I’ll be honest, I don’t like writing with LLMs. There’s something sad to me about the personality that gets lost when we produce text with LLMs. If you’re building product interfaces, an LLM can help you be consistent, but for prose, I think it makes you consistently mediocre.

Even with great guidance, I still find that LLMs writing prose struggle with structure. I’ve seen some truly great phrasing output by Claude, but I still find the way it structures content is unnatural. It lacks the ability to create any kind of rhythm—every paragraph follows the same kind of rhythm, and often ends in an exclamation mark or very clear statement. It’s a kind of output that lacks pauses, deliberation, and frankly, vocabulary.

I enjoy reading, and enjoy learning and using new words. Writing is a way to get to use those fun words. LLMs meanwhile are dry writers. While some of the text may seem like it carries emotion and structure, even the best-written documents by LLMs still often fall back into the trap of repetitive rhythm and cadence. You’ll often notice this by the way you start skimming an LLM-drafted document once you’re about 3 paragraphs in. Not necessarily because the content is bad, but because the document lacks a structure that creates suspense and expectation.

For a document that’s going to be consumed by another LLM, that’s probably fine, and maybe even good. Increasingly, that means text like your product documentation is probably fine to be written by an agent, and possibly edited by a human before publishing.

Edit yourself with the LLM, don’t edit the LLM

Writing for humans is a different thing. These days, I scroll through so much content that just loses me after the first few sentences. Not because the content is bad, but because I just get tired of the (lack of) structure.

Now, LLMs are good at language, but I still don’t think you should let the LLM create your draft. Instead, write the draft yourself and use the LLM to edit your content, instead of the other way around. When you’re editing an LLM’s work, you’re more likely to end up with line editing, which makes it harder to address the structural issues in agent-written articles.

But hey, this is just a rant, and encouragement for people to write more themselves, because practice is the only way to get better.