7/5/2026 at 10:19:59 AM
It’s getting tiring to hear at this point, but the Claude voice comes through clearly in this post, and it’s a little off-putting. If even an important product release doesn’t warrant full human attention, where will we draw the line?by ricardobeat
7/5/2026 at 1:37:56 PM
The post effectively communicated what it needed to. It seemed both written and structured in a way that was optimized for human consumption.If they used AI to write this and that gave them more time to volunteer their time towards developing this fantastic piece of open source software, then this all seems like a good thing to me.
by techscruggs
7/5/2026 at 3:31:14 PM
It is clearly not effectively communicated if the tool used to write it stamps its signature in such a way that it distracts from the great work they’re doing.by sickcodebruh
7/5/2026 at 4:02:53 PM
It is distracting you because part of your mental focus is on "is this AI".by ashikns
7/5/2026 at 5:36:59 PM
I love how quickly all AI pushback gets blown off as "skill issue". Even reading and taste now!by collingreen
7/5/2026 at 5:58:44 PM
All writing is open to interpretation by the reader.Some people let punctuation or grammar mistakes ruin an entire text or post for them, because they choose to focus on those flaws, rather than looking past them and taking in the content itself.
"this was written/assisted by AI" is starting to feel like next-gen "this has spelling/grammar mistakes in it, therefore it is invalid".
by sbarre
7/5/2026 at 8:16:55 PM
I think the problem is that too many people use AI to write bullshit. Thus AI writing becomes a cue for bullshit.For people who have internalized AI writing as a cue for bullshit, it is very difficult to read obvious AI writing without constantly being cue-ed that the thing they're reading is bullshit. Even if it's not.
by corpoposter
7/5/2026 at 3:36:16 PM
Its only distracts the distractable. Does anyone ever read product announcement blog posts like they were great literature? Ive always just skimmed, theyve always been throwaway writing to me. I’d rather the humans spend more time on the actual creative challenges in a project.by nullstyle
7/5/2026 at 3:41:24 PM
tldr; continue to cede ground on the slippery slope.did i get that right?
by F7F7F7
7/5/2026 at 3:57:42 PM
yep, and when the llms can pack flatware, stamp license plates or clean bedpans, I'll argue we shouldn't have humans doing that bullshit work either.by nullstyle
7/5/2026 at 5:00:07 PM
The issue is that you can't trust that every word of the message was intentional due to how much Claude will usually add various levels of nonsense, some more obvious some less to your voice or requests. Considering how much Claude alters the meaning of what I want to communicate I wouldn't trust the accuracy of that output right.And I use Claude a lot, 24/7, but not for things like that. And I appreciate how much it elevates my productivity, but not like this. It usually prioritizes or highlights the wrong things, it overfixates on one thing I said and adds random content there out of nowhere.
So then I can't tell what part of it is slop, how slop, and it becomes impossible to trust.
by mewpmewp2
7/5/2026 at 7:28:07 PM
LLMs literally are incapable of writing in the way humans are. Generating a string of tokens is a completely different task than composing prose be it fiction, documentation, or product releases. It would take an insane harness on the par of a complexity of a coding harness to write at the level of college graduate.So when I see someone saying LLMs are suitable for this use I must assume that they don’t think what they are writing is worth the effort or they don’t understand how effective written communication works. Either way, I’m resentful of it in the way someone reviewing a slop PR is.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week after having fable try to write some design docs and it outputting 1k line docs which I had to manually rewrite to 200-300 lines. I should of just did it myself to start.
by J_Shelby_J
7/5/2026 at 7:40:52 PM
Then don't trust it. Don't read it. Don't use it. But I don't get this obsession with trying to police and control everyone's use of AI. Hint: you can't control everyone. They're going to do what they want whether you like it or not. The only thing you can do is move on.by yawaramin
7/5/2026 at 11:47:24 AM
Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I use plannotator with claude a lot and have much better time, since I asked for a specific styleguide.I used "CD era MSDN reference and Raymond Chen blogging style" as a starting prompt for the styleguide and my work ability to digest AI plans raised a lot.
Couldn't recommend it more. Humble, insightful and respecting the reader
by eurekin
7/5/2026 at 2:33:45 PM
> respecting the readerWhen people say LLM slop is disrespecting the reader, I don't think they are complaining about style.
by 8organicbits
7/5/2026 at 2:43:21 PM
That's where the annotation in plannotator helps.I'm asking to scan projects on gitlab, go through some docs to find more grounding material, write a subarticle (in the same style), scan logs on the test env, issue some curls, etc.; until the whole article is digestible - in the "backing knowledge graph" department.
by eurekin
7/5/2026 at 7:26:24 PM
Respecting the reader means:- Understanding what you wrote
- Verifying correctness of any claims
- Putting in at least as much effort writing as your audience will reading
- Not sharing generated content if you can't do the above. If you must, then explicitly disclaiming your use of AI
It does not mean "prompting AI better"
by shepherdjerred
7/5/2026 at 7:34:58 PM
> Putting in at least as much effort writing as your audience will readingThis is the big one.
> Ideally not sharing generated content if you can't do the above. If you must, then explicitly disclaiming your use of AI
This is the reason why people get mad about AI generated open-source PRs and repositories. Rather than contributing thoughtfully to the commons, you make it a dumping ground when you do this.
by argee
7/5/2026 at 2:57:38 PM
Very funny.by 13415
7/5/2026 at 3:08:39 PM
They are, and I am. While I don't use the words "LLM slop", I do have the urge to instantly stop reading any piece of writing that was obviously default Claude output with no effort to make it sound even remotely human written.I'd rather read natural sounding, non-repetitive, and actually useful LLM text than the majority of reddit comments (including the serious ones) for instance.
by elxr
7/5/2026 at 3:33:26 PM
that's precisely the objection most people have whether they realize it or not.slop just means "I don't like this style"
when AI writes more reliably in a way that people do like, they will stop calling everything AI does slop.
by qntmfred
7/5/2026 at 4:38:01 PM
I may complain that I don't like the way a sleezy con man talks, and I may be able to detect his communication patterns, but that doesn't mean I want the con man to speak in a different way I can't detect as sleezy. I don't want to talk to the con man.Obfuscating LLM output to trick the reader into thinking it wasn't LLM output is not respectful.
by 8organicbits
7/5/2026 at 6:05:20 PM
Disclaimer, I only use it to grow the "knowledge hub".It's a single git project at my $USER home, that is referenced in global memory. It contains as much information about work things, as possible, to be productive.
I found that, if I allowed Claude to create the notes, it actually became more and more useful, but without the guideline, I just could barely get through reading it manually.
I'd never publish anything with such origin.
by eurekin
7/5/2026 at 3:46:44 PM
I think you are forgetting about the decency and dignity part of "respect".Yes there's a quality component to the role of communication in how it respects other people.
There's also honesty, transparency, truth and vectors along the dimensions of "Are we claiming and presenting the truth or are we bending facts and creating impersonations and warping reality?" Most AI is used for the latter today: people are having AI's write their words and speech for them and then the AI says things as though it were the human like "I said xyz" when the AI is NOT the human who did those things. That's lying and deception and disrespect to the reader.
by mannanj
7/5/2026 at 1:40:52 PM
Exactly! See this is what I don't get about the Claude/GPT-style writing that's so prevalent everywhere and why it annoys me even more. It's just so easy to get rid of it, that's why it feels even more disrespectful when I still see it everywhere in full force, just a few sentences is enough to get rid of so much of the extremely obvious tells, sometimes even a "Don't write like an AI" in the prompt leads to completely acceptable results. Everywhere I use LLMs I put a tiny style-guide with instructions such as yours, and the results are just so much more pleasant I barely understand why it seems that almost everyone else seems incapable of it?The obvious response is of course, they're just completely unbothered by it. Why change it if it doesn't even matter (to me)? I presume the set of people who use AI like this for writing and the set of people who are annoyed by it are largely not overlapping, and there is a possibility that a lot of the text I read and think sounds human, might be written by an LLM with a style-guide like mine. Still though, if 5 words genuinely can reduce annoyance by a lot of people who read your article, why does it feel like so many people haven't picked up on it yet? Or is the LLM writing highly loved & popular amongst other people perhaps?
by Melonai
7/5/2026 at 10:21:54 AM
Serious question, why does it matter to you? Maybe they wrote a draft and reviewed Claude's writing before publishing. Why are we trying to "call out" when AI is assisting us in our work? This is an open source project, not a F500 company. They have limited resources, maybe English isn't their first language.by deanc
7/5/2026 at 12:25:02 PM
I'm not a shadcn user, and so as with any project I'm not familiar with, I'm looking to see if if it's interesting to me. If the post is thoughtful and clear and I like the sense I get of their perspective on programming, then great, tell me more. No guarantees but maybe the writer is someone whose software I'd like to use. Claude doesn't tell me anything except that the writer used Claude.It's the same as with too marketing-speak, which conceivably this is. Maybe the actual work is good but Sturgeon's law, it's probably crud. If I really needed a UI library or whatever right now then maybe I'd dig deeper but in casual browsing HN mode? No time, catch them later.
So maybe all your maybes but who cares? It's not AI that made me think badly of them: I think badly of all software by default and it takes more than Claude to change my mind.
by zopa
7/5/2026 at 5:25:21 PM
For me, I don’t care one bit whether the text is AI generated or not. What stood out to me on this one is that they talked about something called shadcn, something called base UI, and something called radix as if they were things that everyone should be familiar with, but failed to consider that a reader might never have heard of any of them. I read for a while to see if they give some clues but nothing was forthcoming so the whole thing might as well have been gibberish.by hamburglar
7/5/2026 at 1:51:33 PM
Tone/style bit aside, a real problem is length. Scroll waaay down and look at most older updates and see how brief and too-the-point they were. Often they look rushed, some essential links, and that’s it. Fine by me! That’s the real state of things… people usually don’t want to write bc it’s a lot of effort.I see the same phenomenon at work. A year ago I’d read your two-sentence daily update in slack, all riddled with the quirks and oddities that made it yours. Today when I see the page of headings and emojis describing the couple things you did yesterday, I wince because now I’m the one who has to sift through the fluff to get to the point.
by LVB
7/5/2026 at 10:56:34 AM
Because it sounds like the average LinkedIn poster and we don't want it to invade spaces outside LinkedIn.by dev_hugepages
7/5/2026 at 11:36:36 AM
Because it means that they think I'm stupid.They think it's not worth investing human attention to write it, so why am I expected to invest my attention to read it?
If it's written as SEO spam, why link it here?
If it's written to be read by humans, do they think we're stupid?
by purerandomness
7/5/2026 at 11:23:00 AM
Because I associate that style with "I have little to say, but I will say it in as many words as I possibly can"by robmccoll
7/5/2026 at 11:05:16 AM
I think fundamentally it's just really annoying to read the same cringey LinkedIn style voice everywhere.If you manage to write an AI assisted article that doesn't tediously follow the "what this means for you", "it's not this, it's that", "One thing. Two things. Three things." formula... I really doubt people would complain.
by IshKebab
7/5/2026 at 12:14:18 PM
I agree that the style is somewhat generic, but for things like new release announcements, I find that the common structure allows me to skim through much faster. I value that and am happy with that tradeoff.by vcf
7/5/2026 at 1:33:43 PM
Just read the post! It's essentially "we switched from Radix to Base UI". Why? "the ecosystem moved on". Nothing says braindead web frontend churn like this post, and them not having written it in the first place is just the cherry on the cake.They could have just written "we asked Claude to rewrite our project with Base UI because it eclipsed Radix in NPM downloads".
by stefan_
7/5/2026 at 1:50:42 PM
If you're not a heavy frontend developer then you probably don't know why radix is a blocker for most server side reactby NamlchakKhandro
7/5/2026 at 10:48:09 AM
Because it implies that the users of the AI don't understand that it's output is usually horseshit littered with enough good info to make it sound correctby lionkor
7/5/2026 at 11:32:12 AM
Just read the post and it didn’t sound AI to me.Would be kind of funny if someone from the team came out and said it was written by a human.
by drchiu
7/5/2026 at 11:50:13 AM
> Just read the post and it didn’t sound AI to me.Those short and punchy two-part sentence groups very much feel like the writing that Claude does, like: The writing feels familiar. Suspicion earns its keep. Ultimately, the judgement remains yours. Not conjecture, your thoughts.
Then again, I bet how much aversion people feel to that sort of thing depends on how much they’ve been exposed to that, especially in frustrating circumstances. Personally, that’s a lot (daily Claude Code) and sometimes that writing makes me really upset.
Or maybe people genuinely just write like that and overuse that style and Claude has ruined it for me, whereas otherwise I wouldn’t have given it a second look.
by KronisLV
7/5/2026 at 3:58:40 PM
I call it "being shot in the face with bullet points". I was trying to use an LLM to write up some guidelines on how to use a piece of tech, and I kept getting frustrated that it felt like a slide deck rather than sincere persuasion.Maybe it's a style that's always existed in moderation, but now it feels like it's being applied to every paragraph in every document or social posting.
by andrewingram
7/5/2026 at 2:53:39 PM
People do write like that. Claude learned it from somewhere, after all. I read an X post yesterday where someone was complaining about "genuinely" as being an AI tell.I think the broader phenomenon with the AI tells is it is revealing about a person's consumption. If they already interacted with and read material that resembled AI output, it wouldn't seem as weird. But if you encounter a particular pattern with the AI before you encounter the human patterns that trained it that way, it seems like an AI quirk.
by mattmcknight
7/5/2026 at 3:57:28 PM
> But if you encounter a particular pattern with the AI before you encounter the human patterns that trained it that way, it seems like an AI quirk.It might also be the overuse of specific phrases and patterns. I sometimes scan over my own blog posts to see what appears too often and there are things that I overuse in my own writing as well.
by KronisLV
7/5/2026 at 3:14:01 PM
It's not that it's bad writing. It's that people are used to bad writing. People are used to garbage. For example, your comment is awful from a literature or writing perspective. It needs to be edited. This comment that I'm writing right now is awful. We're used to crap writing and people who don't care about editing and putting out good, thoughtful words. When all you're used to is garbage, things that actually are better are generally going to seem odd and out of place. However, for those people that are used to better, more elegant writing, it's going to seem fine.Of course, the difference here is context. In a comment, you're not expecting well-written sentences, structure, and editing. So we jump at these things that seem out of place because of the context.
> sometimes that writing makes me really upset.
You know what makes me upset?
- No writing
- Or bad documentation
- Or just no documentation
- Or just nothing being written down about something
For me, at its core, the most important thing is accuracy. Is it accurate? If so, good. We can start from there. If your issue is style, fine, but that's a personal judgment. As long as it's accurate, I'm fine.
by jasonlotito
7/5/2026 at 6:35:07 PM
Claude/ChatGPT is not good or elegant writing. Read a book or a short essay from a respected author and it becomes obvious why different styles of writing are actually discernible. AI-generated text feels void of life and unintentional, it is legitimately a chore to read.by jagenabler2
7/5/2026 at 4:09:57 PM
That’s a genuinely smart take, and to be honest with you – most people never achieve this level of awareness. /sMost humans speak in “garbage” and not perfectly correct sentences. Imperfection makes it human.
In this case, it’s not about unwanted sophistication, but fluff and specific sentence structures that tell you this was written by AI, not the actual people behind the project. I guess the closest analogy is to always being left on voicemail.
by ricardobeat
7/5/2026 at 11:49:24 AM
Maybe the human has been reading too much ai generated text and got influenced by it?by designerarvid
7/5/2026 at 2:30:40 PM
Exactly! We have accepted British English, American English, Australian English …. Lets just accept AI English and move on.by robofanatic
7/5/2026 at 2:32:45 PM
There's not a strong reason for a human to write this type of content anymoreby jacob_rezi
7/5/2026 at 4:30:23 PM
Why should a human read it? And by extension why even bother than if it’s just for machines?by dawnerd
7/5/2026 at 5:10:15 PM
Because the human wants the information contained within?by tzs
7/5/2026 at 3:09:09 PM
To me, it couldn't sound more AI if you tried.by elxr
7/5/2026 at 11:45:02 AM
I didn't read the post and scrolled to a random clause."Because you own the code. You've added variants, changed classes, threaded new props. A codemod handles the components you never touched and breaks on the ones you did."
by relativeadv
7/5/2026 at 2:50:34 PM
It's so staccato throughout, a human wouldn't write like this.by dbbk
7/5/2026 at 3:41:50 PM
I disagree, that it's not tiring to hear - because it's deception and lying as it gets used and presented today. I believe it's dangerous to a culture of cooperation that I think cooperation requires trust and truth to support and preserve. I don't want articles to have AI's lying and saying "I did or said" when it was the human who did and said those things.for example, in this article (if it was truly Claude written):
> Last year, Base UI tagged a beta and a lot of you asked if we are going to replace Radix with it. I said "the worst thing you can do for your production app is switch component libraries". I meant it, and it still holds. So instead of switching, we did the shadcn thing: we rebuilt every component for Base UI, kept the same abstraction, and let you choose. December brought npx shadcn create with both libraries. January brought full Base UI docs.
If an AI wrote this, why and how is it pretending to be a human and the humans on the team at that? That's impersonation, and it's a lie and deceptive. I personally don't want a culture where my AI agent is talking as though its me, when a pro-cooperative and honesty/truth preserving culture would instead say "My human said" or at least label correctly that this is an AI acting on behalf of a human.
by mannanj
7/5/2026 at 11:38:21 AM
[dead]by draw_down
7/5/2026 at 11:26:18 AM
I hate the marketing-selling-linkedn style as much as anyone, but I don't think it's an LLM thing in particular. It's a style that existed before LLMs and it's very easy to make LLMs avoid it with one or two prompt paragraphs.For what it's worth, I didn't get that vibe reading this post.
by fjdjshsh
7/5/2026 at 2:33:01 PM
Am I the only one who expects ALL writing to be generated or at least edited by an LLM going forward? It's like pointing out the fabric in my clothes was not hand woven by a human. Sounding like an AI wrote it is not as valid a criticism as "it was unclear about...", or "It was too long", or "It left out this important point...". Can't we move past the "It sounds like AI..." posts?by dstroot
7/5/2026 at 7:35:59 PM
Look, if you can’t take the time to communicate with me, I won’t waste my time listening to you.Writing is not hard. It’s a fundamental skill. Even before LLMs, any successful professional had strong writing skills, and those that didn’t were treading water at best. This isn’t classism. It’s just that we literally can not communicate if you aren’t willing to put in the effort. And if you don’t need to take the time to put it in writing then I don’t need to read it.
by J_Shelby_J
7/5/2026 at 7:48:35 PM
You are welcome to continue to read these LLM-generated writings without questioning their content.by Banditoz
7/5/2026 at 3:50:07 PM
I'd love to have this as a norm, as long as the AI doesn't lie and impersonate and deceive humans in speech by saying things as though it were the human like "I ate breakfast" or "I was saying this to my team" because clearly the AI did not do those things. That's lying, deception and harmful to a culture of truth and transparency.Instead the humans who promoted and allowed the LLM content to post behind their human identity, didn't bother to update the LLM language and either do a) mark the post as AI generated or b) properly update those pronouns so it isn't an AI speaking through the humans point of view.
Consider this exaggerated example: Would it be ok for you if in a zoom meeting with your team someone was lip syncing an AI speaking on their behalf, both impersonating voice tonality, the words chosen, and even pretending to voice the humans thoughts themselves? Of course you wouldn't. So now extend this to the words people write in articles like this one where the "I said" perspective was used many times supposedly by an AI.
by mannanj
7/5/2026 at 10:38:39 AM
I'm sure this received full human attention, even if they used a computer to help write it (be that more traditional text tools or more recent ones).by nmstoker
7/5/2026 at 12:46:33 PM
Isn't that a bit like working in the movie industry and no longer being able to enjoy films because you are always thinking about how they were made and noticing their flaws?by petilon
7/5/2026 at 1:22:44 PM
More like working in the movie industry and noticing all the places where the director took the cheap shortcut instead of putting effort in. And while the result isn't much worse, it still feels a bit disrespectful. You reminisce about the time five years ago when things were much more humanOh, and the target audience of movie you are watching are other people in the movie industry. Nearly everyone in the audience can tell where production cheaped out
by wongarsu
7/5/2026 at 2:19:43 PM
After watching the movie everyone in the audience goes back to their offices, and what do they use to improve their productivity? Right, AI.by petilon
7/5/2026 at 12:49:26 PM
[dead]by nullsanity