No, but it satisfies a number of algorithms that drive traffic to websites better, and there are honestly people who will upvote something that starts strong and is long without reading the whole thing, who wouldn't upvote that same strong start if it wasn't padded with filler to make it look more exhausitive.

Not a fan either but there are real game theoretic reasons to do it.

You think this was written by AI? I'm curious, why? Anytime I'm about to read a long post I generally paste it into a few detectors for sanity, but none of them flagged anything for this one. I read the entirety and thought it was pretty compelling - long maybe, but thoughtful. I appreciated the historical quotes interjected, and didn't find the prose suspect.

"On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question:"

"This gives us the first corollary of end-state thinking cold but honest:"

"What does the end-state look like? My take is simple — a single line: PRD is Code."

"This shift brings a quiet, lethal corollary: "

"But think clearly about what letting go means."

"It sounds like a lament; it is actually a refining process. "

"When the tide of the times is pushing you along, slow can be a discipline."

These outtakes are all fairly obvious unedited claudeslop that add nothing to the argument. The excessive use of bolding and em-dashes throughout the article are also signals.

Some of the formatting for emphasis and em-dashes looked a bit iffy. It's hard to imagine AI wasn't involved, at least an an editor or to discuss ideas. To be clear, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with this.

"—" "blast radius"

done :)

I actually didn't smell AI at all while reading this article, because the idea density seemed high, rather than when AI just expands a few ideas into repetitive mumbo jumbo. The last portion was a bit wordy and metaphysical, but he landed the plane at the end.

Isn't the original post in Chinese? English is probably llm translated - like the whole blog

LLM translations of non-LLM text don't generally look as bad as this does. Many of the LLM-y traits -- inappropriate overuse of bolding and em-dashes, aggressively punchy sentences, and an essay that seems artifically stretched out to hit a word count -- are not affected by translation.

You can switch to the Chinese language version. Why don't you read that one first before deciding if it's LLM generated.

I enjoyed the fact that AI was used to deliver the anti-AI message.

that fewer people will read because it spends pages saying what could be paragraphs

Yeah, I got through about 2/3 of it, then called it quits.

I wonder if the author tried to sit down and read the whole post, from beginning to end in one go? The AI-written posts feel sludgy, like plain oatmeal that's been cooked too long, homogenous and bland.

Yeah it became very wearisome to read. I started skimming about halfway through.

Maybe you don't understand, if we didn't have LLMs expanding our ideas into longer form we wouldn't have anything to give to LLMs to summarize.

My boss pays me for the lines of code, right?

Glad I wasn't the only one!

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal

Unfortunately with word generators this has become -

I would have written a letter, but I couldn’t be bothered.

third time i see this cliche quote in two days

The quoting will continue until writing improves

The thing is that writing - especially writing well - is fairly hard, and does take time and mental effort. So lazy authors (or wannabe authors) take the shortcut. But the fact remains that most of us do not want to read AI-generated slop, and human-written slop is not much better.

So there is a point to the quote, no matter how many times you've read it. But there is a countering point as well: If you don't have time, don't write. Don't use that as an excuse to get lazy and shove slop at us.

And yet people(?) keep publishing stuff that's too long.