I actually loved this. While reading, my mind fired rapidly through dozens of personal memes that I keep in my knowledge-base, where I think through what I would consider my spiritual practices and sensemaking around complex systems, and Daoist teachings. It basically entangled itself with the work I am doing at the outer edges of my own knowing, where I am working on my rawest and most fragile but precious thoughts.

I don't think this is trite, I think there is something in this that is in contact with "living structure" (in the Christopher Alexander sense[1]), and much exists outside the edges of the text.

To those who dislike this, I am genuinely curious: would you say you dislike metaphor? Do you feel connected to poetic writing?

[1]: https://dorian.substack.com/p/at-any-given-moment-in-a-proce...

I tried writing a short novel using Claude Opus 4.6, I gave it outline and raw draft, and the style is very similar to this writing.

I tried to steer it away from this kind of writing because it feels weird. But it always try to output something similar to this. Or maybe I am just not used to reading novel.

So I was curious, what kind of training data was Claude trained on, that its very hard to steer it out from this style.

So I opened my kindle and looking through the recommended popular novels. Just reading through its free samples.

And the similarities are striking. Now, I dont know whether the recommended novel is the training data, or its actually written by LLM. Or maybe its just how novelist writes.

I even tried writing full chapter from scratch. And asked Claude to ghost write the second chapter for me using my writing style. It still wont follow my style and keeps writing in this kind of style from the article.

Not accusing the article of using an LLM to ghost write. Even so its fine to use LLM to ghost write. Its just one anecdote from my side, on how LLM fails to follow my writing style and keeps coming back to its training data.

Most amazing art isn't really a product of inspiration, but from severe editing (or severe practice, if it's live).

Good writing needs a lot of "post-production" to get the ideas hammered out. Most of it is removing content that isn't central to what the writer wants.

This LLM trend is part of a larger historical pattern that shifts editing away from us having to think things in our brain:

  A. At one time, the editing was mental load, since writing was tedious.

  B. The typewriter made writing easy, but modifying it required lots of handwritten scrawling, but the mental load was still within reviewing and rewriting the content.

  C. By the end of the 20th century, editing and rewriting was a total breeze, but the mental load was still within handwritten note-taking.

  D. Once we made a bazillion forms of productivity and note-taking software, the mental load was only in thinking the thought and getting it into a computer. Everything after that was massaging the idea.

  E. Now, the regurgitation machine can get you 3/4 of the way to the finish line of your draft without even trying.

Paul Graham's essay on good writing (https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html) defines "right" written ideas as "developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail".

My opinion is that the absurd complexities of the Over-Information Age make the "right" level of detail the following:

  1. Executive summary that children and dumb people can understand.

  2. Tightly-defined specifications for everyone who cares or needs to know.

  3. Footnotes and background information that you can throw everything and the kitchen sink onto. This includes attempts to persuade, artful descriptions, feelings you had, associations to other things, and that general elegant "waxing on" that everyone gets the fancy for doing sometimes.

LLM or not, this is just terrible kitsch.