Does writing still matter? Does anyone still care? I care. I write. Because it matters.
"Still" refers to the ongoing "AI will replace us all" anx...
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someone called out one of my HN comments as AI-written earlier this month and it kind of hit hard because I actually wrote it. but I had been so focused on being clear and structured that it just read that way anyway.
honestly what helped was writing like I explain things to a colleague - detours, half-finished thoughts, the occasional tangent going nowhere. my articles still feel too polished sometimes tbh.
also - the biggest AI tell is not vocabulary, it is the total absence of uncertainty mid-thought. AI never goes "wait, actually no" and walks something back.
Actually. I witnessed github copilot CLI do this in its reasoning. (Not sure if that's applicable here.)
yeah copilot's reasoning traces have that very distinct pattern to them. and honestly i think heavy AI tool use quietly shifts how you write prose over time, even without copy-pasting. that realization made the whole HN thing sting a bit more
Bug: the "Are we creating a knowledge collapse and no one is talking about it?" post link is broken.
Personally, I think a good start here would be the addition of a "top 7 posts of the week that aren't about how to AI harder".
Thanks! I fixed the link.
Everything is AI. I am knee deep in ollama my last 4 projects. 😂😆
If everything is AI, nothing is AI. We should stop using that simplified hype term as be more precise about what we really mean in a given context, like ollama isn't nano banana isn't claude, copilot, sonnet or a custom local LLM controlling a laser cutter or a distributed system of specialized language models analyzing x-ray images etc.
The AI buzzword...
Its a term used by business leaders that dont know what AI is. Its used as a sales tactic, FOMO creation, and many other not so amazing things. But it is amazing for some lthings. Like finding patterns!
I agree that people should be specific when they reference AI.
I do not want a tiny local llm controlling anything capable of causing me physical harm, especially if I'm the one who's telling it what to do!
I think ultimately people should always have the freedom to choose whether or not to use ai in their day to day. This is a gray area @moopet. Because technically, anything that is misused could be a threat to life. For example, what if you have an ai bot that washes dishes, becomes "mad" and then throws a plate? Perhaps we should wash our own dishes. If we dont fully train ai on the ins and outs of human nature, it wont respond in ways we would expect. A conundrum for sure. 😂
The best articles are the ones that arent written by AI. I search for authentic writers on dev. It takes a little intuition, but generally not difficult to spot. ✨️
I wanted to also comment that as an artist, I do like the ability of making pretty pictures quickly for my dev posts with AI. I use it maybe 50% of the time now, but only to support my writing. Im one of those people that thinks adding breaks with pictures makes my article feel less long. 😂
Id be ok without it, but I do like it. 😅
I think it depends on the topic as well. Technical posts with authentic screenshots or diagrams, maker posts with real-world photography, etc. while other topics don't imply natural authentic images.
I love screen shots. They are so helpful and give real examples. I suppose I can see a use case for using ai to convey abstract ideas. But I also agree that authentic work is usually better.
Writing still matters, but for different reasons now.
The practical value of writing well: it forces you to think clearly. If you can't explain a decision clearly in writing, you probably don't understand it clearly yet. That's true whether AI exists or not. The documentation that saves a team hours, the post-mortem that actually prevents recurrence, the RFC that gets accepted on the first read — these require genuine understanding.
The AI suspicion angle is real but I think it resolves itself. Generic AI-flavored prose is recognizable, and people filter it out. The writing that gets attention is specific, opinionated, and personal — which is also the writing that AI is worst at producing.
i've started treating every AI output as a hypothesis that needs testing rather than a solution that needs reviewing. same with my own writing now. if i can't point to something specific i tested or experienced, i don't state it as fact.
Really enjoyed this.
The “long tail” point hits home. most of us won’t write the definitive guide, but documenting real bugs and real lessons still matters. That’s what keeps the web (and even AI) grounded in reality.
Also +1 to “Don’t be Claude” 😅 Untested code and vague hedging kill trust fast.
AI can assist, but lived experience and accountability still belong to the human hitting publish. Keep writing.
The evaluation gap between benchmark performance and real-world reliability is where most LLM-powered products struggle. Demos optimize for the happy path. Production systems need to handle distribution shift gracefully, which requires a different approach to testing and validation.
Totally agree! Writing still matters because it's about human connection, not just information transfer. AI can generate text, but it can't generate authentic experience — the late-night debugging stories, the 'why I chose this weird solution' moments, the personality that makes tech content actually readable.
I recently let AI rewrite 40% of my codebase (wrote a post about it actually) and realized AI makes things technically correct but soulless. My messy code with honest comments connected more with readers than perfect AI-generated docs ever could.
Writing = thinking. If we stop writing, we stop thinking. Let's keep both alive! ✍️
Updated in February 2026 to include a link to the promised post about my broken phone and why and how I still use it: Using Slightly Broken Smartphones thanks to Accessibility
Using Slightly Broken Smartphones thanks to Accessibility
Ingo Steinke, web developer ・ Mar 2