I had a professor who said that writing is thinking. If you outsource writing to an AI, there’s no thought in it.

Using AI for any part of the writing process has a way of seeping into the rest of it, so I try to stay away from using it at all when writing.

If you start thinking today, there's no way to know if you can think without writing.

- Socrates

(The problem is real, but the future equilibrium is not easy to predict.)

"If you haven’t, there’s no way for readers to know if you can write without AI, whereas if you have written long enough, people know."

I disagree... I can see where a person uses a degree or certificate of some kind where they have a large focus on writing in person without the use of a computer, and they can use that to prove they can write without AI.

The actual title:

> Writing with AI: What's the Best Approach?

The submission title isn't even on that page.

Imo we should speedrun to how we can use ai to write well. We'll get past this weird opus5 talk phase.

I wonder how much my post would come across as AI-written. I wrote almost all of it by hand. Of course, I do use AI for technical reinforcement, but I wonder how this kind of principle would come across.

Looking at it a bit further back, we're in an era drowning in bullshit (spam, scams, ads, posers, cons, wannabes, on and on). Our ability to quickly and effortlessly discern signal from noise has evaporated.

AI has, at the very least, confirmed something that I (and many others) have been saying for more than a decade: a lot of the writing you need to do while working in the corporate world is strictly performative.

I used to work at a very large BigCo [1]. On the first day, one of the first things they had us do was set up email filters. A lot of email filters. Many, many, many email filters. This is because it was not uncommon to get multiple-thousands of emails every day. Of course it would be impossible for anyone to read that much, so you set up filters to have emails moved to folders that you never open because you never read them, and you needed to make sure that important emails weren't missed because if you took more than an hour to respond back to an email you risked a phone call from an angry middle manager yelling at you asking why you didn't respond to their email [2].

Email, and most written documentation in tech companies, isn't there for humans to read, it's for plausible deniability. You send out emails that you know no one will actually read because then you can say "I told you so!" when things go wrong. You write pages of documentation that you know no one will read because you can tell people that you wrote the documentation. You can generate infinite comments for your code that no one will read so you can show people that you did your work to write comments.

When I complained about the quantity of emails I got, I would universally be given the response of "just set up filters", presumably because they know that most of the emails I receive were a useless waste of time.

It never mattered if the writing was "good", and it never mattered if it was up to date, and it never mattered if it corresponded to anything useful, because "human comprehension" was never the point. It was there to some bureaucratic rule-of-thumb that a middle manager would religiously adhere to in order to justify their existence in the company.

I'm sure there are exceptions but it always felt like all this performative writing was disliked by everyone. No one liked spending time reading low-effort "cover-my-ass" emails and no one liked writing pages upon pages of documentation that no one will read. Having Claude write and read all this shit and cutting humans out is the natural conclusion, because, at least in my experience, no one will ever seriously suggest we stop with all the performative writing.

[1] It's not hard to find my history, and it's fine if you do, but I politely ask that you don't post it in relation to this thread.

[2] That's not a joke, and it's not hyperbole. I had gotten phone calls from higher-ups complaining I hadn't responded to their email within two hours. I usually bit my tongue because I was a bit more of a coward in those days, but now I probably would have tried to explain to them the very basic concepts of synchronous and asynchronous communication.