude Sonnet 4.5" on Reddit and you'll see lots of disappointed users [1]
If I could give out ratings,
Average human with a degree: 5/10
Sonnet/Opus 5: 2/10
GPT 6 Astra, 5.4 Sol: 3/10
Sonnet 4.6: 8/10
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 9/10
GPT 4o: 6/10
GPT 4.5: 10/10
GPT 3 Davinci (with a lot of coaching): 7/10
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/claudexplorers/comments/1ta6f9c/i_s...
To me, it also seems like they AI digestion is getting actively worse? As best as I can tell, all the agentic nature and reasoning for code is now making writing actively worse, as the agent pulls across your whole knowledge base and will take that one thought and eagerly join and context it thinks is relevant, with the reasoning spread throughout the page.
We do not experience the world as words. Words and language are already an hallucination on top of reality and LLMs are an hallucination on top of language.
There are many use cases for LLMs that will help humanity progress. Putting AI in between yourself and the people you want to build productive relationships with is not one of them.
I can't tell if this essay was written in earnest or as a subtle troll.
I'd always rather read an actual person's thoughts, clearly communicated and written down in their voice. But, there's clearly a subsection of people who don't want to (or aren't confident in / etc) writing their ideas fully.
If they have a bullet point list, and they want to use AI to neaten up the bullet point list and present it back, that's fine by me. I wouldn't have minded reading their thoughts in a messy list, but AI is serving to make it more readable.
What I think everyone hates, is AI being used to convert the list into pseudo-thought-out-prose. It just contains a bunch of bloat that wastes people's time.
So my advice if you use AI to write and don't want to change: keep going, just stop seeing the desired output as human prose. Just neaten up your bullet point list / promot / whatever, and send me that.
The same goes for articles. I want the author to distill the material using their own voice and hard earned expertise. I don't want a generic text which sort of tells the tale.
> I would much rather someone be themselves and write with their own voice, or with some passion
I recently had a fairly successful article here on HN. The common thread among comments was appreciation for the passion and it being "hand-crafted". I am thrilled my passion shone through despite the dry subject. Still, it's sad that something simply being written by a human has become such a rare compliment.
I write almost every line but I have one or more agents always running against the changes alongside me evaluating correctness, suggesting approaches, auditing test coverage, etc.
I’ll also use it for grunt work refactors, scaffolding, resolving merge/rebase conflicts, etc.
At this point I can't tell if it's a pun or the anti AI article is AI written as well. This sucks.
[0] myself included https://www.google.com/goto?url=CAESbQHrOzAViiJizn8otPF3AAeE...
So there it is: cruel people who don’t even read their own prompts while happily believing others read their text load and pat the genius on the shoulder for being such a great guy in writing, while in essence it turned the RTFM movement on its head: UUOAI - “Use your own AI.”
People cannot communicate better by using the digital equivalent of logorrhea.
One minor addition: when a (conscious) human writes a proposal, a question or a request, they'd instinctively choose words with which they can express their uncertainty in some of the details. I as a reader can detect these uncertainties and I can choose to do more research assert or correct them, if it feels appropriate. AI-generated texts miss those cues, therefore they are much harder to read and connect to.
And yet, every person high up in business that I talk to, including my wife, advises me to use Claude for this sort of thing. I don't get it. Claude text sucks, and it hurts my eyes when I'm forced to read it.
My question recently has been how to broach this subject with colleagues who really enjoy producing prose with AI. There is not yet a better cultural shorthand for this sort of thing than "slop" which is a harsh-sounding word and itself sort of a thought-terminating cliché. "I don't want to read what you didn't write" is maybe closer — but it needs a pithier and somewhat more encouraging encapsulation, like "I want to hear it from you".
Has anyone had good experiences setting up professional boundaries or team norms around AI-written docs?
“Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.”
The juxta-positioning of the ambi-dextrous personification of the meta-sematicism is going to be both rich and soul transpiring....
It's gonna be basically a fingerprint in your soul, from my soul...
Moreover, people are finding it hard to differentiate what is an is not AI-generated with newer models, often attributing original work with those of LLMs. It has just become an easy scapegoat for lazy comprehension and a desire to do less. You are jumping at AI boogeymen.
Just about the only thing here I can level with you on is, yes, AI is far from perfect and will continue to advance. Otherwise, so much of this reads as fruity prose to excuse apathy.
I'm sorry but that's the last thing (almost last) I want to read.
I want an 'excellent summary' of the design including motivations and concerns.
Yes - the AI is bad at that but hopefully it will get better.
If you don't like AI slop. Don't read it. But wasting your time generating human slop to complain about AI slop is so obviously futile that it immediately identifies the writer as lacking the capacity for reason or emotional clarity, or merely seeking attention for their self-promotion with clickbait.
I stopped reading here. I’ve become so sensitive to LLMism, I don’t want to go on. Tip; omit the needless ”it’s not X, it’s Y” and just write ”it’s Y”.
This becomes problematic when it turns out people haven't even read what they sent me.
To clarify: this is about voluntary projects that do not win them extra points.
It doesn't fundamentally change the equation if I use AI to prepare and then write it myself. If I'm using AI effectively, it's likely that you won't be able to tell.
This sort of post is increasingly coming off as high and mighty, where the user thinks they are being exceptionally creative and other people who are using AI are using it mindlessly.
I’d be curious whether the author composed this sentence himself or it was the output of AI. Personally I often find myself “it’s not X it’s Y” and then recoiling in disgust and rephrasing it simply because AI has made it so grating from overuse.