Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived.
Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.
At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because
1. the heuristic is flawed
2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult
I don't agree that it's flawed. There's so much to gain by writing your own words. It's something to practice and after a while, it's even fun to be able to express something the way you intended. Even today I do my own writeups and articles manually. I want the text to come from me, to show how I'd put it, even if I have a typo here and there. I feel like it's worth it to keep your own personality instead of having AI do it for you - or even edit for you. Even if you think your writing suck, it's still your voice and it's just more interesting for me to read an actual human being.
I agree honestly. I just wanted to get the story out and share it and I'm swamped IRL. But I'm going to go back and clean it up when I get the chance. I do appreciate the constructive feedback from everyone and I will do better.
It’d be an interesting exercise to just write it again yourself without referring to the LLM article then compare the two to see which bits of each are better. Yours would be shorter, but perhaps better and more honest?
Just wanted to say don't worry about it too much. I do advocate for writing because I like it and I feel it rewards me. But you made a decision to do it a certain way and that's fine. Don't let people tear you down for this.
I don't use AI for my writing and I agree with you. I meant that it is bad heuristic because people often do put a lot of effort into posts with AI writing styles in them, so it is not accurate due to a large amount of false positives. If one performs a test that is wrong a significant percentage of the time then it will be eventually abandoned.
The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph.
There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good.
That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out.
People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.
I honestly get it. I wouldn't have made that comment but I get why it was made. It tells me I need to go back and put some more effort into it and clean it up. You know, in-between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and working on the actual game... Without Claude there would be no story to read. I pay Anthropic $200/mo and Claude is a robot. I don't think anyone shed a tear that I didn't put "coauthored by Claude" at the bottom.
It has nothing to do with missing "coauthored by Claude"
The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing.
One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts.
I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
Most people enjoyed it. It is the same as the game. Most people like the remaster direction, a subgroup vehemently dislike specific design decisions and they don't always overlap. The more people that learn about the game the volume of feedback goes up and so does the volume of negative feedback. Just telling you feel my perspective, take it when a grain of salt. So you learn to take negatively, especially emotionally charged negativity, with a grain of salt. And you have a compulsion to ignore it. But I'm a very self aware person and I try to see the other side. I may not understand it, I may not agree, but I try to listen and understand. But to say I blanket missing the criticism is a flippant remark in my opinion. I'm not an idiot... It's easy to tell AI was involved and it turned many people off. But they also crap on the stuff I wrote from scratch. So is it AI or just that I suck at writing? It was just to share the story. I reread it multiple times and I enjoy the story even knowing it like the back is my hand. I lived it. I write stuff for me. I remastered the game for me and to share with like minded people. Honestly, the article being anti-AI rage bait is a low pass filter for people who could have said anything, and instead, they chose to NIT the article. But I try to be open minded and do better, but I am only human, not an AI, I have emotions and opinions. I'm sure most of those opinions are flawed. But I'm not mad at any of the criticism and I appreciate it.
Writing is not about writing. Admittedly, that is a trick sentence [what does it mean??] and it exists because I'm trying to get you to re-evaluate my next words. And, I am doing this because I think you are missing the point.
Writing is about organizing your thoughts. You cannot have someone else organize your thoughts. Once you approach writing as a thought excercise, and not an output excercise, then there is a world of nuance and writing is more than just organizing your thoughts.
Further, you have allegedly spent 3 years on this. I know you're busy. That said, you can certainly spend 3 days on writing if you spent 3 years working on this.
Please don't double down on acting like everyone is just a hater. There is more depth to the criticism than I think is being acknowledged.
P.s, if you feel "blocked" writing and think of it as just about output, try this:
(0) Ask yourself what you want to convey, why; to whom.
(1) Write without inhibition
(2) Edit, cut, delete. Refer to (0); look at what seems higher word count in proportion to its value.
There are other tips to editing and writing. This is one rough off the cuff formula that I think tracks & may benefit you, especially since you seem to see yourself as a worse writer than you may actually be.
There's no reason to be so nasty. The fact that it's currently on the top 5 posts on HN means you're dead wrong, he's not wasting anyone's time.
TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.
I’d love to read more about how the original code looks like - examples of the parts that would be so difficult to transpile / understand and so on. And perhaps an overview of the game’s architecture? It surely is a unique piece of code due to the complexity, and I’m sure there are many interesting parts and algorithms there.
Speaking of LLMs, I recently used Claude Code on my own old codebase to do such a writeup, and it ended up a very nice read for myself too - Claude managed to explain some parts of what I built better than I did :D
Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.
At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because
1. the heuristic is flawed
2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult