This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…)
The argument that communicating an idea is a necessary part of shaping it feels counterintuitive, but it’s really true.
Whether it’s debugging, ‘big’ writing, or even down to the scale of a tweet (RIP Twitter) or an HN comment, I’ve often had the experience of starting to explain a process or opinion and only then discovering that it’s inconsistent or even indefensible.
I suspect (I hope!) that this is something everyone can empathize with.
The author doesn't come across as arrogant to me, more like frustrated. The tone is certainly not for everyone but I enjoyed it. And I agree that it's a good essay!
> This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…)
We have reached the point where you have college professors who defend[0] using AI to write scientific papers (in a seemingly AI-written tweet). Everywhere I go online, I see spam written with the exact same voice. Scientific journals and literary magazines are inundated with AI-written submissions. Software projects have shut contributions because maintainers are tired of reading AI-written slop pull requests.
What's the right tone to take here? "Please stop defecting"? "I wish you would kindly stop ruining the commons"? I don't know. Maybe, if we raise the reputational cost of slop, we get less of it.
Perhaps I meant ‘crude’ rather than ‘arrogant’. Or another word that a blend of the two.
I mean, I think there’s a middle ground between defending all uses of AI writing and saying “It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife.”
Edit: or “if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass”
Yeah I don't know. I mean the author says only smart people can write good. And then says anyone who uses AI to write is basically giving up their genetalia so that Anthropic's AI model could make love to your wife (apparently without her consent because you can obviously just decide who has sex with your wife).
The author should learn how to write properly and communicate ideas in a less sexist and disgusting way if he wants to make a point about writing well.
> you can obviously just decide who has sex with your wife
That's your fantasies, not author's. He merely implied that one can obviously decide whom to allow to fuck one's wife. He hasn't implied that wife's consent is unnecessary or automatic.
> Anyone can imagine a programing language that is as fast as C and as dynamic as Lisp, but when you sit down and think through what those goals entail, you realize the design becomes contradictory.
Ignoring the usual LLM rant, that's an interesting observation. Those conflicting goals reflect a problem that comes up quite often - the conflict between efficient volume production and flexibility. It's solvable for programming languages. That's what just-in-time compilers are for. Anything can change, but in practice, most things don't change that often. It's a caching problem.
This hits much harder in manufacturing. An extreme case is what was once called "Detroit automation" - totally specialized lines of machine tools that could make V8 auto engines all day and all night with very little human attention. But that's all they could make. Even switching to a V6 or a different cylinder size required new equipment. The other extreme is 3D printing in metal. It works, but it's so slow it's only useful for high-value items. Space-X makes Raptor engines that way. Nobody makes auto engine blocks that way.
A decade ago, there was a huge enthusiasm for 3D printing for making everything. That's declined. It's become another machine in the machine shop. It works, but if you want to bang out thousands of something, injection molding or stamping is far faster. There's a sizable tooling cost, and then each item is cheap. This is the tradeoff between efficiency and dynamics.
A year or two ago, someone posted a link on HN to a video of someone making a small screw on a lathe. Nobody does that except out of desperate need for a non-standard part. Small screws are made by special purpose machines that bang them out at machine-gun speeds. American culture does not know this any more. Too few Americans today have been inside manufacturing plants. The culture has forgotten where stuff comes from.
This just seems weirdly similar to Plato's comments on writing:
"And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows."
Maybe it simply comes down to how things get used and people are trying to figure out how to use this strange new tool that's available to us.
But writing, calculators, search engines etc. are specific tools, you drop a skill to gain effectiveness in another. While AI is a general tool whose builders intend it to be able to perform all cognitive work. Past a certain point, what is left of the human?
I do not agree that the concept of writing can be considered a specific tool at all. Maybe a pencil, but writing opposed to remembering everything is a more substantial level of a paradigm shift than AI use is.
> I take this to mean they threw a bunch of incoherent bullet points at the AI for it to denoise and render into paragraphs
What I generally tend to do is have a long conversation with an LLM for at least 30 minutes, and then have that turn into the first draft. It might be considered lazy, but I've never been very good at editing prose - I always end up making a mistake that makes it more confusing.
If after the conversation I find it's an idea worth sharing (usually with colleagues), then getting the LLM to turn it into something readable is the best option available to me. If I had to do it myself, it likely wouldn't make it before I move onto something else. And it has had my genuine input throughout the long conversation, I wouldn't call it incoherent nor am I an idiot for not being able to express myself in long form writing
> A “thinker” who doesn’t write, who skips the step of “merely” synthesizing their vague thoughts into prose, is not thinking. And then these people give their noise to the AI.
OP is quite good with words and has a high standard and world view. The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise.
It's a medium to pack the idea into "something" that represents the idea. It was never about a finished and polished product.
It's the sign language for deaf people - a way to show your thoughts.
I'm certain that the people presenting their github repo do put quite some effort (= prompt work) into it, which IS the thinking process.
At the end of the day, most developers are introverts that can think very well but have hard times with soft skills.
Everyone wants to be proud of his work, let us don't blame them how the show it off.
>It's a medium to pack the idea into "something" that represents the idea. It was never about a finished and polished product. It's the sign language for deaf people - a way to show your thoughts.
Sign language is a fully fledged language, as capable of expressing deep and complex thoughts as spoken English. Likening it to some kind of prosthetic for second-rate thinkers is insulting.
The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise.
What?! This is nonsense. You’re really making the argument that most people getting LLMs to write for them just couldn’t communicate in any way five years ago?
The five-years-ago internet was certainly full of incoherently expressed ideas (and still is now). For some people AI is just spellcheck on the sentence/paragraph level.
As a reader, I appreciate reading writing that lacks large amounts of spelling mistakes. Everyone agreeing on spelling seems like a useful monoculture, like driving on the same side of the road.
But I don't feel the same way about AI writing. It feels totally different in a way that good spelling does not.
Even if I liked the style, I would object strongly to that style quickly becoming a monoculture.
We're on a path to a style optimized for shallow attention maximization becoming the majority of text we read.
> because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass
Damn, that is so hurtful. I'm sorry if English is my third language. But for my project documents I would love to read it like a proper documentation so I'm thankful for AI.
Nobody cared if you translated using Google Translate in the past. People don't care if you use claude to translate now. But people are clearly doing more than they claim when they just translate their text, since their "translations" end up full of AI-isms.
> ... I feel contempt for the author, because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass. Let’s not mince words here. Someone who is so eager to replace themselves, that they would have a machine write in their stead, when the machine can’t even write good yet: what do you call that, if not contemptible? It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife.
Unfortunately due to how tasteless this passage was, I won’t be reading this or your future writing.
Alas, for rude, tasteless behavior, such as replacing your own authentic self-expression with the mellifluous spew of verbal diarrhea that bullshit machines slather across all surfaces they touch, rude, tasteless metaphors are the only fitting ones.
Tastelessness aside, it also shows that author doesn’t (or refuses to) understand why someone may decide to delegate a documentation task to a subpar agent.
Laziness.
Yes, conceptually it’s something about surrendering one’s voice and agency to a subpar machine. Or something like that. (Though that persistence-suggestive neutering metaphor is probably a unwarranted exaggeration.) In practice though it’s more like “I don’t want to write anything, but some poorly written document I’ll just proofread to be not too blatantly wrong beats having absolutely nothing. PRs welcome.”
It might be not the best decision, sure. Quite arguably, a wrong one. Still, I find it concerning that it’s sufficient for the author to dehumanize someone, even in a jest of edginess. Like wtf dude chill down, as if the world isn’t mad enough already.
But the problem is people are not just delegating formulaic procedural prose to AI. They're using AI to write entire scientific papers, so now reviewers have to use Pangram[0] to screen submissions. Literary magazines have the same problem[1]. Maybe those people should know that their behaviour is bad.
Ah, yes, although that’s a different situation from the linked post, more disrespectful (and potentially nefarious) than a sloppy readme. In those cases, most likely, more than just laziness is involved.
Arguably, someone who has chosen to replace their own human expression with machine words has already dehumanized themselves - although this is perhaps a too-literal reading the word “dehumanized”?
I feel that the author mistakes intelligence with mental energy.
Even if you are smart you still have to budget your mental energy and one way to do that is to delegate tasks to AI.
Some people might hate writing documentation but love to write code and vice versa.
Delegating things you don’t want to spend time on is ok in my book.
That’s why the analogy “might as well let Claude hump your wife” does not hold, unless you really don’t enjoy that process.
This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…)
The argument that communicating an idea is a necessary part of shaping it feels counterintuitive, but it’s really true.
Whether it’s debugging, ‘big’ writing, or even down to the scale of a tweet (RIP Twitter) or an HN comment, I’ve often had the experience of starting to explain a process or opinion and only then discovering that it’s inconsistent or even indefensible.
I suspect (I hope!) that this is something everyone can empathize with.
The author doesn't come across as arrogant to me, more like frustrated. The tone is certainly not for everyone but I enjoyed it. And I agree that it's a good essay!
> This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…)
We have reached the point where you have college professors who defend[0] using AI to write scientific papers (in a seemingly AI-written tweet). Everywhere I go online, I see spam written with the exact same voice. Scientific journals and literary magazines are inundated with AI-written submissions. Software projects have shut contributions because maintainers are tired of reading AI-written slop pull requests.
What's the right tone to take here? "Please stop defecting"? "I wish you would kindly stop ruining the commons"? I don't know. Maybe, if we raise the reputational cost of slop, we get less of it.
[0]: https://x.com/harryjwang/status/2062710375884148945
Perhaps I meant ‘crude’ rather than ‘arrogant’. Or another word that a blend of the two.
I mean, I think there’s a middle ground between defending all uses of AI writing and saying “It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife.”
Edit: or “if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass”
Maybe you're right.
I could not get past "waste of biomass".
Yeah I don't know. I mean the author says only smart people can write good. And then says anyone who uses AI to write is basically giving up their genetalia so that Anthropic's AI model could make love to your wife (apparently without her consent because you can obviously just decide who has sex with your wife).
The author should learn how to write properly and communicate ideas in a less sexist and disgusting way if he wants to make a point about writing well.
The blog post has terrible writing sorry.
> you can obviously just decide who has sex with your wife
That's your fantasies, not author's. He merely implied that one can obviously decide whom to allow to fuck one's wife. He hasn't implied that wife's consent is unnecessary or automatic.
> Anyone can imagine a programing language that is as fast as C and as dynamic as Lisp, but when you sit down and think through what those goals entail, you realize the design becomes contradictory.
Ignoring the usual LLM rant, that's an interesting observation. Those conflicting goals reflect a problem that comes up quite often - the conflict between efficient volume production and flexibility. It's solvable for programming languages. That's what just-in-time compilers are for. Anything can change, but in practice, most things don't change that often. It's a caching problem.
This hits much harder in manufacturing. An extreme case is what was once called "Detroit automation" - totally specialized lines of machine tools that could make V8 auto engines all day and all night with very little human attention. But that's all they could make. Even switching to a V6 or a different cylinder size required new equipment. The other extreme is 3D printing in metal. It works, but it's so slow it's only useful for high-value items. Space-X makes Raptor engines that way. Nobody makes auto engine blocks that way.
A decade ago, there was a huge enthusiasm for 3D printing for making everything. That's declined. It's become another machine in the machine shop. It works, but if you want to bang out thousands of something, injection molding or stamping is far faster. There's a sizable tooling cost, and then each item is cheap. This is the tradeoff between efficiency and dynamics.
A year or two ago, someone posted a link on HN to a video of someone making a small screw on a lathe. Nobody does that except out of desperate need for a non-standard part. Small screws are made by special purpose machines that bang them out at machine-gun speeds. American culture does not know this any more. Too few Americans today have been inside manufacturing plants. The culture has forgotten where stuff comes from.
As the buddhists have pointed out for thousands of years nothing is permanent. Attachment to things that are ever changing is the path to suffering.
This just seems weirdly similar to Plato's comments on writing:
"And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows."
Maybe it simply comes down to how things get used and people are trying to figure out how to use this strange new tool that's available to us.
But writing, calculators, search engines etc. are specific tools, you drop a skill to gain effectiveness in another. While AI is a general tool whose builders intend it to be able to perform all cognitive work. Past a certain point, what is left of the human?
I do not agree that the concept of writing can be considered a specific tool at all. Maybe a pencil, but writing opposed to remembering everything is a more substantial level of a paradigm shift than AI use is.
> I take this to mean they threw a bunch of incoherent bullet points at the AI for it to denoise and render into paragraphs
What I generally tend to do is have a long conversation with an LLM for at least 30 minutes, and then have that turn into the first draft. It might be considered lazy, but I've never been very good at editing prose - I always end up making a mistake that makes it more confusing.
If after the conversation I find it's an idea worth sharing (usually with colleagues), then getting the LLM to turn it into something readable is the best option available to me. If I had to do it myself, it likely wouldn't make it before I move onto something else. And it has had my genuine input throughout the long conversation, I wouldn't call it incoherent nor am I an idiot for not being able to express myself in long form writing
> A “thinker” who doesn’t write, who skips the step of “merely” synthesizing their vague thoughts into prose, is not thinking. And then these people give their noise to the AI.
OP is quite good with words and has a high standard and world view. The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise.
It's a medium to pack the idea into "something" that represents the idea. It was never about a finished and polished product. It's the sign language for deaf people - a way to show your thoughts.
I'm certain that the people presenting their github repo do put quite some effort (= prompt work) into it, which IS the thinking process. At the end of the day, most developers are introverts that can think very well but have hard times with soft skills.
Everyone wants to be proud of his work, let us don't blame them how the show it off.
> The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise.
Isn't this a bit circular? They're not communicating to the AI through a BCI.
>It's a medium to pack the idea into "something" that represents the idea. It was never about a finished and polished product. It's the sign language for deaf people - a way to show your thoughts.
Sign language is a fully fledged language, as capable of expressing deep and complex thoughts as spoken English. Likening it to some kind of prosthetic for second-rate thinkers is insulting.
The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise.
What?! This is nonsense. You’re really making the argument that most people getting LLMs to write for them just couldn’t communicate in any way five years ago?
The five-years-ago internet was certainly full of incoherently expressed ideas (and still is now). For some people AI is just spellcheck on the sentence/paragraph level.
As a reader, I appreciate reading writing that lacks large amounts of spelling mistakes. Everyone agreeing on spelling seems like a useful monoculture, like driving on the same side of the road.
But I don't feel the same way about AI writing. It feels totally different in a way that good spelling does not.
Even if I liked the style, I would object strongly to that style quickly becoming a monoculture.
We're on a path to a style optimized for shallow attention maximization becoming the majority of text we read.
> because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass
Damn, that is so hurtful. I'm sorry if English is my third language. But for my project documents I would love to read it like a proper documentation so I'm thankful for AI.
Translation is fine.
Is it, though? The post author is railing against it.
Nobody cared if you translated using Google Translate in the past. People don't care if you use claude to translate now. But people are clearly doing more than they claim when they just translate their text, since their "translations" end up full of AI-isms.
> ... I feel contempt for the author, because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass. Let’s not mince words here. Someone who is so eager to replace themselves, that they would have a machine write in their stead, when the machine can’t even write good yet: what do you call that, if not contemptible? It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife.
Unfortunately due to how tasteless this passage was, I won’t be reading this or your future writing.
I agree that it was a rude, tasteless metaphor.
Alas, for rude, tasteless behavior, such as replacing your own authentic self-expression with the mellifluous spew of verbal diarrhea that bullshit machines slather across all surfaces they touch, rude, tasteless metaphors are the only fitting ones.
If only everyones authentic self-expression were so important to hear, to say nothing of unique and inciteful.
I'm not against authentic self-expression, but this is more about being wrapped up in ones own self-importance.
Tastelessness aside, it also shows that author doesn’t (or refuses to) understand why someone may decide to delegate a documentation task to a subpar agent.
Laziness.
Yes, conceptually it’s something about surrendering one’s voice and agency to a subpar machine. Or something like that. (Though that persistence-suggestive neutering metaphor is probably a unwarranted exaggeration.) In practice though it’s more like “I don’t want to write anything, but some poorly written document I’ll just proofread to be not too blatantly wrong beats having absolutely nothing. PRs welcome.”
It might be not the best decision, sure. Quite arguably, a wrong one. Still, I find it concerning that it’s sufficient for the author to dehumanize someone, even in a jest of edginess. Like wtf dude chill down, as if the world isn’t mad enough already.
But the problem is people are not just delegating formulaic procedural prose to AI. They're using AI to write entire scientific papers, so now reviewers have to use Pangram[0] to screen submissions. Literary magazines have the same problem[1]. Maybe those people should know that their behaviour is bad.
[0]: https://blog.neurips.cc/2026/06/02/ai-generated-papers-in-th...
[1]: https://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/
Ah, yes, although that’s a different situation from the linked post, more disrespectful (and potentially nefarious) than a sloppy readme. In those cases, most likely, more than just laziness is involved.
Arguably, someone who has chosen to replace their own human expression with machine words has already dehumanized themselves - although this is perhaps a too-literal reading the word “dehumanized”?
"the machine can’t even write good yet"