[bos]

This is an exhausting and dispiriting article to try to read because of its short, choppy, clearly AI-generated sentences. The topic is interesting, but whoever caused it to be penned didn’t seem to care enough to make it appealing to read.

[protortyp]

Curious which parts specifically felt that way for you? I spent over a week on this, and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections, but "didn't seem to care enough to make it appealing to read" isn't it. Happy to look at the spots that felt choppy if you can point them out.

[swatcoder]

> and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections

???

Why in the world would that be an "ofc"?

If you're trying to establish yourself as a writer and communicator, LLM's are the last thing you want to color your personal voice with. They may have a role in cleaning up interpersonal communication or in helping non-professional communicators shape up their prose for formal occasions, but they are not some kind of magic neutral way to improve a writer's writing.

As you're seeing here, all that work would have been better received without the compromises and tells of LLM-ese because it would have been your writing, in your voice, as an intelligent analyst and communicator. The idiosyncrasies of that prose voice (your prose voice), are a durable signature that people come to associate with you individually and help them interpret tone, inflection, emphasis, insight in ways that the genericism and accent of an LLM scrubs out.

Give yourself more credit and don't do this; or at least don't treat it as an "of course"!

[raffael_de]

I also don't understand this. After having written something I never felt a need to have it reformulated by anything. What would even be the prompt for that?

[ASalazarMX]

Maybe "You are an expert editor. Polish this article for X demographic. Make no mistales."?

But jokes aside, I too prefer genuine human writing. Writing is complex enough that you can see a distinct style even if it's rough. LLMs tend to polish the roughness so much that everything reads like magazine ads.

[Idilunlu]

I think it's easy for native speakers to say. But as English is not my mother tongue, I find it safer to run it through a checker and nowadays, LLMs. So maybe no need to be so harsh about it

[matusp]

I understand that motive. On the other hand, LLM smell makes the text untrustworthy. I have detected it as well, and I immediately started to wonder about whether I am reading a reasonable expert analysis or just an AI hallucination. I still don't know.

I recommend prompting the LLM to mostly fix glaring grammatical and stylistic mistakes, not to rewrite the entire thing into a LinkedIn post style text.

[vizzier]

Or us dyslexics, I don't mind having the robot check and rephrase my work.

[nlawalker]

Have you ever had someone else edit your work, comment on it and provide alternative phrasings or organization? LLMs are pretty good at that, available any time and give instant results, as long as you understand that they work differently from a human reviewer - you can't expect it to be of the quality you'd get from a subject-matter expert or highly skilled writer, you have to lean into the LLM slot-machine model where you just get some alternative options. But it's incredibly useful when you're stuck in a rut with how to conceptualize or explain something, or even when you're not, and just want to visualize some alternatives that come from somewhere outside of your own head.

I think of it like a power thesaurus. Thesauruses get a bad rap for people just using them to look for ten-dollar words, but they're super useful for finding ways to articulate things differently, which can sometimes lead to bigger insights or ideas about restructuring the content.

It's on the author to look at what's suggested by the LLM and decide whether or not to use it, and there's an inherent danger in having one's voice overridden by simply accepting too many of the recommendations as-is. But that's between the author and the tool. I won't make any comment here on the article author's prose or how they maybe did or didn't use LLMs.

[bos]

It starts in the very first paragraph. “The headlines say yes. […] The headline is wrong.”

And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”

LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.

If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.

I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.

[chrismorgan]

> That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.

That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:

> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.

[nostrademons]

The staccato style is often effective for emphasis, but the paragraphing is wrong on this article. It should've been:

> The headlines say yes.

> Patriot crews shot down a Kinzhal over Kyiv on the night of May 4, 2023. Arrow-3 batteries killed Iranian ballistic missiles over Tel Aviv in April and October 2024. A pair of THAAD batteries in Israel emptied something close to a quarter of the US national inventory across twelve days of war in June 2025. The headline word in every one of those engagements was hypersonic.

> The headline is wrong.

> No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target. Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic. The Avangard, the only Russian vehicle that meets the strict definition, has sat in silos in Orenburg since 2019 without being touched. The Chinese DF-17 has never been used. The American Dark Eagle has not yet been ordered to fire.

> So when we ask “can you stop a hypersonic,” we are partly asking “what would happen if anyone fired one.”

There are assorted other issues with the article as well, like excessive use of passive voice, lack of parallelism, and too much meta-talk.

[protortyp]

Fair, that's very helpful feedback.

> the interspersed animated/interactive models often don't seem strongly connected to the text

It's indeed the part I struggled with most. The intent was to make the constraint more "visceral", so that the "the interceptor can't catch up" point becomes something you feel by dragging a slider and wtaching the gap grow. But you're right that I didn't do enough to stitch each properly into the prose around it. It reads a bit too adjacent to the text.

For what it's worth, an earlier draft was nearly twice the length and even included a small missile-interception game as the introduction. I think cutting it was the right call though.

Thanks for the notes! I'll keep this in mind for the next post.

[echoangle]

> The intent was to make the constraint more "visceral", so that the "the interceptor can't catch up" point becomes something you feel by dragging a slider and wtaching the gap grow.

I don't know who the target audience is but if you talk about hitting supersonic missiles and kill chains, I don't think you need an interactive example to show that you can't hit a target that's faster than you if it has a head start.

[hangonhn]

The end especially.

This really gave it away:

"So can you stop a hypersonic? Sometimes, the wrong ones. Probably not the right ones, yet. The one defense working against the right ones today is a politician’s restraint, not a kill chain.

The worst one is still in its silo. And we are running out of interceptors against the second-worst ones."

It sounds like ChatGPT talking to me.

It's weird reading articles written by AI or helped by AI because it's a lot of words but no overarching narrative. It's almost like an expanded and fluffed up outline. It's very exhausting to read and I lose interest partway through. AI written text has a low "ROI".

AI code is similar. The individual parts are OK but even after reading the entire codebase it's hard to understand how it all fits together or what the over arching structure is.

(BTW, I don't mind what you're doing at all -- as long as you're honest and upfront about it. I love how you're exploring this way of working. I also love the widgets you embedded. It's cute but doesn't add a ton to understanding of the ideas in the article but it's the type of thing AI can really enable for writers.)

[tptacek]

"Below it you are doing high-school physics. Above it you are running a small particle accelerator with a missile attached." is where I clocked out.

(Also "honest" assessments; the word "honest" has gone the way of "delve".)

Use LLMs to proofread and critique structure. Don't take a single word they generate and put it in your copy, not even simple vocabulary suggestions. The more work you put into a piece, the more important this rule is.

[caconym_]

> ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections

This is not really meant to single you out, since there's a lot of this going around, but I really don't think this should be a matter of "of course". Why should it be the default to let a tool that doesn't have your context, or your voice, override your own usage of language?

[axus]

He met the goal of conveying a lot of information. If he's only judged on what he said, and not how he said it, he did great. If I want to hear someone's voice, I'll watch YouTube.

[caconym_]

> If I want to hear someone's voice, I'll watch YouTube.

I'm sure that in your head this is a witty rejoinder, but it really is quite a wild thing to say: that you place no value on the individual variations in how different human writers express themselves. It follows that you really don't care about voice on YouTube either, except in the most basic mechanical sense: you would be happy watching videos written by AI and narrated by the same monotone text-to-speech narrator, video after video, efficiently delivering that densely packed information you crave.

This is actually a thing, isn't it? Like those "shorts" with the AI narration and matching subtitles flashing by in the middle of the screen. I guess you must love those---somebody does, probably a lot of people, or they wouldn't exist.

I'm tempted to frame this as a new kind of illiteracy. People whose brains are so addled by the modern media landscape that to get them to pay attention to anything at all you have to resort to tricks like this; god forbid they ever encounter a writer or narrator who speaks differently, sounds differently, thinks differently, frames differently. Nobody should be surprised, I suppose, that the ability to parse different levels of meaning in Content that falls outside the AI cognitive monoculture is a dying skill.

[jemmyw]

> The wallet was supposed to be the constraint. It turns out, as we will see, that the wallet is the constraint after all.

I can't tell if you made a mistake and meant the wallet isn't the constraint. These short burst sentences are really hard to read. Write "As we'll see, the constraint is x.". There's no need to split that, a single sentence conveys the whole point.

The article is full of similar wording, and that's why it feels choppy to read.

> The rest of this essay is about why that is harder than the press understands. And about a second problem hiding underneath it

I'd describe this as chain of thought writing. It's fine in casual conversation, with the words just tumbling out of our mouths, but it doesn't work in writing or speeches. There are so many ways the two concepts expressed there could be worded, combined or separated. "The press has an unfortunate tendency to use hyperbole and simple descriptions, but even with those stripped away there are deeper misconceptions..."

It's interesting that folks have honed in on AI as the problem. I'm my view the issue is that you haven't decided on your writing style, and as a non native speaker, you're unable to write a simple phrase and get AI to embellish it. Writing simple phrases is surprisingly difficult. Try making everything concise, with no repitition, and then adding style and flowery language afterwards.

Edit: sorry I may have read another person's comment about being a non native speaker. Writing concisely is something we can all work on.

[chadd]

Thanks for compiling this.

"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."

- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?

[alach11]

> The honest answer to that question, in June 2026, is that we do not know

> The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics

> The honest 2026 answer is in three parts.

> The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried

Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.

[piazz]

“Honestly” / “the honest answer is” are huge LLM tells.

Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably.

That said I enjoyed the article!

[ethin]

Agreed, that's a huge turn off for me, and I thought this would genuinely be fascinating. I'm not a physics expert but I love reading about interesting things like this, but I can't stand this surface-level "well I in theory could be an expert on this topic but nobody knows because the machine removed all of the nuance and now it's shallow AI writing" style of writing.

[neilv]

I'm only a few more AI slop HN posts away from quitting HN.

I will only look at AI slop if paid to do so.

(Scouting ahead for alternatives, I wouldn't mind a Lobste.rs invite, to see whether that's pleasantly anti-slop.)

[Jtsummers]

Submissions like this one are why I've pulled back from the site. I would like it if the comment guideline:

> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

were extended to submissions as well. People submitting junk should get banned just as people commenting with LLMs do (or risk).