AI for editing is garbage. Chat to it to get ideas maybe, but in its current incarnation it’s just going to degrade anything you filter through it.

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hectdev 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I work mostly on the tech side of things but my corporate limitation has always been writing up documentation, communicating/translating to stakeholders, and recalling everything relevant when writing PR descriptions. AI has been a breath of fresh air. I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before. I still maintain my own writing for more casual things like social media (HN included) and low stakes Slack conversations but AI for getting across ideas and then proofreading it is great.

	▲	Morromist an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before" - this is subjective and evidence seems to point to the opposite in my view. In reality most people who think they communicate better with AI don't actually read what the AI has written for them and just puke it out on the world, expecting their readers to do the work. The Ai almost always writes boring, repetitive garbage and very, very often includes redundant information. But saying it creates more efficiant communication is a great excuse for being sloppy and lazy.
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wincy 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was asked to write user stories about a complex topic where I’m the SME at work. I spent two hours info dumping everything I knew about the project, everything the AI wouldn’t have any context for, using Cursor to add related projects to the workspace, tagging specific files where we’d implemented similar things with our styles, noted all the quirks of the system and how it works and where to find relevant information. I spent a lot of time on it, and then asked it to reach out using cli to grab relevant information from our infra, and write stories about how we’d accomplish everything I intend to get done. I then spent another few hours reviewing the 45 or so stories that conversation generated. It was similar to how I’d talk to a new contractor I’m onboarding to work on the work.

I have a deep knowledge of the information, have done the process we’re doing on two previous projects, but organizing all the stories would have been an absolute nightmare. I still spent half a day on this, I’d guess the fatigue from the boring parts would have made this take a week or maybe two, just because I was doing the parts I enjoy (knowing things and describing them) and I was able to offload the parts I’m not great at (using a lot of boilerplate language to organize the info I knew into scrum stories). Then I had a meeting, reviewed the stories with my coworkers, we had a discussion, deleted two or three of them that we determined weren’t necessary, and fixed up one or two where I’d provided insufficient information about some context surrounding coloring of a page.

It burned through a ton of Opus 4.6 tokens, looked through a ton of code (mostly that I’d written, pre-LLM), but has been amazing for helping me move into a lead position where grooming stories and being organized has always been my weakest point.

Also, when I wrote a postmortem for a deploy that had some issues, I wrote it all by hand. You have to know when the tools help and when they will hinder.

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pizzly 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI for editing is good and have many useful cases. The part where it fails is that the tone/style of the writing gets overtaken and reads like all other AI edited writing. But the quality of the edit is good, its just not in your style. When everyone sounds the same then there is no uniqueness. But using it edit legal letters, software documentation etc are very good use cases, using it to explain your ideas in a blog not so much.

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ArcHound 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I thought it's quite good. Of course, I'm not taking 100% of output, but it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and a/an/the articles!).

Can you please share what and how gets degraded? Sometimes I don't like a phrase it selects, but it's not common

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piker 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve against those very blind spots. In exchange for that your audience gets 3-4x length normalized bullshit to read instead.

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unyttigfjelltol 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

AI can take a rough draft, clean it up and shorten it as much as you want. The suggestions very often expose ambiguities in the original text. If you think the LLM got it wrong, it’s nearly often the LLM overreading some feature of the original that you failed to catch, which is precisely what you’d want out of your proofreader.

Yes, LLMs reduce the individual charm of prose, but the critique itself carries a romantic notion that we all loved the idiosyncratic failures of convention and meaning which went into highly identifiable personal styles, and which often go missing from LLM-edited work.

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shagie 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve against those very blind spots.

I'd contend this is not true. Even professional authors go to an editor who identifies things that need to be fixed. As the author of the text and knowing what it should be, it can be difficult to read what you wrote to find those mistakes.

> In exchange for that your audience gets 3-4x length normalized bullshit to read instead.

This is not at all what is implied by having an AI act as an editor. Identifying misplaced commas, incorrect subject verb agreement (e.g. counts), and incomplete ideas left in as sentence fragments.

You appear to be implying that the author is giving agency to create the content to the AI rather than using it as a tool to act as a super-charged grammerly.

	▲	piker 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Even professional authors go to an editor who identifies things that need to be fixed. Yes, and these people are good at it. What’s your point? If you need grammar checking, there are thousands of apps including word processors, web browsers and even most mobile devices that will check your inputs for grammar and spelling mistakes as you type. All of that without burning down the rainforests or neutering your thesis.

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georgemcbay 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and a/an/the articles!)

There are plenty of pre-LLM tools that can fix grammar issues.

> Can you please share what and how gets degraded?

I'm not the person you asked, but IMO LLMs suck the style and voice out of the written word. It is the verbal equivalent of photos that show you an average of what people look like, see for example:

https://www.artfido.com/this-is-what-the-average-person-look...

As definitionally average the results are not bad but they are also entirely unremarkable, bland, milquetoast. Whether or not this result is a degradation will vary, of course, as some people write a lot worse than bland.

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SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In many kinds of writing, perhaps most, communicating your state of mind to the reader is a primary goal. Even a smart LLM fundamentally degrades this, because to whatever degree that it has a mind it isn't shaped like yours or mine. I've had a number of experiences this year where I get to the end of a grammatical, well-structured technical document, only to find that it was completely useless because it recited a bunch of facts and analyses but failed to convey what the author was thinking as they wrote it.

(Of course, that may well be exactly what you're looking for if you're writing an audit report or something.)

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viccis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>damn you commas and a/an/the articles

This sounds like an ESL issue. LLMs are good at proof reading ESL-written English text. They are not as good at proof reading experience English writers.

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pryelluw 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s kinda useful to me for the following three reasons:

- spelling - grammar or weird grammar as English is not my native language - read proofing and finding things that do not make sense in terms of sentence structure

I do not use it for ideas, discussing the writing, or anything else because that beats the purpose of writing it myself (creative writing).

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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holoduke 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Only if you don't understand how to control AI. If you understands how it works and have the skills to ride it like a wild horse, you can make yourself a 10x developer. Its maybe a bit of an insult, but you seriously have to change that mindset. AI is not going to be worse tomorrow. It will get better and it will dramatically change our life as developers. Code will no longer be a prominent thing we are working on in the near future.