I don’t seem to have cracked the Hacker News writing formula yet. A few years ago I got similar feedback, but for the opposite reason: people complained that my English felt awkward because I’m not a native speaker. This time I asked an LLM to smooth out the wording, and it seems I accidentally outsourced my personality too.
The content and research are mine. I spent a few hours trying to collect all the moving pieces into something I wish I’d had as someone returning to frontend after many years away. It was just meant to save a few fellow dinosaurs from opening 47 tabs and wondering why they suddenly need seven package managers.
Like others here, the content is something that I'm interested in, but I too have a reaction to the LLM-isms. I think part of it is that, once I recognize I'm reading LLM output, I have no way of knowing if it wrote the whole post based on a one-or-two sentence prompt or not, and if it did, how much can I really trust the output to not be hallucinated. If I'm going to read LLM output, I'd rather do so in the context of my own chat with it so I can understand the inputs to it and ask follow-up questions.
Can you put the pre-LLM version of your post on your site somewhere? I (and presumably many others) would be much more interested in reading that, even if the English is a bit awkward.
You will never write something that everyone likes. And furthermore, writing a quality text is _hard_, as in, that is something that even a native speaker will have to practice several years.
"There's a Gap that for the first couple years that you're making stuff
what you're making isn't so good. it's not that great it's it's really not that great it's it's trying to be good it has ambition to good but it's not quite that good but your taste - the thing that got you into the game - your your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of bad."
I wish I had a better way to communicate that I loved this article. I just took a Software Engineering Methods class that just should have been this article. Don’t listen to people complain your AI use is ruining their lives; their contribution is less than yours.
I work with claude every day, and instantly recognized its voice; but at the same time, as a web dev from the late 90s who traveled kicking and screaming through all of these ages, I really enjoyed the article anyway. I don't have a visceral disgust with claude's tone as some others here seem to. I'm glad you wrote it and I plan to share it with a friend.