[thaumaturgy]

I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" (https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/)?

I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human.

Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn't strike me as having the same thoughtful consideration in it. I would venture to guess that the author tried to come up with some new angles on the news of the Claude Code leak, because it's a hot topic, and jotted some notes, and then let an LLM flesh it out.

Writing styles of course change over time, but looking at these two posts side by side, the difference is stark.

[mergesort]

Hey there, author of the post here! I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning. It was initially meant to be a quick note more than a full blog post —- whereas Coding As A Creative Expression took me a couple of days to write.

I made a commitment to write more this year and put my thoughts out quicker than I used to, so that’s likely the primary reason it’s not as deep of a piece of writing as the post you’re referencing. But I do want to note that this wasn’t written using AI, it just wasn’t intended to be as rich of a post.

The reason it came out longer is that I’ve honestly been thinking about these ideas for a while, and there is so much to say about this subject. I didn’t have any particular intention of hopping on a news cycle, but once I started writing the juices were flowing and I found myself coming up with five separate but interrelated thoughts around this story that I thought were worth sharing.

[tpoacher]

Reminds me of the classic Mark Twain quote: "Apologies, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one."

[adzm]

> I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one.

First known use in English comes from a 1658 translation of Blaise Pascal in 1657

> Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

translated to

> I had not made this longer then the rest, but that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is.

(note the archaic then)

This was a popular piece of wit at the time.

Mark Twain wrote something similar a hundred years later

> You'll have to excuse my lengthiness - the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost.

But it's still quite different.

There is a great article about this one on quoteinvestigator! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

[jachee]

Hmm… this started as an admonition for using then and than interchangeably. I see folks get it wrong unintentionally a lot… then i re-read your parenthetical and pulled up etymonline and had my mind blown a bit.[0]

Seems everything old is new again.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/than

[bostik]

>wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk

If you have a strategy for jotting down (or dictating) notes while walking about, I would be curious how you manage that. I spend plenty of time walking outside, and tend to get (at the time) ideas that I'd like to explore further, most of which have evaporated from my mind by the time I get back home. Or even before I can get my phone out to jot down the keywords to help me recall the details later.

Cannot even imagine how someone would manage both walking and writing at the same time.

[nyulmalac]

What I tried is to record my voice and then post-process the transcript. There are solutions which work without internet connection. I am non-native english and mix 3 languages, so transcript is shitty quality. Nevertheless the really good ideas stay with me and can be easily recalled by a few keywords. And you need to do the post-processing shortly after you reached home else it fades away…

[DANmode]

> Cannot even imagine how someone would manage both walking and writing at the same time.

Some are just born with it.

[mergesort]

And here I've been using Maybelline for nothing!

[staindk]

Have a look at the Pebble Index ring. Might be a good fit for you.

[mergesort]

Hey there! I'm not sure I have a universally applicable answer, but I can do my best to map out some things about my process and flow that hopefully help a bit and answer your question.

- I've had an iPhone for half my life (I'm 36 and got one when I was 19), so I've gotten pretty acclimated to typing on the go. I try switching to dictation every couple of months but the iPhone's dictation trips up over enough words that I find it more frustrating than typing as I walk.

- I don't do this but if you're worried about the thoughts disappearing I would absolutely recommend recording a voice note. As I'll touch on in a moment — do not let those thoughts disappear! Even the act of codifying them into something tangible allows you to process them more deeply.

- I live in NYC but I start most mornings by taking a walk along a relatively quiet street, so I rarely end up having to worry about bumping into someone. That is definitely not universally applicable advice. (:

- I look up as I'm typing and let autocorrect take the wheel. That works at least 95% of the time, so if I make the occasional typo it doesn't really matter, I'll just fix it in post.

- It helps to have an app with a great text editing experience. I've found that there are very few out there that are fluid, many have incredibly subtle hitches that make it hard to quickly jot down thoughts onto a canvas. I really love Craft (https://craft.do) and have been using it for years, so at this point it feels more like an extension of me than an app.

- This is surely unique to everyone but my writing tends to start from a few keystone thoughts. Once I have one written down, I let myself almost free associate, writing down whatever comes to mind from that initial thought to make sure I do not forget. I can always edit after the fact, and often the editing process leads to more interesting insights as well. But the main thing I want to avoid is losing those sparks, in the same way that you're mention your thoughts evaporating. Don't let those go, just get 'em on paper and sort through 'em afterwards.

- That's all a lot easier to do on my phone than if I approached the problem as "type an essay on my phone", so I'll almost always edit a post on my computer before publishing. Yesterday was more of an exception than the rule though because I was bouncing around between doctors all day, so I wrote all of this on my phone [not expecting it to blow up or get a ton of scrutiny].

Not sure if anything's missing but I'm happy to share anything that may be helpful! Clearly this post wasn't perfect, but I've been much happier since I started letting myself write out long-form thoughts on my phone and sharing them as blog post rather than firing them off as pithy tweets that decay into the ether once the algorithm says it's time for them to go.

[anfogoat]

>­ I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning.

Apropos of nothing, this is astonishing me to no end. The ergonomics of 1) using a phone keyboard for anything but a word or two and 2) doing so while walking pretty much guarantee that I'd probably need a half a day to recover if I attempted the same.

[sirpilade]

As a more general comment, I hope we’ll stop trying to discriminate whether a certain text was or not written/polished/extended by AI and focus more on content and author’s responsibility for what they do or do not say with that text.

[dpark]

I agree. Not because I think that most AI content is worth reading, but because it can be criticized on more grounded merits. People wrote blogspam by hand for two decades before AI started generating it. It wasn’t high value when a human wrote it either.

On many (most?) posts, far more energy is spent arguing about whether a post is AI than discussing if there’s anything of value in the post.

[JonChesterfield]

I've stopped reading anything on blogs on the basis that it's now probably llm spew and life is too short for the signal to noise ratio that implies.

With the exception of things that places like HN seems to consider worth reading, which is why I'm looking through the comments to this and others to find recommendations.

[bengale]

Another swing and a miss from the AI police.

[stbev]

Have you noticed that comments like "this post seems written with AI" are now appearing on all posts, even those written without AI?

We're starting to become wary due to the abuse of AI and proliferation of sloppy content, but also because we often have trouble distinguishing authentic from sloppy content.

Another feature of this AI era that I hate.

[hxugufjfjf]

Agreed. Its so tedious that the top comment section on every HN post the last six months is "this seems be written by LLM" with a bunch of back and forth on whether it is or not.

[amarant]

Once I was tempted to say that those comments themselves were written by llms, but honestly I've yet to find a model quite so uncreative as that.

[watwut]

As a daily user of HN, this is not true. Maybe you are clicking on different headlines, but the ones I am clicking on dont have that as top comment all that often. They do not even have it as a comment somewhere all that often.

[grufkork]

I mean, a lot of it is. Green user, signed up 49mins ago, 5 comments, which erodes trust in real people as well. I’ve noticed I’ve just felt less engaged and more anxious about all kinds of online content. While most platforms were previously botted, had adverts, etc… You could always find niche corners where there were only people talking about things they genuinely cared about. Now you can fill out even those spaces automatically.

[bakugo]

Probably because most HN posts in the last six months have been written by LLMs. Not all, but that doesn't matter, the trust has been eroded to the point that clicking on an article on the front page of HN and not being immediately met with the sloppiest slop imaginable is now a standout event in my mind.

[roysting]

I’ve been accused of being AI. My first impression when it happened was that because I often deal in information that people don’t like hearing, because it challenges their frame of mind, i.e., what they were trained on, “this is AI” is just another convenient tool to either dismiss uncomfortable challenge, i.e., cognitive dissonance, and/or another means to keep the mental herd they are part of or control in line with dogma.

“This is AI” seems to just be an evolution of other thought terminating cliches where the negative conditioning associated with something is used in an abusive and manipulative way to evade challenge or the truth itself. It is a common tactic of abusive people, the “beyond the pale” moralizing.

[benterix]

Yeah, whenever I see "It's not... it's...", I catch myself instinctively dismissing the content as AI slop, but upon reflection I'm not so sure, it used to be a normal phrase.

But I do take extra care to avoid LLM-speak as much as I can.

[dpark]

“It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno!” — Probably AI, according to HN commenters

[grey-area]

It does read as if were written on a phone but it doesn’t read like LLM text to me.

What is interesting and has possibly bled over from heavy LLM use by the author is the style of simplistic bullet point titles for the argument with filler in between. It does read like they wrote the 5 bullet points then added the other text (by hand).

[raincole]

What changed is you, the reader. In 2026 we treat the smallest signs as evidence of LLM writing. Too long? LLM. Too short? LLM. Too grammatically correct? Must be LLM.

[sanitycheck]

For me it was the "it's not x"/"it's y" stuff and some other structures Claude is very fond of using all the time. Perhaps humans are starting to write like LLMs!

[raincole]

Perhaps, just perhaps, LLMs are just statistical models that literally can't create novel things, therefore any structure LLMs write was learnt from human writing?

But who knows!

[bakugo]

What kind of human writing has "it's not X—it's Y" in every single paragraph?

The answer is none. LLMs haven't accurately modeled human writing for years, current models have been smacked on the head with the coding RLHF bat so much, they all write distinctly inhuman text.

[dpark]

The thing is, people are screaming “AI” when they see a single “it's not X—it's Y" pattern in a post, despite this being a fairly common construct.

People are nitpicking every tiny thing in their search for proof of AI. It’s not useful and ends up dominating the conversation. AI panic is degrading the value of forums at least as much as actual AI at this point.