[Spide_r]

Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.

[thinkingemote]

It's now almost certain that every submission about LLMs will be written (or assisted) by LLMs.

That this kind of writing puts a great number of us off is not important to many who seek their fortune in this industry.

I hear the cry: "it's my own words the LLM just assisted me". Yes we have to write prompts.

[simonw]

My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way.

I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rationale that the LLM just made up.

I use LLMs to proofread text I publish on my blog. I just shared my current prompt for that here: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

[WarmWash]

I think it is very fair to say that in the same way that LLM's have given english majors access to programming, LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication.

I'm not shy to admit that LLMs even from 2 years ago could communicate ideas much better than me, especially for a general audience.

[rcvassallo83]

As someone who has written a few deeply personal articles with LLM assistance, I see the signs and I'm almost certain this was generated off a few bullet points. The repetition and cadence strongly resembles the LLM output. Its the kind of fluff that I remove from a piece, because it lacks humanity and offers little substance.

[bonoboTP]

The comments as well. I won't give away the tells but HN is less and less pleasant to read. Now is the time to cherish your pockets of small scale high quality forums that's not flooded by this stuff yet.

[alex_suzuki]

How do you find those pockets?

[marginalia_nu]

Even the title has that unmistakable smell of punchy LinkedIn profundity.

[nz]

Even the linkedin profile has a studio-ghibli-style avatar. People are going to assume that he is just an "analog interface" to an LLM. Which is sad, because he might be a good programmer. In fact, I tend to see a lot of english-as-second-language people embrace LLMs as a kind of "equalizer", not realizing that in 2026 it is the opposite (not saying that it's right either way, just pointing out that it is becoming a kind of anti-marketing, like showing up to a conference without any clothing, and getting banned from the conference permanently).

We should probably normalize publishing things in our native languages, and expecting the audience to run it through a translator. (I have been toying with the idea of writing everything in Esperanto (not my native language, but a favorite) and just posting links to auto-translated English versions where the translation is good enough).

EDIT: as someone with friends and family from Eastern Europe, I can tell you that the prevailing attitude is: "everything is bullshit anyway" (which, to be fair, has a lot of truth to it), and so it is no surprise that people would enthusiastically embrace a pocket-sized bullshit factory, hook it up to a fire-hose, and start spraying. We saw it with spam, and we see it now with slop. It won't stop unless the system stops rewarding it.

[jmcdl]

This was my thought after getting through a few paragraphs as well. At first, I was thinking, this is interesting, maybe worth sharing with colleagues. But then it became too obvious it was AI written or "assisted". Can't take that seriously.

[neogodless]

AI made writing words easier. It made communicating well harder.

[brobdingnagians]

AI made writing blog posts easier. It made critical thinking harder.

[RevEng]

LLMs write this way because people write this way. Maybe not everyone, but enough for it to train the models to do it. Much of my writing reads like an LLM wrote it, but that doesn't make me an LLM.

[krackers]

No, this statement is not true for anything except a base model. Benchmaxxing during RL phase is how you get the advertisement style "punchy" writing, because even though people don't usually write that way it is eye catching and people will vote for the bullet-point emdash slop. I wonder if some lab will be bold enough to do "anti rlhf", lmarena score be damned.

[timmytokyo]

Yes and no. LLMs take all the writing on the Internet (good and bad) and average it out. It's similar to the way generative AI images always have an identifiable, artificial "look". They've averaged out the personality and thereby erased the individuality that went into the efforts the original artists used to create them.

[lelanthran]

> Much of my writing reads like an LLM wrote it,

I doubt it; share something you wrote prior to, say... 2024.

[archagon]

Why were flags manually removed? It's obvious that the community does not want to read AI slop.

[apt-apt-apt-apt]

Why is this sentiment expressed so often ("It was written/edited by AI"?

It seems to bother people, perhaps since it may have been low-effort. Doesn't it not matter as long as the content is good? Otherwise, it seems to be no different than a standard low-quality post.

[layer8]

The formulaic style/cadence/structure/tone is annoying, for one due to its LLM-induced prevalence, but also because it is padded and stretched without adding substance while being dyed in superficialities, and has a weird tendency of meandering through its thematic territory, like the author was slightly distracted or is writing the same thing for the 20th time, or is missing a good editor. Pre-LLM, it might have been an okay-ish, but not great, article. Now it’s just grating and makes you feel like you’re wasting your time reading it.

[lelanthran]

> Doesn't it not matter as long as the content is good?

"Why is everyone railing against my spam? Doesn't it not matter as long as the deal I am offering is good?"

When people don't want the spam, it is irrelevant whether the spammer is offering a good deal or not.

[bonoboTP]

When I want to read Ai writing (which is not never), I chat with it myself and I prompt it better and get more interesting stuff than these generic insight blogspam.

[rsynnott]

LLM prose is typically _painful_ to read, overly long, and bullshit-heavy.

[agentultra]

I couldn’t even finish it. I picked up on it after reading the other one that made it to the front page the other day.

I don’t think there will be a point in coming to this site if it’s just going to be slop on the front page all the time.

Maybe mods should consider a tag or flag for AI generated content submissions?

[lsc4719]

AI writings should be notified

[altmanaltman]

It is almost 90% generated using AI text. So many paragraphs to say basically nothing at all.

Like look at this paragraph:

> Junior engineers have traditionally learned by doing the simpler, more task-oriented work. Fixing small bugs. Writing straightforward features. Implementing well-defined tickets. This hands-on work built the foundational understanding that eventually allowed them to take on more complex challenges.

The first sentence was enough to convey everything you needed to know, but it kept on adding words in that AI cadence. The entire post is filled with this style of writing, which, even if it is not AI, is extremely annoying to read.

[m00dy]

What would he have written instead?

[polynomial]

Classic LLM construction.

5 sentence paragraph. First sentence is parataxis claim. Followed by 3 examples in sentence fragments, missing verbs, that familiar cadence. Then the final sentence, in this case also missing a verb.

Pure AI slop.

[SecretDreams]

I feel like it's such a lack of self respect and respect for others when people write using AI on personal blogs.

Reading AI code is very pleasant. It's well annotated and consistent - how I like to read code (although not how I write code LOL). Reading language/opinions is not meant to be this way. It becomes repetitive, boring, and feels super derivative. Why would you turn the main way we communicate with each other into a soulless, tedious, chore?

I think with coding it's because I care* about what the robot is doing. But, with communication, I care about what the person is thinking in their mind, not through the interpretation of the robot. Even if the person's mind isn't as strong. At least then I can size the person up - which is the other reason understanding each other is important and ruined when you put a robot in between.

[beej71]

It's also because we (generally) consider a blog to be human communication and we consider math and programs to be something else.

If you're talking to someone on the phone and halfway through they identify themselves as a bot, surprising you, there's a profound sense of something like betrayal. A moment ago you were having a human connection, and suddenly that vaporized. You were misled and were just talking to an unfeeling robot.

And heartfelt writing is similar. We imagine the human at the other side of the screen and we relate. And when we discover it was a bot, no matter how accurate the sentiment, that relationship vanishes.

But with math and software, it's already sterile from a human connection perspective. It's there for a different purpose. Yes, it can be beautiful, but when we read it we don't tend to build a human connection with the coder.

An interesting exception is comments. When we read the fast inverse square root code and see the "what the fuck..." comment, we instantly relate to the person writing the software. If we later learned that comment was generated by an LLM, we'd lose that connection, again.

IMHO. :)

[lelanthran]

> I feel like it's such a lack of self respect and respect for others when people write using AI on personal blogs.

Not so sure about the respect aspect: I have lots of self-respect, but I don't generally broadcast respect for random other people when I write my blogs - the most recent one even called readers stupid, IIRC!

I feel it's more a matter of expression of contempt: if you can't be bothered to write it, WTF are you expecting people to read it?

[383toast]

Yeah the article is 100% AI generated according to Pangram

[dom96]

It's funny how seemingly easy it is to tell articles like this have that AI generated whiff to them. The first bit that raised my suspicion was the "The Identity Crisis Nobody Talks About" headline. This "The x nobody talks about" feels like such a GenAI thing.

I hate it. I couldn't read much more after that.