Tech blogger argues writing is AI's safest job target
A programmer contends LLMs have plateaued on prose quality while dominating code, making human writers less vulnerable than coders to AI displacement.
What to know
- A programmer argues writing is more AI-resistant than code because LLMs plateau on prose quality while excelling at formally verifiable tasks like programming.
- Hacker News commenters counter that writers are already losing jobs in practice, and many organizations prioritize cost over prose quality.
- Disagreement centers on whether AI limitations in writing are fundamental (as the essayist claims) or architectural (fixable with different training or design choices).
- Critics note that market incentives and audience indifference to AI-written content may leave writers vulnerable regardless of their work's intrinsic superiority.
The dispute Whether LLM limitations in writing are fundamental and insurmountable (essay view) versus architectural and fixable (commenter skeptics), and whether the market's willingness to pay for human prose quality is sufficient to protect writers from displacement. · positions read across 200 posts and comments
Writing is more resistant to AI than code because it requires subjective judgment and Theory of Mind that LLMs structurally struggle with.
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“It's just that the models are inefficient at it right now, due to training and/or architecture.”
docheinestages · Hacker News
Writers are already losing jobs to AI regardless of quality differences; organizational cost-cutting and audience indifference make prose quality less valuable than the essay assumes.
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“There may well be some writing jobs that are safe for the reasons given in this post, but that doesn't help all the writers I know who have already lost their jobs and are struggling to find work.”
muvlon · Hacker News
AI limitations in writing stem from fixable architectural and training choices, not fundamental constraints, so improvements should be expected.
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“It's just that the models are inefficient at it right now, due to training and/or architecture.”
docheinestages · Hacker News
AI writing cannot solve the core problem that good writing requires authorial intent; even perfect AI cannot read a writer's mind.
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“A prompt complex enough where it won't get any wrong ideas has to contain as much information as the output would have.. so just write it.”
unleaded · Hacker News
Murat Yildirimoglu Tech blogger and programmer
The record 1 articles and posts · last 28 days
What people are saying 24 voices from 1 site · best of 200 · verbatim
- Sep 1
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>It's reference material of all sorts. Technical books, manuals, software localizations, etc.Yes, I covered that under "formulaic content". As I've already said, a lot of this was already done decades ago. East Asian manuals and copies using machine translation are kind of a meme. Human translators are not losing any work from this. These are all…
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One of the things that I think a lot of people get confused about is "writing" vs proper written communication of ideas. HN is full of people posting AI-generated copy-paste "writing" about whatever it is they've built, or an idea they've had, or whatever.A lot of that writing is really bad because of the AI smell, the clunky structure and…
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The problem with AI writing is that it can't add produce the texture of lived experience.This would mean the specificity of details, thoughts and sensations as filtered through a specific individual.There is a theory that what we perceive as beautiful in a face is that every feature, distance between the eyes, width of nose, distance between…
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The thing is, at some point, it takes so much work telling the AI exactly what to do that you are better off doing the damn thing yourself.AI can help with the execution, and for an amateur, this is important. But for real pros, the ones who actually know the appropriate style and what the layout should be, they usually have the execution nailed…
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Given what I have seen in recent Hollywood "writing" I would not be surprised if when correctly prompted an LLM can outdo a lot of the disposable, predictable writing in modern shows.Every story boils down to the same predictable elements, even so-called twists are just repeats of the same old twists. Every story is boy-meets-girl, the friendly…
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> and empower staff who weren't good writers.That's the part I question. You have to be a really good communicator to put yourself in the place for the reader and adjust your language to your target audience. So much of "professional" communication fails because the language assumes that the recipient is knowledgeable or even just interested. If…
- Aug 31
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It's that, yeah, but coming from multiple orders of abstraction.In this case, part of the experiment was to see what "oh-my-pi", a "fat and feature rich" LLM harness, could do when coupled with modern GPT, given a 6k~ word overview of a story, and told to come up with a plan to write/review/audit it, making use of subagents and all the fun new…
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What I find fascinating, in a let's say sociological manner is how we've been thoroughly brainwashed to accept things like the complete destruction of middle class by their replacement with AI.Everybody treats this as something innevitable, like the movement of the tectonical plates.Everybody knows this is being paid with the giant transfer of…
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This argument can be applied to anything AI does. AI can do bad writing, bad code, bad graphics and bad music.But AI cannot (yet?) do the job of a skilled writer, coder, graphical artist and musician.And it is the same problem every time, LLMs lack intention. That's essentially what the article is about, writers choose every word because they have…
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This is something that constantly gets missed by HN in discussions about AI in the arts. There's the quality of the output and the essence behind the art itself. Humans want both [1][2] but these models only provide an output. Could ChatGPT output the next IT or Lord of the Rings, probably.However, once it's understood that it wasn't written by a…
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People seem to have very short memories. LLMs are easily capable of good writing. The fact that they are loaded up with obvious "tells" now is quite a recent development.One year ago, the writer Mark Lawrence posted an article [0] (featured on HN) describing how he generated 4 pieces of flash fiction with ChatGPT, asked 4 published authors (with a…
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I am not a writer but I do have to write a lot for work. The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced, and I am expected to use AI. It is very good, but it's not all the way there. I am now left to decide whether to take the time to do it right or to go back to doing what I actually get paid to do. I wish my organization…
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I disagree, and not because I think AI can write as good as a good writer does, but because in 90%+ of the cases, _companies won't care_.I did translation as a side job for about 20 years (helped me keep my language skills sharp, and some side income was welcome). I was good at it. But translation was one of the first professions to fall to AI…
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No. Currently the models are totally helpless with plot and emotions.They make epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes.But:They are very good in finding _your_ epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes. They are great as adversarial reviewers. They can validate grounding. They can test voices. They can build complex parallel constructions…
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First, I actually had the author of this post as my distributed systems professor back in college. He's not just a super smart dude on a technical level, but he's probably the only CS professor I've ever had who seems to appreciate writing in itself (which may be evident from his blog). I think the combination of these two qualities puts him in a…
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It extends well beyond creative stuff too. It makes me think of Gell-Man amnesia [1].People can tell when something they are experts in is being done poorly, but others can't, and it frustrates the experts. Then, those same people think something completely different is being done well despite what experts in that respective field say. It's like…
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Size of context is not the entire story here, it's ability to properly feed and index the context that's needed on this sort of thing. E.g. your entire slack/discord/email/github/jira/zoom meeting/coffee chat ... history is the context that you bring to the table on this sort of thing. Most of this is unindexed. Much of this will not be in the…
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I was thinking about this yesterday, while going through some slop documentation generated by deepseek. If you compare claude fable 5, side by side with the deepseek, the differences in prose are glaring. It's not even close. Deepseek prose reads like fragmented shorthand, where claude fable 5 comes fairly close to human, certainly not superior to…
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I recently have been trying out frontier models on writing. Just for laughs, to bring an idea I have into the world acting more as director than author. I have a multi agent setup and am getting different models to argue about rating the story for clarity and whether the plot is complete.I agree with the article. Even the frontier models call out…
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Mmm, I doubt it.I have a weird background (product, development, writing + devrel). I write a lot of code and a lot of articles.I think there is a lot of overlap in how people who write code or articles (documentation, books, etc.) use AI. On one side of the spectrum, you have people who just blindly input some prompt, accept the output and move…
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I appreciate what this piece is trying to do directionally but it shares a logical flaw with lots of other pieces about AI and knowledge work. It assumes that in order to disrupt a particular field, AI needs to print serviceable work unassisted; that it's "vibe-shipping".AI today is most effective when it's not vibing, but rather copiloting a…
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Yeah, this tracks with my experiments. About every 6 months or so for the past year-and-a-half I've tried using the "frontier" LLMs to as-near-as-possible autonomously write novel length stories, because I find it fascinating.When I had Gemini 2.5 write a novel, it wasn't really objectively "good" by any stretch of the imagination, but while the…
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LLM prose has degraded with each model update, the models are now being RL'd into wall of texts that only makes sense to other agents. I think its going to become more obvious as we move forward that is llm generated because labs seem to only be focused on tool-calling/agentic-coding environments, as that's the only thing that drives revenue.There…
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No, they use "the same cadence and cliches" because they inflate a short and ambiguous prompt into long and specific prose by making statistical assumptions about what best fills in the gaps. It's not a training problem, it's an information theory problem, and it's not really surmountable.Any given model will always have some distinct implicit…