Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

> you're saying you use an LLM but your articles aren't slop

Not a single word of my articles was written by LLMs. I used them for proofreading and critique.

Writing articles by hand is useful for me since it allows me to crystallize my knowledge. Writing it down for my own future reference essentially prevents me from forgetting in the first place. LLMs accelerated me so much I'm actually trying to slow down so I can let my recent achievements sink in a bit. Writing is how I do that.

> Do you mention in your submissions you subscribed to or used Claude?

I don't use Claude for my articles. I use Claude for code review and design. Implementation is almost a footnote, and even that gets significantly rewritten during my numerous human review passes. I still write code by hand too.

That's for the projects I actually care about. I do have some explicitly vibecoded projects, and I never made a secret out of it. Projects that wouldn't exist at all were it not for LLMs making it easy to execute. I personally review those too, just not as often.

I don't add AI models as co-authors to commits of my own repositories. I'm not in the business of providing free advertising to trillion dollar corporations. If other projects require it, I do so as per their rules.

> The mere existence of the subscription and using it for unrelated things won't be why people flag

It will. They will zero in on things like CLAUDE.md and dismiss your entire project as slop the second they see it.

I know because I asked people directly. Response? If an LLM touched your project, then your project is slop. Verbatim. And that's the polite reply.

Trying to establish some simple criteria for sloppy vs good work nearly got me kicked out. People came at me with literal "I know it when I see it" nonsense. Even Claude does a better job of defining "slop" than that. I find it hilarious how these rules are based on vibes. People just get LLM vibes out of other people's projects, and then dismiss them.

> I can only assume they notice the quality level and/or style

I'm not sure they even saw my project. It's just pure prejudice. AI detected? Slop, no need to even read it. If they actually read my work and thought it sucked, fine. In fact I'd be very interested in knowing why so I can improve. I refuse to accept these predetermined judgements though.

Getting outright called "LLM pusher", "slop fetishist" and "clanker lover" is pretty fun too. It's not the overt racism-tier insults that bother me, it's the fact not a single person seems to have gotten banned over this. One could be forgiven for thinking they opened a 4chan tab.

We should try replacing forum mods with AI

just for a while :)

I'm suggesting using AI to combat the AI issue, not complaining endlessly with pointless points that do nothing to solve the very real problem that is not going away by being stubborn or rude. My suggestion, which I use myself, helps limit the blast radius. Doesn't mean I have to get involved with it while it's doing what it does. Do you also question email filters and argue that sending spam is wrong and suggesting to use a spam filter is not useful to the conversation?

The broader point stands that all this AI stuff is highly polarizing, for a reason. I think you did a good job explaining why people get polarized. Sorry for any confusion.

Increasingly you will have to go offline for human experiences and the internet will be more and more ads and agents land. It has barely started - we're still in early adoption and early infra phase. Content for the web is already so perishable. I have no problem whatsoever reading LLM text if it was produced by SOTA models - earlier/currently free models are pretty bad, but their style is almost instantly recognizable so it's an easy skip. Not only model "intelligence" will increase, it seems, but also the skill/habit of customizing the writing style of your LLM. It all feels inevitable, tbh: incentives are too great in this era - so distant of knowledge, reading, community, rationality, etc. Last time I've hand-written a long text, it was a 2-page letter - I took 8 hours to write it, thinking carefully about each and every word, idea, paragraph and logic - and the receiver answered with a single meme gif.