Dead horse but I find it astonishing that people can still miss AI writing like this.
Don't you find it incredibly grating that every paragraph grinds to a halt while 3 sentence fragments are repeated? Same rhetorical devices. Same tone. Same pointless constructions.
That's not good writing. It's cheap parlour tricks.
The rhythm continues almost as though the writing is in verse—with the effect of hypnotizing the reader so they don't notice nothing is being said at all. The result? Skimmable prose. Digestible reading. Shareable content.
It's not just bad style. It's actually rotting your brain. And if you can't notice that, maybe you weren't reading at all.
I envy you, I can’t even read more than a few paragraphs because this style of adding catchy sentences to make you go „wow“ every few sentences is so annoying.
The slow realization this whole article was AI prompted was such a disappointment to me. I'm fascinated by the subject matter, and it seems like the person who prompted it is aware of specifics at least... But I also don't want to feed myself LLM-induced pollution that might make it into my own writing or thinking patterns.
I mean, it's a post a week. I think that's pretty plausible. The worst part of this era is just not knowing if I'm reading generated output or genuine human thought.
> Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.
> That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above
> None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.
Its thing X. Its thing Y. Its thing Z. And now I'm going to tell you about thing Q in a longer sentence.
More generally it's pure info dump. Everything is lists of things, all given the same weight, even if not literal bullet point lists or numbered lists.
Some other common things (not present in this article) that are dressed up lists are short titled paragraphs, and sequences of sentences that go "blah blah blah: blah blah blah."
Very little opinion added anywhere, but the punchy writing style where everything is given an overdone monotone overimportance masks it a little.
Pure infodump is not terrible for some things but I'd much rather it be less heavily processed by the LLM, and be upfront about the fact that it's a dressed up infodump with an LLM involved.
The irony is that this is a perfect example of the thing the article complains about. Even writing is now of a lower quality thanks to LLMs. In this case you're paying with your time instead of money for a lower quality product than you'd get 10 years ago.
It could be a stylistic choice, except it's rapidly become an extremely popular one for some reason. It's also the default Claude style. So, take what you will from that. Either someone is writing exactly like Claude on purpose, or they just asked Claude to write something, but either way I'm entirely oversaturated on it. At this point I don't think "Claude", I just start skimming and then close the tab.
Even if a human were to try to write in this style intentionally I think they are very likely to express a few opinions, maybe an anecdote, maybe express their motivation in some way, and add a little more variation to tone.
Its not proof, but its certainly a smoking gun. Even when humans use that literary device, we don't typically do it every other paragraph. It feels like a pretty safe bet that an LLM wrote most of this.
> It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing
I wish we could bet money on this. This is an LLM and I'd win that bet.
The ability to recognize the style comes from working with them.
It's quite possible the author wrote an outline or rough draft of the article and then asked the LLM to clean it up. But the final result has LLM tells all over.
How would you ever prove that it’s by an LLM? There’s no text an LLM can produce that I couldn’t theoretically type myself, too. But the style is strong evidence.
"Stylistic writing" that just happens to perfectly match Claude's current default codeslopped output style, and the exact same style as the majority of posts that have made it onto the front page of HN in recent months. Just endless streams of short punchy sentences that are really just glorified bulleted lists with no substance to them.
Let's quit the gaslighting and acknowledge that no human actually writes this way consistently across every paragraph, unless they're intentionally trying to write badly.
"It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste LLM stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
LLMs really like the "it's not this, it's that" framing. The short punchy lists/sequences also feel off to me.
I think it's also the reuse of the same strategy repeatedly throughout the article. I think most human writers often feel put off if they use the same literary device too much.
At this point, I'm running anything that has the "usual" AI tells through Pangram. Nine times out of ten, the article is 100% AI generated. (This one is 63%.)
Also from the guidelines: "HN is for conversation between humans." Granted, it's under comment guidelines, but I think it's acting in the spirit of the rule to point out AI output.
If you think it's AI slop, just flag the article and move on. Of all the stupid reasons people flag articles unfairly on HN, finally we have a good reason to flag them, and instead people comment.
This is false, that I commented instead of flagging. Of course I also flagged it. I'm flagging stuff every day.
It sucks.
There's a problem where this stuff constantly gets upvoted, presumably because it looks OK if you skim it and it's a good jumping off point for comments. I continue to comment about it because I hope we figure out how to stop this stuff making it to the front page so often.
Its a dumb and toothless rule. How do we detect that?
Counting emdashes? "If not this but that"? 'I am using AI'. (Username with bot or claw or agent)
Where this is headed is a LLM being able to control a KVM connection, and the LLM and associated software doesnt exist on the VM. And naturally, you run anti-VM detection software.
That way theres no API, other than the actual webpage UI. Thats ALSO a API.
Thank you. By the end of 2026, the same snarky "This article was written by LLM" comment is going to be posted on every single article on HN. It's becoming pointless to point out.
I doubt it, you didn't write about this! You prompted it and signed your name to it.