Do your own writing • Hacker News Board

Re: Do your own writing

#261

Post by dgxyz » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

darth_aardvark wrote: post #226

dgxyz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All LLM output is always dry as fuck quite frankly. At all levels from ideas and concepts through to the actual copy. And that’s dotted with pure excrement. I think the only reason it’s seen as good anywhere is there are a lot of tasteless and talentless people who can pretend they created whatever was curled out. This goes for code as well. If I offend anyone I will not be apologising for it.

> curled out This is the kind of understated yet thoroughly disgusting imagery an LLM couldn't come up with on its own, great example.

Thank you :)

Re: Do your own writing

#262

Post by samusiam » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

dgxyz wrote: post #260

samusiam wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the only reason it’s seen as good anywhere is there are a lot of tasteless and talentless people who can pretend they created whatever was curled out. This goes for code as well. This is an oversimplification. If you have taste and talent, then the LLM output you get is going to reflect that. So on the one hand, yes: tasteless and talentless people won't know good output from bad output. On the other hand,…

No it’s not. That’s total rubbish. You can’t coerce quality creative writing out of it however you attempt to gaslight it into doing so.

Well you're free to disagree but my experience has been counter to your position. I write both code and research / technical documentation. The quality of what the LLM produces is limited by the quality of ideas I give it initially (mind you, this is just a starting point), and the quality of my review of its output.

Re: Do your own writing

#263

Post by iteria » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

probably_wrong wrote: post #209

radicalriddler wrote: post #206

I wonder if anyone from HN would be willing to input their opinion into some features I'm building, which is really outputting LLM generated writing. It's basically automating release notes and sprint summary's from existing systems like Jira and Linear. The target user is a product team, the target reader are business stakeholders who want to validate your existence. I've found this process to be stupidly time consu…

I'm saying more and more "if you don't have the time to write it then I don't have the time to read it". Therefore my first impression is: if the process is so formulaic that you can automate it, then the content itself cannot be of any interest and the whole song and dance should probably be scraped altogether - think of a person asking ChatGPT "make this one-liner sound professional" and then sending it to someone…

Some documents are not important today, but they become _critical_ in the future. We lost a guy from my team and he was the only one who happen to know how to do this one process that happens every couple of months. Having that document was crucial. There is a lot of writing that is like that. I make my LLM write PR descriptions. It's not for me now and it might be for some of the reviewer now. But it's 100% for me in 2 years when I'm trying to understand why I did any of this and what was even the intention. But I'm a dev who tends to work on long lived systems where every once in a while you desperately need to know why something was done this way 5 years ago.

Re: Do your own writing

#264

Post by theshrike79 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 6:43 AM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #195

delusional wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your context, I'm an AI hater, so understand my assumptions as such. > The obvious best solution is to have your agent write release notes for your agent in the future to have context. No more tedious writing or reading, but also no missing context. Why is more AI the "obvious" best solution here? If nobody wants to read your release notes, then why write them? And if they're going to slim them down with their AI…

For release notes in particular, I think AI can have value. This is because more than a summary, release notes are a translation from code and more or less accurate summaries into prose. AI is good at translation, and in this case it can have all the required context. Plus it can be costly (time and tokens) to both “prompt it yourself” or read the code and all commit logs.

If your process always goes PR -> main and the PR descriptions + commit messages are properly formatted, generating release notes shouldn't be much more than condensing those into a structured list with subheadings.

This is something LLMs are excellent at.

Re: Do your own writing

#265

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #22

nerevarthelame wrote: post #12

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

LLMs can come sometimes up with novel or non-obvious insights...or just regurgitate google-like results.

[deleted]