Remix.run Logo
thaumaturgy 3 hours ago

I wonder what happened to the person that wrote "Coding as Creative Expression" (https://build.ms/2022/5/21/coding-as-creative-expression/)?

I'm not (just) being glib. That earlier article displays some introspection and thoughtful consideration of an old debate. The writing style is clearly personal, human.

Today's post is not so much. It has LLM fingerprints on it. It's longer, there are more words. But it doesn't strike me as having the same thoughtful consideration in it. I would venture to guess that the author tried to come up with some new angles on the news of the Claude Code leak, because it's a hot topic, and jotted some notes, and then let an LLM flesh it out.

Writing styles of course change over time, but looking at these two posts side by side, the difference is stark.

mergesort 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hey there, author of the post here! I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning. It was initially meant to be a quick note more than a full blog post —- whereas Coding As A Creative Expression took me a couple of days to write.

I made a commitment to write more this year and put my thoughts out quicker than I used to, so that’s likely the primary reason it’s not as deep of a piece of writing as the post you’re referencing. But I do want to note that this wasn’t written using AI, it just wasn’t intended to be as rich of a post.

The reason it came out longer is that I’ve honestly been thinking about these ideas for a while, and there is so much to say about this subject. I didn’t have any particular intention of hopping on a news cycle, but once I started writing the juices were flowing and I found myself coming up with five separate but interrelated thoughts around this story that I thought were worth sharing.

anfogoat 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>­ I actually wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk this morning.

Apropos of nothing, this is astonishing me to no end. The ergonomics of 1) using a phone keyboard for anything but a word or two and 2) doing so while walking pretty much guarantee that I'd probably need a half a day to recover if I attempted the same.

tpoacher an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminds me of the classic Mark Twain quote: "Apologies, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one."

adzm 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

> I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one.

First known use in English comes from a 1658 translation of Blaise Pascal in 1657

> Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

translated to

> I had not made this longer then the rest, but that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is.

(note the archaic then)

This was a popular piece of wit at the time.

Mark Twain wrote something similar a hundred years later

> You'll have to excuse my lengthiness - the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost.

But it's still quite different.

There is a great article about this one on quoteinvestigator! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

bostik an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk

If you have a strategy for jotting down (or dictating) notes while walking about, I would be curious how you manage that. I spend plenty of time walking outside, and tend to get (at the time) ideas that I'd like to explore further, most of which have evaporated from my mind by the time I get back home. Or even before I can get my phone out to jot down the keywords to help me recall the details later.

Cannot even imagine how someone would manage both walking and writing at the same time.

nyulmalac 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

What I tried is to record my voice and then post-process the transcript. There are solutions which work without internet connection. I am non-native english and mix 3 languages, so transcript is shitty quality. Nevertheless the really good ideas stay with me and can be easily recalled by a few keywords. And you need to do the post-processing shortly after you reached home else it fades away…

DANmode an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Cannot even imagine how someone would manage both walking and writing at the same time.

Some are just born with it.

an hour ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
sirpilade 16 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

As a more general comment, I hope we’ll stop trying to discriminate whether a certain text was or not written/polished/extended by AI and focus more on content and author’s responsibility for what they do or do not say with that text.

stbev 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you noticed that comments like "this post seems written with AI" are now appearing on all posts, even those written without AI?

We're starting to become wary due to the abuse of AI and proliferation of sloppy content, but also because we often have trouble distinguishing authentic from sloppy content.

Another feature of this AI era that I hate.

hxugufjfjf an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. Its so tedious that the top comment section on every HN post the last six months is "this seems be written by LLM" with a bunch of back and forth on whether it is or not.

amarant an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Once I was tempted to say that those comments themselves were written by llms, but honestly I've yet to find a model quite so uncreative as that.

grufkork 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, a lot of it is. Green user, signed up 49mins ago, 5 comments, which erodes trust in real people as well. I’ve noticed I’ve just felt less engaged and more anxious about all kinds of online content. While most platforms were previously botted, had adverts, etc… You could always find niche corners where there were only people talking about things they genuinely cared about. Now you can fill out even those spaces automatically.

an hour ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
grey-area 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It does read as if were written on a phone but it doesn’t read like LLM text to me.

What is interesting and has possibly bled over from heavy LLM use by the author is the style of simplistic bullet point titles for the argument with filler in between. It does read like they wrote the 5 bullet points then added the other text (by hand).

raincole an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What changed is you, the reader. In 2026 we treat the smallest signs as evidence of LLM writing. Too long? LLM. Too short? LLM. Too grammatically correct? Must be LLM.

sanitycheck an hour ago | parent [-]

For me it was the "it's not x"/"it's y" stuff and some other structures Claude is very fond of using all the time. Perhaps humans are starting to write like LLMs!

raincole an hour ago | parent [-]

Perhaps, just perhaps, LLMs are just statistical models that literally can't create novel things, therefore any structure LLMs write was learnt from human writing?

But who knows!

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]