Comment by RealityVoid

There is a big difference between "asking an editor for suggestions" and "vibe posting".

You don't lose your voice if you ask for advice and manually incorporate the suggestions you agree with.

You might lose your voice if you say "Improve my comment to make it better" and copy-paste the result without another thought.

It hides your voice, and shortcuts your thinking process, because your editing is when you actually evaluate what you think!

When using LLMs to write, the temptation to avoid actually thinking about what you're communicating is too much for most people.

In the words of the comment: the rough edges are what make you.. you!

Keep polishing and everything eventually turns into a smooth shiny ball. We need texture, roughness, edges.

An LLM telling me I mispeled a word isn't changing my voice. Especially when I know the proper spelling and simply have a typo.

An LLM telling me I omitted a qualifier and that my statement isn't saying what I meant it to say isn't changing my voice - it's ensuring what you see is my voice.

Yep. I actually prefer seeing imperfect writing, there is signal there that AI would erase.

Maybe. But it can also help people find their voice. And I'd rather have comments from someone knowledgeable but unrefined with some good guidance than their silence on that same topic.

AI doesn't just hide your voice -- it improves it!

I had a README with a curse word in it and the agent would try repeatedly to remove it in drive by edits bundle in with some other change.

Extend spellcheck to asking questions like "does it meet HN rules" "how can I improve my writing" etc. Though these are the kinds of questions that do at very least still meet the spirit of the rule, I suppose.

People who are particular about spelling do not want to write misspelled words! It's not about whether you/others will tolerate it. I have my standards, and I hold to them.

I personally don't use an LLM to spellcheck (browser spellcheck works fine), but I see no problem with someone using an LLM to point out spelling errors.

And while I don't complain about others' spelling errors, I sure do notice them. And if someone writes a long wall of text as one giant paragraph that has lots of spelling/grammatical issues, chances are very high I won't read it.

Some people write very poorly by almost any standard. If an LLM helps the person write better, I'm all for it. There's a world of a difference between copy/pasting from the LLM and asking it for feedback.

I think that people subconsciously perceive grammatically correct and stylistically appropriate writing as more authoritative. And author is perceived as smarter and/or better educated person.

At least that was the case before LLMs became a thing, now I'm not sure anymore.

Obvious spelling mistakes are usually ignored, but there are certain types of writing mistakes that really trigger the type of people that frequent HN.

For example, use "literally" for exaggeration rather than in the original meaning of the word and you'll likely trigger somebody.

I've been hit by spelling/grammar noise once or twice. Those are usually downvoted and/or flagged.

No, I do not, I mentioned asmuch in my post. But I do not hold it against those that do. I think if you want to make a point across, doing this the most effective way without detracting from the point is a good thing.

Relevance is in the eye of the beholder.

> a word doc editor of some sort (Word, Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc); then enable Review Changes and annotate your post for 10 minutes; then, review and accept your changes individually and re-read what you’ve written.

Pffff... I'm not going to install LibreOffice for that, or to figure out how to make Gdocs to work with uBlock.

There is a much easier way. Open LLM chat, type there "Proofread please for grammar, keep the wording and the tone as it is, if it doesn't mess with grammar. Explain yourself." and then paste your text. I don't really know what the tools you mentioned do, but any "free" LLM on the Internet will point to things like missing articles, or messed up tenses in complex sentences.

You recommend choosing self-improvement, but I just don't believe I can figure out how to use articles. With tenses I think I can learn how to do it, but I'm not going to. I remember there is some obscure rule how to choose the right tenses, but I was never able to remember the rule itself. I'm bad with rules, it is the reason I chose math as my major. There are almost no rules in math, you are making your own rules. The grammars of languages are not like that, they have rules which can't be easily inferred, you need to remember them. Grammars have exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions, and in any case they are not the rules, but more like guidelines, because people normally don't think about rules when they are talking or writing.

No way I'm starting to learn rules now, I'd better continue to rely on my skills. But LLMs can help me see when my skills fail me.

> It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.

I believe you (as most of fervent supporters of the rule here) gone too far onto philosophy with this, too far from the reality and practice. You can't detect AI in my messages, because they are mine. Even when I ask LLM to find words for me, it is me who picks one of the proposed alternatives, but mostly I manage without wording changes. I transfer the LLM's edits by hand by editing the source message, so nothing unnoticed can slip into the final result. If I took the effort to ask an LLM to proofread, it means I care about the result more than usual, so I'm investing more effort into it, not less.