Partially. I'm a terribly slow writer and get stuck on phrase choice, but I'm good at content ideas, outlines, and editing text already on the page. So I have AI do the bit that I'm not as good at.

Process: First, actually have ideas :D Then, I write an outline for what I want to talk about at basically a sentence-by-sentence level. (This is me yelling things at my computer.) And then I have the AI convert a chunk at a time into prose. I reread it and rework it to be my voice.

Then I have the AI help with things like subject titles and social posts.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hi, thanks for engaging!

I am not personally like philosophically or ethically opposed to having LLMs help or even write text... the issue is that I see so much LLM-written text that is just _bad_, and very hard for me to read or extract meaning out of, especially relative to it's often long length.

People think they are bad writers, but usually LLMs are actually worse (although they are great writers of catchy slogans and phrases, and then put together an article out of them, which I find just exhausting to try to get more than a "vibe" out of).

What you describe sounds like a fairly reasonable approach, but I suspect the parts the person I was replying to were reacting to was areas were you had not been as succesful at reworking it to be your voice. Which are probably also the parts pangram flagged as likely LLM written.

Pangram gives you a handful of free tokens, it would be interesting if you wanted to see what parts are the 20% pangram is flagging as LLM, and reflect on if they went through your process differently. Perhaps they were the parts you didn't spend quite as much time reworking it to be your voice. (I 100% believe you, because I've been running things through pangram a lot lately, and it's actually pretty rare for it to flag mixed content, instead of 100% likely AI or 100% likely human).

There was recently a post on HN that said if you want to avoid this, you really can't use any words at all that are written by the LLM, you can use it for suggesgting structure or points, or reviewing your work in various ways, but if you accept even a single phrase it provides... it's not going to be "reworked into your voice", it's going to be picked up by people (at least those of us who have become sensitive to it) as AI, because it's like, headline-speak.

(I can't find the article now, because I'm trying to quit facebook so can't log in to find my own post of it there, have to stop using that as bookmarks substtitue!)

Of course, that's not welcome advice if what you want AI for is "phrase choice".

I'm just here to say, LLMs are not good at phrase choice either. Although they may be quick at it. I feel like it's asking the reader to do the work of trying to extract meaning from slop that the author didn't have the energy to use to encode it well in the first place. I don't have time to try to read sentences that the writer didn't have time to write, i find myself bailing out quicker and quicker at signs of AI slop buzzword headline-speak.

Panagram seems fun! I tried it out with a large chunk of my post (whole thing wouldn't fit). Panagram says it is 98% human. Feels right, to me b/c I aggressively edit whatever comes out. The thing that I'm avoiding is the ominous blank page - I just freeze. If there's text there I can always reshape it. And I do, heavily.

prodigycorp is entitled to their opinion

For me, I think the big deal is that it promises to be general and broadly applicable and high quality. That's new and special. But we'll wait to see if the claims actually hold.

You might find my old post interesting https://arcturus-labs.com/blog/2025/03/31/supercharging-llm-...

I'm glad someone noticed :P - It was hilarious once we figured out what was going on. We had literally removed it's ability to shut up.

chaotic neutral

Nope. Here's the closest I got https://arcturus-labs.com/blog/2025/03/31/supercharging-llm-... - 1.5 years ago! But I never really did anything with it. And I wasn't thinking about reinforcement learning anything.

I think that ego/status is a big part of it. And the loss aversion bias. Our thought process is "This thing is going to be able to do software as well as a human, therefor it is going to take my job." When a more optimistic and probably more realistic take is "This thing is going to do the boring parts of software, so I can spend my time building out the more interesting, big-picture parts of code. I'm going to be so much more productive." But the fear of loss is so much more distracting than the potential gain. ... And what is it that we fear losing? Status! Software development is in high demand, it's a sought after role, we feel "special".

Now that it's released, it's time to experiment with what it can do.

``` from cataclysm import doom

def mystery_func(): while True: pass

# predict if specified function halts print(doom.does_it_halt(mystery_func)) ```

Ah, really curious if it'll balk at the age old problem or just answer based on the code provided since it does inspect the nearby code to understand context for the generated code.

I'll have to try that when I get back to my desk!

I wrote a book (https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search). Considerations: are you willing to write the book assuming that you will effectively make nothing in direct proceeds from the book? (Close to true.) The upside from a book is in monetizing on it indirectly. For instance, as a "though leader" you'll be able to garner a higher salary at your next job or you'll be able to ask for higher rates for consulting. But the catch here is that you've got to be willing to put yourself out there, otherwise it's a nice bullet point on your resume.

Oh yeah - and don't underestimate the time and effort involved. (I know you mentioned it in your post, but still.) A due date, even if fairly far off, looms ominous. For a year you'll have trouble relaxing and having fun because you know you should be getting work done on the book. You won't have weekend back for quite some time.

Would I do it again? Yep. Will I do it again? Nope. (At least not likely :D )

Good luck!