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- Hacker News
- The irony is that this article reads a lot like it was written by AI.by Reason077
- AI-generated writing does not bother me, unless it is intended as prose writing, where the flow communicates as much as the specific facts that are described. For technical writing, I usually just scan for important information anyway, and in that sense the only thing that bothers me about AI-generated writing is if it's too verbose and obscures the important information by leaning ineffectively on jargon and high-minded verbiage. I find that Claude Opus is very guilty of this, whereas GPT 5.6 variants are not.by davesque
- On the note of imperfections... My preference is now strongly towards reading someone's stream of thought thrown down at speed over than that same stream of thought shat through the digestive track of an AI agent. At least that feels human.
To me, it also seems like they AI digestion is getting actively worse? As best as I can tell, all the agentic nature and reasoning for code is now making writing actively worse, as the agent pulls across your whole knowledge base and will take that one thought and eagerly join and context it thinks is relevant, with the reasoning spread throughout the page.
by addisonj - "Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing."
I can't tell if this essay was written in earnest or as a subtle troll.
by jmcgough - I appreciate the direction of this article, and commend the author on publishing work, but the first sentence in the first paragraph is exactly what they lament.
> A pattern I see is that people use AI to build something new, then they use AI to retrospectively summarize what they have already built into a design document. Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.
by blandcoffee - There's a lot of misunderstanding here. The quality of LLM writing has not plateaued, it has dropped significantly. They've cut it to the point where people start noticing.
Do a search on "Claude Sonnet 4.5" on Reddit and you'll see lots of disappointed users [1]
If I could give out ratings,
Average human with a degree: 5/10
Sonnet/Opus 5: 2/10
GPT 6 Astra, 5.4 Sol: 3/10
Sonnet 4.6: 8/10
Claude Sonnet 4.5: 9/10
GPT 4o: 6/10
GPT 4.5: 10/10
GPT 3 Davinci (with a lot of coaching): 7/10
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/claudexplorers/comments/1ta6f9c/i_s...
by muzani - It's funny, i push back on pull requests because there is too much description now - a 20 line change has pages and pages of generated description, rationalisation for why it is safe, defense of each design decision, analysis of risks and side effects. People are indignant, you're rejecting my change because there is too much documentation? And my response is, I don't have time to read it and you put me in the position where I can't afford not to - because approving the PR implies I did and accepted it. The investment to read all that for the value of a code change that I'm one prompt away from doing myself if I cared is just not high enough. So it's rejected.by zmmmmm
- As I have been saying for years:
Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
by hatthew