[dang]

I have no idea about the current article, and given that the author is the person with the first commit in the Kubernetes repo (https://joe.dev/about/), he obviously has a lot of credibility.

Just generally though: what we're seeing a ton of these days is people writing something and then passing it to an LLM with a request to improve it somehow, e.g. by fixing grammar, tightening the style, etc. In such cases, the answer to your question is that the "prompt" is (1) a first draft, and (2) an instruction to edit it.

It's clear, though, that the LLMs leave far more imprints on the text than most people realize, and that although they may have asked the LLM to restrict its edits to "just" X or Y, the actual changes to the text will often go beyond that.

How this will evolve over time is anyone's guess, of course.

[kshacker]

I do this so many times. Type in a large amount of text and the only thing final in my mind is para breaks and the idea per paragraph. And then give it to AI saying "sending to director", "sending to friends on WhatsApp group", "sending to colleagues" and it does an awesome job of bringing the "AI polish" and then you edit or negotiate line by line or para by para on what you want to keep.

[dang]

Yes, this is certainly common, and opinions and tastes differ about the outcomes—as they should, because we are all still in the early stage of sorting through the best way to use these tools. I think it's also already clear that "best way" means something different in different contexts.

Where some people are getting into trouble, at least in the HN context, is underestimating the impact that this has on their text. There's a big perception gap between the author's view ("fixed up the grammar a bit") and the reader's view ("this sounds entirely like an AI wrote it") in many cases. So many, in fact, that I feel I can say something about it. I'm no authority on any of this and don't want to sound like one, but this is such a common pattern at the moment that I feel confident reporting it. How it will change over time, I have no idea.

(I also don't want to sound anti-LLM - we rely on these tools heavily, they're amazing, they've already improved HN, and they show every sign of high potential to improve it further. The bottleneck isn't the LLMs, it's how quickly we can figure out how to use (and test) them. We just don't use them to process any text that we put on HN itself.)

[AndrewDucker]

Unfortunately, the "AI Polish" is really obvious and offputting to many people.

[kshacker]

And that is sad. I had speech impediment while growing up, but somehow I was able to focus on writing and used to write real well, first technical (sciency) stuff and then general thoughts too. Despite having never spoken english for conversation till the age of 16 or 17, someone decades later speculated that I was an english major because I could communicate really well (and I did use some heavy but very very context appropriate english words). Nowadays ... while I do use AI now and then to clean up my text, I have been accused of being an AI more than I can count :) You put in the effort and get accused of being chatGPT.

[wenc]

I have a steering .md file that instructs Opus how not to sound like an LLM when writing prose (I write prose in my IDE with Opus). The steering is specific to me, but I've found that giving Opus rules like eschewing punchy journalistic sentences ("Not because X. But because Y. And that matters."), varying sentence lengths and avoiding staccato sounding clauses go a long way in smoothing out LLM smells in writing (at least according to me).

Aside: different LLMs sound different too! ChatGPT is the worst offender for LLM-sounding writing and needs the most smoothing, but Claude (web) actually sounds like a humanities major from the get-go.

[wenc]

Attached is the writing.md I use to steer Opus 4.8. Prompt:

  "use the writing.md steering on x.md and loop until all LLM traces are removed". 

I ran it on TFA and Pangram flagged it as LLM generated but Claude Fable couldn't definitively tell.

-- writing.md ---

# Writing Rules (MANDATORY)

## Banned Words and Phrases

Never use: "incredibly", "extremely", "absolutely", "fundamentally", "dramatically", "crucial", "vital", "powerful", "robust", "elegant", "seamless", "cutting-edge", "game-changing", "groundbreaking", "It's worth noting", "Importantly,", "Interestingly,", "Let's dive in", "At its core,", "At the end of the day,".

No exclamation marks in technical writing. No contractions in formal writing.

## Banned Sentence Structures

1. *Semicolons joining independent clauses.* Do not write "X does A; Y does B." Use a comma + conjunction that names the relationship: ", while" (contrast), ", and" (addition), ", so" (consequence). Semicolons hide the logical link and sound artificially balanced. 2. *Label-colon-explanation.* Do not write "The key insight: ..." or "The limitation: ...". State the point directly or use "is that" phrasing. 3. *Colon after a bolded term.* Do not write "a *rollout engine*: a lightweight...". Use a comma. 4. *Sentence fragments as assertions.* Every claim needs a subject and verb. "No gap at any ρ." → "There is no gap at any ρ." 5. *Em-dashes joining independent clauses.* Do not write "X does A — Y does B." Use a comma + conjunction. Parenthetical em-dashes ("the policy — trained offline — cannot adapt") are fine. 6. *Tricolon lists of near-synonyms.* "It does not X, Y, or Z" is padding unless each item is genuinely distinct.

## Banned Rhythms

1. *Staccato sequences.* Two or more consecutive short declarative sentences of similar length. Join them with a conjunction or subordinate one. A single short sentence standing alone for emphasis is fine and often good. Do not eliminate it. 2. *Formulaic layout.* Do not produce: intro paragraph → three bullets → summary paragraph. 3. *Gratuitous parallelism.* Do not force list items into identical grammatical form if it makes them sound robotic. 4. *Saying it twice.* If you stated a fact, do not rephrase it from another angle in the same paragraph. One clear statement is enough. 5. *The negation-correction reversal.* This is the move where you deny one candidate and assert the real one. Surface forms to match: "not X, but Y"; "it isn't X, it's Y"; "X was never the point, Y was"; "for me X, for them Y"; the comma-tag "Y, not X" ("sanctioned, not stolen"); the "not so much X as Y" form; and the gapped version where a stranded verb delivers the pivot ("Hours aren't the bottleneck. Attention is."). One reversal at a genuine turning point is good writing. The structure is not the problem. The density is.

   Detection is a whole-document pass, not a per-paragraph glance. Read the entire piece and mark every sentence or sentence pair that negates one thing to elevate another, including the comma-tag and gapped variants above. Count the marks. More than one per ~300 words, or more than three in a short piece, means the reversal has become the default sentence engine, which is the machine tell. A single dense paragraph with two stacked reversals also counts.

   Fix by thinning, not by deleting all of them. Keep the two or three that land on the strongest turns. Rewrite the rest as plain declaratives that state the point with no foil ("The bottleneck is attention now." instead of "Hours aren't the bottleneck. Attention is."). Removing every instance flattens the voice, so the aim is to make the survivors rare enough to regain their force.

6. *Repeated hedge adverbs.* A softener like "almost", "somewhat", "rather", "a bit", or "fairly" used more than once in close range becomes a tic. Keep at most one, and only where it earns its place.

## Positive Rules

- Active voice. Use "we" and "our". - Concrete nouns and verbs. "The model overfits after 50 epochs" not "exhibits suboptimal generalization characteristics." - Plain English. Use technical terms only when they carry meaning plain English cannot. - State consequences, not meta-commentary. "The policy has no lookahead" not "training compresses multi-period consequences into a single-step mapping." - One sentence that advances to the next thought beats two sentences restating the current thought. - State assumptions when uncertain. Do not hedge-stack ("it might be the case that perhaps..."). - Not every paragraph needs a topic sentence or a concluding sentence. - Do not resolve the ending with a tidy bow. A piece may close on an open question, an admission, or an unresolved tension. Summary endings that restate the thesis read as machine-generated. - Do not over-smooth. Removing every short sentence, every parallel, and every fragment flattens prose into uniform medium-length sentences, which is itself an LLM smell. Fixing a tell should not cost the voice. - When editing existing text, match the density and register of surrounding paragraphs. - Direct and conversational register, but no contractions in formal writing. Personal essays and conversational pieces keep their contractions; the no-contraction rule applies to formal and technical writing only.