The amount of EM dashes and usage of negation does make me think AI wrote part of this. I'll give credit for lack of semicolons, but people are starting to get a bit better at "humanizing" their outputs.
There are em-dashes, but the writing feels nice and unlike the default ChatGPT style, so even if AI, (which it might not be, cause people do use em-dashes), I don't mind.
I'm certainly seeing a huge amount of AI-assisted writing recently (that "I Love Board Games" article posted here yesterday was a good example), but I think this one is human-written. Pangram shows it as human written also.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone had AI write a bot to post a complaint on every HN thread about how the articles smells like AI slop. It's so tiresome. Either the article is interesting and useful or not, I don't really care if someone used AI to write it.
FWIW: When I accuse folks of it, take it more seriously - we literally wrote a paper (ICLR 2026) on deslopping language models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061