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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

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Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#161

Post by softwaredoug »

embedding-shape wrote: post #154
softwaredoug wrote: post #152

It’s never been easier to differentiate yourself as a writer. You just write with some personality. People don’t want writing that doesn’t look average, but looks novel. I despair much less for human writers than a did maybe a year ago.

> just write with some personality I think that's the first time someone claims that "write with some personality" is some easy thing you just learn somehow. There are authors out there, even ones that make a living on their writing, who still haven't learned to "write with some personality". What exactly does that mean and how concretely can people actually do this in practice? A few "tips and tricks" might be more…

Some things that help me.

1. Be vulnerable and share your mistakes. Avoid a triumphalist “everything works” PoV

2. Write about your actual lived personal experiences.

3. Try to have a sense of humor

4. Have an informed opinion or PoV - strong opinions held weakly.

5. Be casual. Don’t treat a blog like it’s a research paper.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#163

Post by 27183 »

lacunary wrote: post #160
27183 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care about the tool per se, but if I'm reading some LLM output you give me its utility is awfully limited if you don't also supply the prompt. That's what I'd like to see normalized: Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text. Without the prompt I cannot discern what you were trying to do, because the LLM output is basically devoid of any coherent voice. Whether it's code, p…

it's often not a single prompt but a tree or rooted DAG of many prompts, with the root node being the final prompt. the prompts on interior nodes might not make much sense without the intermediate responses as well. how would you like this communicated?

Just a chat log would be acceptable. Like an IRC channel log or slack channel history. It would be even better if, say in the case of code, there was a durable mapping between prompts and commits, that way I could follow the prompts linearly and review every commit associated with that prompt. For other forms of output (prose, pictures, whatever) this would also be useful to be able to see the history of its development.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#164

Post by embedding-shape »

softwaredoug wrote: post #161
embedding-shape wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just write with some personality I think that's the first time someone claims that "write with some personality" is some easy thing you just learn somehow. There are authors out there, even ones that make a living on their writing, who still haven't learned to "write with some personality". What exactly does that mean and how concretely can people actually do this in practice? A few "tips and tricks" might be more…

Some things that help me. 1. Be vulnerable and share your mistakes. Avoid a triumphalist “everything works” PoV 2. Write about your actual lived personal experiences. 3. Try to have a sense of humor 4. Have an informed opinion or PoV - strong opinions held weakly. 5. Be casual. Don’t treat a blog like it’s a research paper.

Thanks a bunch! I actually tried "writing more personal" just some weeks ago, and the feedback I received so far been relatively OK I think, except some people apparently think the part about the drugs to be childish. May I ask what you think of it, if it does sound like it's written with actual personality? https://emsh.cat/en/the-people-are-still-there/

I won't claim to be a professional author or even good, but lately I've been trying to get more into the "it's a person who writes actually" direction and this was an exploration into that, so any sort of feedback would be most welcome, if you have the time!

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#165

Post by 27183 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #114
agile-gift0262 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. And I'd say that at least in my case, it applies to both writing prose and code

Agreed, but a lot of code doesn't need to be understood. Knowing which is which is the art right now.

Uhh... what? You'll instantaneously feel very differently when the service you're responsible for is down at 3:15am and your logs are full of stack traces that end somewhere in that code that "doesn't need to be understood". At that point, you will need to understand it well enough to fix it stat.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#166

Post by bcherny »

jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think.

It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a large set of guardrails we've set up over the years (linters, typecheckers, security checks, LLM-assisted code quality checkers), and it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less and engineers think a level or two up (machine code I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. But writing and coding are different enough in a number of ways that this is far from inevitable.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#169

Post by AnimalMuppet »

zero_shift wrote: post #133
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

I have found this extremely relevant as a (primarily) non-verbal thinker. I don't, generally, think in words, more in - I guess I would call it something like meta-shapes? A sense of a shape but not things I can exactly visualise. (You might be surprised to read this and then hear I have an English degree. Surely I thought about Shakespeare in words?! Nope. Shapes, movement, structures) For me, having to write is cri…

Interesting. I have designed code that way. And the shapes aren't UML diagram elements or anything like that, they're just... shapes. I'll slowly walk around, in the hall or outside, and be kind of seeing these shapes and vaguely moving my hands around as I sort out the relationships between them.

I think I have produced reasonably good designs. Don't ask me to teach anyone how I do it, though.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#170

Post by prisonguard »

bcherny wrote: post #166
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…

You and the AI agree, but how about you and the team who will eventually read and do code review.

Cognitive burden increases marginally with AI assisted coding.

This is why we haven't seen big projects(think browsers and browser engines) spawning in the past year.

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