Maybe I just need to get over it, but this post reeks of Claude-isms and it immediately makes me stop caring about what the post has to say.

Obviously having an LLM write these kinds of things is the norm now, but what doesn't have to be the norm is the writing style. The way Claude (and other popular LLMs) write is so obnoxious and verbose. I think a simple pass of "make this more terse and to the point" would do wonders here.

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faldor20 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As much as the content and tech behind it is really cool, and I appreciate Ryan's ideas it does seem like a shame to culminate so much work with a very "sloppy" finish

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retropragma 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This might be more palatable: https://gist.github.com/aleclarson/da55bca36103d582a9720dd4a...

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chrisjj 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is Claude really this bad, though?

E.g. "The problem that never went away was async. Every framework, including ours, treated it as a condition that happened to it."

Async treated as a condition?

And a condition happens?

And on grammar, the second it is ... the framework??

I rather suspect this is second-order output. Writings of a brain rotted by "AI".

Shame, because enough of the message gets through the fog to tell me the whole message would be worth receiving. I wish the project every success.

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ryansolid 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Like a cold. Sometimes people call an illness a condition. A condition that can happen to you.

We have frameworks essentially living in a completely synchronous world--like a 2D plane--and they can't tell that there is another dimension out there except for when something inserts itself into its view out of nowhere. The protocol that we arrive at to deal with async is convoluted, because it is a state that is basically inflicted on the framework. That's what we sought to remedy.

	▲	chrisjj 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah. The medical meaning, for an analogy. I think 99% of readers will, like me, take the software meaning. I'm sure Claude would know that if left to its own knowledge base, so I presume it was prompted to go way outside its training, hence the wierd word salad.

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andrewingram 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The article reads eerily like the Claude-authored drafts I did for some internal explanations of Relay’s design philosophy (it’s a GraphQL client I’ve been advocating for). I’m not one to make accusations of AI authorship, but it was a particularly striking impression with this one.

I had to rewrite the drafts very heavily in my own voice in order for people to enjoy reading them —- not that I’m a great writer, but I am human and people tend to appreciate that.

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ryansolid 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Hey want to see what AI generates when I ask it to talk about Solid 2.0. It's not that. It is:

https://hackmd.io/@0u1u3zEAQAO0iYWVAStEvw/rJM9ws3Kbg https://hackmd.io/@0u1u3zEAQAO0iYWVAStEvw/H1Q8XTMSbe

	▲	5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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ryansolid 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It was human written, fed to AI, human adjusted, re-fed, and around again — for days, with dozens of reviewers in between. (GPT 5.6 Sol doing the AI half of the lifting, for what it's worth.) So "nobody even looked at it" is the one criticism I can rule out. Everybody looked at it.

But you aren't wrong. The marketting heavy parts are where the tone shows. And honestly those are the parts I write worst. Exactly why I lean on AI there. When I ran before/after comparisons past reviewers, the polished versions kept winning. Maybe that's the norm creeping into how all of us write now. I notice it in my own sentences too. The words I choose. But given the choice between slightly synthetic and authentically clumsy, I tested both and shipped the one that read better.

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wavemode 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Personally I don't think that a release announcement needs to be "marketing heavy" in the first place.

That's really the heart of the problem - in an effort to sound exciting, many parts of the article are just wasting the reader's time rather than simply explaining how things work clearly and directly.

	▲	ryansolid 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No release announcement has the time to explain how things work. I actually think in hindsight what Rich did by including a video in the Runes announcement worked well. I will have a livestream tomorrow.

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terabytest 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Out of curiosity, did you use AI for this reply too? It reads a bit like it.

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threatofrain 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ryan has given so much to this community... perhaps he gives too much.

	▲	terabytest 12 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To be clear I’m not making any statement or implication about Ryan’s work or his quality as a developer. As someone who knows nothing about Solid I’m trying to read the article and understand what the USP is and struggling. And remarking on the AI tells in the writing.
	▲	owebmaster 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Is non-AI writing too much? I don't think his projects would have got as much attention if it was AI-written since the beginning.

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fn-mote 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI knows how to spell “marketting”.

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benrbray 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hey, I want to say that I love Solid as an alternative to react. I've been using it for hobby projects for 5+ years.

I'm at least one example of someone who prefers authentically clumsy. Users like me will be less likely to give Solid a chance if they cannot see that there are real humans with a vision behind it.

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xg15 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do you need several human/ai iteration rounds and dozens of reviewers for a blog post?

	▲	ryansolid 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because it's important. You don't want to read my raw writing. Try to read my HackMD and you see what you'd get. It's always taken me a lot of work to release my medium and dev.to articles. Grammarly working hard, and multiple human editors. It scales with how many people I think will read it. A release announcement is important. It needs to be clear and it needs to convey the most information in a very short span. You don't have the privledge to meander in this sort of thing. And meandering is exactly what I'd do if left on my own.

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chrisjj 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> ... I tested both and shipped the one that read better

And there we have it. "AI"s prime use case. Best instead of good enough.

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owebmaster 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The marketting heavy parts are where the tone shows. And honestly those are the parts I write worst. Exactly why I lean on AI there.

Everybody using AI to write slop do so because they think they can't write better but we all prefer a bad written article to the "correct" slop we are getting nowadays.

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ricardobeat 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> And honestly

The AI tone in the announcement is light enough to be barely noticeable, but it’s there. Note that posting AI-generated comments to HN is explicitly forbidden.

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ryansolid 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Before:

Anyone who has spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to heavily edit that out of my writing, but now AI uses the proper punctuation and fills in where I miss words. It's like what I hear in my head but better. Because it is grammatically sound.

After:

Anyone who's spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to spend whole editing passes beating that out of my drafts. Now AI handles the punctuation and fills in the words I skip. It's what I hear in my head, but grammatically sound.

The result is almost always terser, more clear, and to the point. And usually all it takes is one more pass over to adjust anything I wouldn't say. In this case I kept the after verbatim just to illustrate my point.

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dash2 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I prefer the former version. It sounds like a human.

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ryansolid 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I like my wording for `miss` better but I like the AI ending much better. This was just in a small two sentence response. I find over the course of an article the impact is much greater.

	▲	dash2 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It is! But not in the direction you think!

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ricardobeat 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

FWIW I also prefer the before. "whole editing passes beating that out" and "what I hear in my head, but grammatically sound" might not be immediate AI tells like 'and honestly' and 'load-bearing', but they are phrases you'd expect in a magazine article, not a forum comment. That kind of language in this context makes it smell like AI.

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noman-land 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I prefer the before.

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xg15 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> And I write the way I talk. I used to spend whole editing passes beating that out of my drafts.

What's an "editing pass"?

	▲	ryansolid 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's when you go top to bottom reworking parts of an article. Often later changes can impact earlier prose, so often I end up doing editing in several passes. That being said AI decided that term. It's actually more accurate to the actual process than what I originally wrote.