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by bayesnet 2 days ago
It’s ironic that the README has all the tells of being LLM-written: > 53 numbered rules, 9 sections, written in 1983 by people whose readers die when a sentence is ambiguous. The ones doing the heavy lifting: …

Not really a promising tell for a writing skill, IMO.

3 comments

I've been using a plain ASD-STE100 prompt for a little bit now, and while I somewhat prefer the text that agents produce while being told to use simplified English, it does not necessarily change the overall structure of what they write. It just now tends to have shorter sentences, and fewer drumroll, pitch-deck / vacuous section titles like "the finding that pivots the preposition", etc. Overall a significant quality increase in my opinion, but nothing earth shattering, and doesn't fully solve the problem.
They acknowledge this, but I really dislike whatever style they're using for the readme:

> Yes, this README breaks half of them. Marketing is explicitly out of STE scope. The skill knows that and stays in the docs.

> Where it refuses to go: marketing copy, blog voice, brand writing. Flat on purpose.

(Each sentence there has an emoji that HN cuts out)

The problem with at least ChatGPT is no matter what personality you set it still reads like a smug asshole trying to sound smart. You can just pick different flavors of smug asshole.
> The problem with at least ChatGPT is no matter what personality you set it still reads like a smug asshole trying to sound smart.

Some of this may be perception rather than reality. I have never felt that ChatGPT was being smug or rude to me.

And the goddamn emojis. I get it, people use them when texting to make the writing a bit more chummy, but I can really live without them everywhere else.
The readme looks to me concise and correct. Tested it and it works. Better than many human-written readmes I've seen around.