Comment by tantalor

4 hours ago

[Metapost] Can we unflag this? It's a good resource and shouldn't be suppressed just because some people don't like the tone.

6 comments

tantalor

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nirvanis  4 hours ago

Hi, OP here. Thanks for this.

I don’t seem to have cracked the Hacker News writing formula yet. A few years ago I got similar feedback, but for the opposite reason: people complained that my English felt awkward because I’m not a native speaker. This time I asked an LLM to smooth out the wording, and it seems I accidentally outsourced my personality too.

The content and research are mine. I spent a few hours trying to collect all the moving pieces into something I wish I’d had as someone returning to frontend after many years away. It was just meant to save a few fellow dinosaurs from opening 47 tabs and wondering why they suddenly need seven package managers.

  • re  3 hours ago

    Like others here, the content is something that I'm interested in, but I too have a reaction to the LLM-isms. I think part of it is that, once I recognize I'm reading LLM output, I have no way of knowing if it wrote the whole post based on a one-or-two sentence prompt or not, and if it did, how much can I really trust the output to not be hallucinated. If I'm going to read LLM output, I'd rather do so in the context of my own chat with it so I can understand the inputs to it and ask follow-up questions.

    Can you put the pre-LLM version of your post on your site somewhere? I (and presumably many others) would be much more interested in reading that, even if the English is a bit awkward.

  • hyperhello  2 hours ago

    I wish I had a better way to communicate that I loved this article. I just took a Software Engineering Methods class that just should have been this article. Don’t listen to people complain your AI use is ruining their lives; their contribution is less than yours.

  • rubinlinux  3 hours ago

    I work with claude every day, and instantly recognized its voice; but at the same time, as a web dev from the late 90s who traveled kicking and screaming through all of these ages, I really enjoyed the article anyway. I don't have a visceral disgust with claude's tone as some others here seem to. I'm glad you wrote it and I plan to share it with a friend.