Commenters debate practical limits of LLM feedback for writing
3 Sep 18 6:23 AM · 8d ago · 6 comments · 1 source · development 3 of 3
Multiple voices push back on the usefulness of LLM critiques themselves. One commenter notes LLMs have poor taste in writing; another advocates using them only for factual accuracy checks. A third refines the approach: use LLMs only after multiple drafts to flag specific problems like word repetition.
“LLMs have absolutely terrible taste when it comes to writing. I don't find their feedback useful at all, beyond trivial spelling/grammar mistakes.”
Retr0idjoeriddles Writer and blogger
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What people said 24 voices · best of 52 · verbatim
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"How To Write With An LLM" https:// sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17 /how-to-write-with-an-llm/ A problem I see is that of course this way of writing is still work and takes time, care, and attention -- exactly what most people using an LLM here are seeking to avoid. Those who _do_ put in this effort could likely do the same editing job without the…
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A workflow I've recently discovered for myself, that may be useful to anyone who speaks at least two languages: Ask the LLM to write a first draft in a language that isn't the one the piece should ultimately be in. Then use the LLM's first draft as a blueprint, to write a first draft yourself in the intended target language. That way, you won't be…
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A funny piece of writing… How to write with an LLM: https:// sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17 /how-to-write-with-an-llm/
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This article reads like user tptacek:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417027 (3 months ago)> Use LLMs to critique your writing, check its structure, vet your choice of topic sentences, check flow from graf to graf and section to section, look for passive voice and overused words. LLMs are fantastic for that. But don't use a single word an…
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Thank you for writing this.This is gold> Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you.Over the last week-ish I turned around 2 product announcement blogposts within ~24hrs. Both written manually by someone who doesn't do product marketing for a living. It actually felt incredibly satisfying to focus and smash something out…
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Too simple, too dogmatic at the start and at the end (“don’t use LLMs” and “then they are poison”). The middle section is all good.Writing with a LLM is a boon if you are trying to write while mastering a new field. Imagine a neuroscientist entering robotics or an electrical engineer trying to enter the field of neuromorphic systems. In these…
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> In your first draft, most of your paragraphs are bad, your topic flow is incoherent, and you’ve got at least 750 words you don’t need.I stopped reading at this point. All of the above may have been correct five years ago, when there was a "canon" of good writing, but now LLMs pack that canon as tight as teenagers in a boy band concert. So, go…
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I sort of agree, but I also think the advice here is circular. To look at the style suggestions produced by an LLM and decide that you agree with some of them in spirit, but want to put it in your own words, you already need how to know how to write well.In other words, you need to read a style manual or two, and you need to read and have opinions…
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> Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you.I think there's a use case where this rule can be ignored. Sometimes I ask LLM to help me pick a single word or short phrase in some language, that has specific meaning, and connotations. Or doesn't carry some connotations or associations. Especially when I have an idiom from…
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You just should not do things that human beings are good at with automated processes. Things such as: creative writing, painting, dancing that is not pre-programmed, going with the flow, living the moment, having sex, wrestling, cooking, acting, connecting with your loved ones... and so on.Word chains these programs produce are inherently…
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The advice of "use your voice" only works if you have a good writing voice and comes off like Henry Cavill's dating advice or famous writers who said that you shouldn't use a thesaurus.Paying close attention to posts written by folks who are not using LLM's the comments here regularly complain (sometimes extensively) about the writing quality…
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This is very good advice. I hate when llms turn into yes-men. I am surprise that the author doesn't use ai to construct the skeleton of the written piece. In my opinion, they excel at this, with all the books they've guillotined and digested, our biological brain cannot match their content retention. I would do the old trick of "asking for a…
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Step one: open up the LLMStep two: close the LLMStep three: pick up a pen and writeWriting with LLMs is a great way to make yourself stupid: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2026-08-07-ai-writing-stupid/I'm glad the OP acknowledges that you have to have to do the writing yourself—though they say this more as a means to avoid getting pegged as having…
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> Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. However much work you put into scuffing up and humanizing it, an LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output. So, first the bad news: you have to write for yourself.---and then> Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice. Readers won’t put…
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> frontier models are supernaturally good at selecting pleasing turns of phraseIt's not even the suggestions in isolation, but it tries to convince you that your writing is stellar and then slips in a word or two, and you accept it because otherwise you'd be skipping greatness. I guess in some way one has to have a bit of hubris about one's…
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"LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output"The best advice for writing for other humans is: don't use LLMs.If you're writing for machines, liking coding, then fine go for it. If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures…
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Just write, write your own words, then create an effective communication persona within your LLM's non-reasoning (non-Chain-of-Thought) capabilities and have it critique your writing after describing your target audience. Then, write your own revision following the critique. Using this, it is not possible to write "AI slop" unless your own writing…
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I still manually edit almost every word for utmost precision in anything I expect a human to read since LLM prose is hard to read and often subtly wrong or misleadingly worded (those false contrasts ...).Commit messages are not exactly in this category for me, I view them mostly as a work log to be later inspected by another LLM to gather context…
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I use LLMs for nailing down the narrative in bullet point form. It proposes a lot of inappropriate points that I tell it to remove, but makes some useful proposals as well. It’s actually fairly efficient for narrative exploration, I then keep it away from prose for as long as possible since whatever it writes is pretty bad but once I start…
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This would sound insane to me from two years ago but I have recently started insisting on writing all my own commit messages and pull request descriptions. I do usually have an agent review them for factual accuracy, but not rephrase them.It slows things down a bit, but in the best possible way. It has helped immensely to improve the depth of my…
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Interesting way to put it because it means in most professional software development contexts, it is also NOT appropriate for coding since other human will work on the same codebase, at least review the submitted code. So... according to this (IMHO pragmatic) heuristics it's only acceptable for coding alone, e.g. weekend project that won't be…
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Got it. I always have the model write the whole thing first and then I just do a little light editing. It has zero soul.I'm looking forward to trying out your editor. When will it be officially available? But I have another question: English isn't my first language. What kind of impact can this editor have for non-English ecosystems? and if we add…
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Read Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought".Emitting words is not really what "writing" is.
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I've found the only good way to write with LLMs is to absolutely not use it for the first few drafts, the using it as a tool to list specific kinds of problems in text (word repetition, unnatural hard to read sentences etc) and approaching those points with caution and skepticism. Even copy pasting a single sentence, I've found, is a slippery…
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