[kristianp]

> Numbers like that buy a model a real migration effort.

Such a silly choice of words. I wish the human directing the LLM writing the article put some effort into rewriting the worst examples of LLM style.

> But it did extremely well, and the promise was immediate and specific: builds finishing in less than half the wall-clock time, at 27% lower cost, scoring at or above our incumbent on completed work.

The way the LLMs write (Claude perhaps?) With short phrases separated by colons, commas or full stops, is so poor and frustrating.

There some good insights behind this article, so it's worth reading, for example below, but it isn't easy to read.

> Earlier GPT models cached implicitly on partial prefix matches, which gave decent hit rates for free. GPT-5.6 dropped partial-prefix matching:

[alasano]

I think for a company in AI specifically it's worse.

It makes me feel like either

1) you don't use the models enough to know how they write

2) you're not self aware enough to know it matters

3) you're oblivious to the situation overall

4) you don't respect your readers

There's no good scenario.

[HPsquared]

5) You're so immersed in LLM usage that these writing patterns now seem "normal" and you don't even notice them any more.

[mkovach]

> The way the LLMs write (Claude perhaps?) With short phrases separated by colons, commas, or full stops, is so poor and frustrating.

This is exactly why I keep a WRITING.md file alongside AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md.

Most people spend time telling the model what to build, but very little time telling it how to write. LLMs are surprisingly good at following explicit style guidance if you bother to give it to them.

Mine includes conventions like avoiding unnecessary colons, em dashes, and sentence fragments masquerading as emphasis. Basically, AI-isms and any grammatical errors I tend to make. It also points to writers whose technical prose I admire. Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike are great examples: clear, conversational, and readable without trying to sound important. I've always tried to do two things with documentation: 1) Make it readable and 2) Make people want to read it. A WRITING.md file helps with both points.

If you're generating documentation regularly, it's worth having your agents reference a WRITING.md file. The improvement in readability is often much larger than any gain you'll get from switching to the latest model, and it can keep your documentation consistent between model switches.

[RugnirViking]

Willing to share your writing.md somewhere? pastebin or the like? I'd love to take a look at how different people are doing this.

I disagree with the person below - I don't think its a wrongheaded goal in and of itself to get better ai generated writing. I read ai output half of my day, I may as well try and make it better for my own sake. Passing that onto other people is an entirely unrelated field of problems, and passing it off as stuff you authored yourself is just plagarism.

[mkovach]

Here is a sample I am using for testing on a personal project (I'm also working on using SpeechActs to do prompting, so yes, the repo is all AI-generated).

https://f.mek.cc/gombasic/file?name=WRITING.md&ci=tip

And in many cases, like you, I spend a good amount of time reading AI documentation. I'm not "stealing" anything, just having a model generate words in a specific way. I'm just being precious in how I want things, without having to do it myself.

[Marha01]

There is also Humanizer:

https://github.com/blader/humanizer

[Planktonne]

Making a problem harder to sport is not a way to fix it.

[mkovach]

I understand what you are saying, but inside the repo, I'm making it explicit.

I'm not trying to hide the problem, just offering a solution that people may find useful, or curiously odd.

[baxtr]

Whenever I suspect an article is LLM authored I stop reading it immediately and instead give it to my LLM tool of choice to summarize/ paraphrase.

This way I can at least somewhat control the style of the output.

[dawnerd]

Makes you wonder if any of stats these articles push are even real.

[vessenes]

My current claude.md bans the phrase “load-bearing”, and Claude HATES that. It will troll occasionally in comments by saying things like “load-be…most specific”. Like it REALLY loves saying load-bearing. Urgh.

[Anon1096]

You are poisoning the context and priming it to say load-bearing. I don't really think there is a good way to actually ban specific phrases other than have it do a second pass, it's something baked into the model from post training.

[vessenes]

I hear you. And, it says the phrase ALL THE TIME even without any priming. Anecdotally it’s better to complain about it. But not a lot better. I have no idea how often it’s using load bearing in the thinking traces though

[icelancer]

Gets a 100% on Pangram. Stuff is so distracting. Write your own posts, FFS. Or at least pass it through "humanizer" type plugins.

[try-working]

You should make sure to not read Stratechery then. It's writing is even worse.

[SwtCyber]

I would rather read an article with actual production experience migrating an agent, even if it is written in this style, than a perfectly crafted long read from another evangelist that has nothing but high level fluff and general phrases about the bright future of ai

[w4yai]

Can we get over the detective work about if the text was written by LLM or not in 2026 already ? This is a lost cause, and we could instead focus on substance over syntax.

[liquidise]

Not OP but my frustrations come from it being impossible to ignore and outright distracting.

I've found the same thing showing with Claude-coded/designed front ends that overuse the same semi-monospaced fonts, Blue/Yellow/Red palette and rounded corner borders. It isn't that it is bad, but it often isn't fit for purpose.

You're right it wont change anything, but authors shouldn't be surprised when people who care about their time/attention comment on low/no effort pieces.

[spongebobstoes]

critique of writing style isn't made better by claiming it was authored by an LLM

[SR2Z]

No but it's a useful shorthand to describe a type of bad writing.

I also think that people should focus on substance and not if AI was used, but AI writes like shit and I find myself retching a bit when I have to read long AI-written documents. Do they say something useful? Maybe, but when my eyes are glazing over because it's just so exhausting trying to parse what's written, I can't tell.

I certainly think less of people when they have such poor taste that they think writing like that is acceptable.

[jasonlotito]

This is just an AI comment masquerading as not trying to prove a point.

[SR2Z]

Since you didn't address the substance, I guess we'll never know :)

[aeon_ai]

I’m as pro AI as any.

Slop is slop. When the “it works but isn’t great” phrases end up slipping into a strong conceptual core, it compromises the perception of the ideas.

Perhaps our AI will cater to us by rewriting the content we read, and each of us intermediate all communication with systems that make that slop bearable.

Or perhaps, we learn that we kinda still need to give a shit when writing to land on the perception we’re trying to create within our readers

[wqaatwt]

To be fair internet (or rather shovelware websites like Medium) were already flooded by crap articles based on a set of templates. Of course the issue is that LLMs are actually better than the robot-humans who used to write them so now it takes more time until you figure whether it’s worth reading or not..

[culopatin]

Maybe if instead we stopped engaging they would wonder why

[justAnotherHero]

To me it's a useful signal not to read an article that someone didn't bother to write.

Which is a shame as real insights are buried inside some of these articles, which if the author bothered to write in his own words could have reached an audience that would have appreciated them.

Writing is one of the areas where I want no LLM involvement.

[frio]

I keep coming back to this https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/

The number of things that make it to the top of HN/Reddit/wherever now that are devoid a human's touch is exhausting. Whether it's a site that's got that Claude frontend smell, or a repo that's got a burst of 10 claude commits before getting shared and abandoned, or a series of blog posts that were written by LLMs... it's all, at this point, a flag for me that the human behind the LLM doesn't really want to engage with others or share; in some ways it dehumanises their entire (supposed) audience.

IDK. Maybe having Claude contribute writing about something novel to the general blogosphere is useful in some dimension, but it usually gives me no confidence in the truth of the post.

[CookieCrisp]

More often it's the difference between finishing something and not finishing it - so often LLM's are helping them reach an audience that would appreciate them, even if that audience doesn't include you

[gbalduzzi]

I agree with the copy-pasted slop that you see sometimes, that is probably generated from a short prompt and therefore has no real substance to it.

If an article has interesting content (which comes from an human) and the LLM is just used to help the author finish off the article, I don't have any problem with that.

Labeling both scenarios in the same category feels completely wrong to it, as equating vibe coded stuff (as in no human ever read the produced code) and agent-assisted good old software engineering

[spicyusername]

The problem is that the second you suspect something is written by AI, its a pretty good signal that 50-80% of the text is empty of meaning. Maybe that will change, but LLMs are terrible and inefficient writers.

Only so much time in the day, its a quick signal to not waste anymore of it.

[lewistaariq]

Correct. AI == Credibility hit and it's increasing as more humans get used to feeling they are AI slop consumers, not worth the time for genuine human engagement. Human engagement costs are increasing. Amazing to read/watch.

[afro88]

It's not about figuring out if it's LLM written though. The style is hard to read and annoying. With the kind of sentences GP was talking about it's actually harder to get the substance.

[1123581321]

It's both poor substance and style, in most cases (and this case.)

Pointing out they generated it at least encourages them to write a shorter article that says what they meant.

[dandellion]

Yes, as soon as models come out that can write properly, we'll all instantly get over it. Until then we'll be having this discussion over and over, as many times as it is necessary.

[joeguilmette]

No: https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/

[girvo]

It means I don’t trust the substance. Whenever I try to use for technical writing like this, I catch it getting things wrong constantly.

[jeremyjh]

Evaluating substance takes time - perhaps more than was invested in the article to begin with. So these tells are very distracting because as soon as I see them I wonder if the person who prompted the LLM even bothered to read the output. If they haven't, then I certainly shouldn't invest the time to determine if there is any substance.

[illusive4080]

No. As a human I like reading human written text over computer written text. I want something a human composed with thought put into it. Not something a human tried to save time with by having the machine write it.

[conjectures]

What substance? That they consume a newer model from the same vendor?

[rsalus]

the frustration is largely because the overall substance is quite poor since it is typically imprecise by nature.

[mediaman]

Because quality of writing matters.

Good communicators learn to use the written word. Bad ones rely on mental crutches.

Good communicators get an audience, and bad ones won't.

You think it's a lost cause, but it's not, because people don't like this junk, because it is low quality and, on average, lacks substance.

The best minds in AI that I've seen all write their own words. They use AI to help them research or ideate, but what they write is their own.

Before assuming this is a "lost cause," consider why the smartest people in the room don't do it.

[blitzar]

Its never lupus and its always an LLM. No need for detective work.

[xeyownt]

100% this.

The AI police is there to say what is worth reading and what is not, because THEY know what people like.

Or not.

[jchw]

It's not detective work, it is literally blatantly obvious and impossible to ignore.

And no we can't get over it either. But I already have talked about that before and said roughly all I have to say on that front, so I'm just going to link back to my last comment regarding this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48861849

[toddmorey]

But it's not about whether it was AI or human authored. That misses the point. We're all fatigued on the writing style. The same cadence and patterns; the same phrases and terms like "load-bearing". Used everywhere, they create a super fatiguing monoculture in all the writing. It's like if every illustration on the internet suddenly contained Garfield the cat.

[Planktonne]

The syntax tells you there isn't any substance.

[jraph]

I have a counter proposition: don't fall for this constant suggestion that LLMs are an unavoidable future would you leave the techbros alone now pretty please, relentlessly keep reminding that we still don't think it's acceptable so people don't start to think this is okay since nobody complains anymore.

I appreciate these comments, they save me time for procrastinating elsewhere.

[derwiki]

I agree with this sentiment: it’s not inevitable if we relentlessly ostracize obviously LLM posts

And let’s be real: I had a post this year that was #1 on HN for a while, and an LLM “wrote” the whole thing, but it was very much my writing style and NO ONE called out the post as LLM slop. If you use an LLM correctly for writing, it’s not detectable. It seems that most folks don’t go through that effort.

[asdff]

The substance is shit too with these LLM articles. Stuck in the box of the training set. Nothing new. Just regurgitation.

[multjoy]

No.

[gexla]

My solution to this is to dump it into an LLM and a prompt that roughly does something like...

Hand wavy list just to get a general idea...

1) Give me a condensed summary 2) Is this adding anything to what we already have? (I save good articles along with annotations and whatever notes I may write to go along with it.) 3) Locate any upstream ideas on this (often AI articles are rehashing much better written ideas.) ...

Something like that. Not that I have some great system for it. I find these articles are so full of fluff that I have lost patience to attempt to get through them. So, I pull out the AI to parse the AI. I know that the AI may miss some hidden gems, but I'm okay with that.

[wqaatwt]

You are reading it wrong. Ask your LLM to read and summarize based on your style preferences. Better yet don’t read anything at all, just tell your agent to convert it to a skill file for it’s future reference..

[user_of_the_wek]

Unironically, I think in the future we will have the option to run filters in our browsers that can reword articles to your preferred writing style. Like user stylesheets for text. I also assume it already exists out there, I've just been to lazy so far to look for it. It's a relatively obvious application of LLMs.

[vasco]

I've used that for about 15 years because I live abroad, it's called Google translate.

[user_of_the_wek]

Google Translate can change the writing style of a text? I thought it would just translate between different languages.

[vasco]

Great gotcha

[yulker]

this is probably sarcasm, but might actually try this. the visceral negative reaction i have to llm writing makes me instantly want to close the tab

[Diti]

If written sarcasm isn’t properly labeled as sarcasm, per Poe’s law, you may consider that message you replied to be a genuine opinion.

I would have downvoted the sarcasm (it doesn’t contribute to the conversation), but I believe it actually is the author’s opinion.

[wqaatwt]

I promise you its not.

[TacticalCoder]

> The way the LLMs write (Claude perhaps?) With short phrases separated by colons, commas or full stops, is so poor and frustrating.

Yup llmish (from now on it's called "llmish") sucks.

But I'd say: at this point it's probably trivial to write a browser extension that detects llmish and that rewrites the worst sentences: from llmish to something less irritating to read. Heck, I could spent tokens on that: an extension that changes on the fly llmish found on webpages.

Also I'd say there's typically no swearing at all in llmish: llmish is too politically correct for swearing. So the rewrite could maybe also use a few "offending" words.

Offending words that, btw, are not going to go well with Gen Zers. Poor Gen Z... They've been raised with the state and its institutions (like school and then universities) hammering them with the notion that they were precious little unique snowflakes and now they arrive on the job market only to be told they've been pre-emptively replaced by AIs. And because they cannot stand a single curse word (because it's "offensive to minorities" or something), they'll be driven off by text rewritten to contain curse words. So they're condemned to read the bland, dumb, AI-generated llmish for the rest of their lives.

Honestly sucks for them. Fuck that.

[weakfish]

As a certified Gen Z member: respectfully, what the fuck are you on about?

The mythical Gen Z you are describing is the hyperbolic exaggeration that is equivalent to me describing all boomers as racist, all Gen X as entitled, all millennials as lazy, etc.

[SR2Z]

Have you ever met an actual Gen Z? They have no problem with swear words. Many of them love Key and Peele, whose humor is like 90% racist jokes.

If wokeness actually did capture a whole generation then why even bother complaining?

[CarRamrod]

For me, it's Bottish