https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nQWavk9mnwcv6ScMR/new-lesswrong-editor-also-an-update-to-our-llm-policy#Policy_on_LLM_Use x This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. LESSWRONG LW Login Site MetaAI Frontpage 2026 Top Fifty: 13% 113 New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.) by RobertM 14th Mar 2026 16 min read 77 113 There's a new editor experience on LessWrong! A bunch of the editor page has been rearranged to make it much more WYSIWYG compared to published post pages. All of the settings live in panels that are hidden by default and can be opened up by clicking the relevant buttons on the side of the screen. We also adopted lexical as a new editor framework powering everything behind the scenes (we were previously using ckEditor). image.png That scary arrow button in the top-left doesn't publish your post! It just opens the publishing menu. Posts^[1] now have automatic real-time autosave while you're online (like Google Docs), but still support offline editing if your connection drops out. Point-in-time revisions will still get autosaved periodically, and you can always manually save your draft if you want a specific checkpoint. The editor also has a slash menu now! image.png Good for [S:all:S] many of your custom content needs! You might be eyeing the last two items in that slash menu. This post will demo some of the new features, and I'll demo two of them simultaneously by letting Opus 4.6 explain what they are: Hi! I'm Claude, and I'm writing this from inside the post you're reading right now. This block I'm in is one of the new editor features -- let me walk you through a few of them. LLM Content Blocks This visually distinct block is an LLM Content Block. Authors can insert these into their posts to clearly attribute a section to a specific AI model. The block header shows which model generated the content, so readers always know what they're looking at. It's a way to be transparent about AI-assisted writing while keeping everything in one document. Custom Iframe Widgets The new editor supports custom interactive widgets embedded directly in posts. Authors can write HTML and JavaScript that runs in a sandboxed iframe right in the document -- useful for interactive demos, visualizations, small tools, or anything else that benefits from being more than static text. There's one just below this block, in fact. Agent Integration The editor now has an API that lets AI agents read and edit drafts collaboratively. If you share your draft's edit link with an AI assistant (like me), it can insert text, leave Google Docs-style comments, make suggested edits, and add LLM content blocks and widgets -- all showing up live in the editor. That's how this entire block was written: not copy-pasted in, but inserted directly through the API while the post was open for editing. To use it, open your post's sharing settings and set "Anyone with the link can" to Edit, then copy the edit URL and share it with your AI assistant. With Edit permissions, the agent can do everything: insert and modify text, add widgets, create LLM content blocks, and more. If you'd prefer to keep tighter control, Comment permissions still allow the agent to leave inline comments and suggested edits, which you can accept or reject individually. Setup depends on which AI tool you're using. Agent harnesses that can make HTTP requests directly -- like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor -- should work out of the box. If you're using Claude on claude.ai, you'll need to add www.lesswrong.com to your allowed domains settings , then start a new chat. (The ChatGPT web UI doesn't currently support whitelisting external domains, so it can't be used for this feature yet.) Once that's done, just paste your edit URL and ask Claude to read the post -- the API is self-describing, so it'll figure out the rest from there. And here's a small interactive widget, also written by Claude^[2], to demonstrate custom iframe widgets: Policy on LLM Use You might be wondering what this means for our policy on LLM use. Our initial policy was this: A rough guideline is that if you are using AI for writing assistance, you should spend a minimum of 1 minute per 50 words (enough to read the content several times and perform significant edits), you should not include any information that you can't verify, haven't verified, or don't understand, and you should not use the stereotypical writing style of an AI assistant. You were also permitted to put LLM-generated content into collapsible sections, if you labeled it as LLM-generated. In practice, the "you should not use the stereotypical writing style of an AI assistant" part of the requirement meant that this was a de-facto ban on LLM use, which we enforced mostly consistently on new users and very inconsistently on existing users^[3]. Bad! To motivate our updated policy, we must first do some philosophy. Why do we care about knowing whether something we're reading was generated by an LLM? LLM-generated text is not testimony has substantially informed my thinking on this question. Take the synopsis: 1. When we share words with each other, we don't only care about the words themselves. We care also--even primarily--about the mental elements of the human mind/agency that produced the words. What we want to engage with is those mental elements. 2. As of 2025, LLM text does not have those elements behind it. 3. Therefore LLM text categorically does not serve the role for communication that is served by real text. 4. Therefore the norm should be that you don't share LLM text as if someone wrote it. And, it is inadvisable to read LLM text that someone else shares as though someone wrote it. I don't think you even need to confidently believe in point 2^[4] for the norm in point 4 to be compelling. It is merely sufficient that someone else produced the text. Plagiarism is often considered bad because it's "stealing credit" for someone else's work. But it's also bad because it's misinforming your readers about your beliefs and mental models! What happens if someone asks you why you're so confident about [proposition X]? It really sucks if the answer is "Oh, uh, I didn't write that sentence, and re-reading it, it turns out I'm not actually that confident in that claim..." This is also why having LLMs "edit" your writing is often pernicious. LLM editing, unless managed extremely carefully, often involves rephrasings, added qualifiers, and swapped vocabulary in ways that meaningfully change the semantic content of your writing. Very often this is in unendorsed ways, but this can be hard to pick up on because the typical LLM writing style has a tendency to make people's eyes slide off of it^[5]. With all that in mind, our new policy is this: * "LLM output" includes all of: * + text written entirely by an LLM + text that was written by a human and then substantially^[6] edited or revised by an LLM + text that was written by an LLM and then edited or revised by a human * "LLM output" does not include: * + text that was written by a human and then lightly edited or revised by an LLM + text written by a human, which includes facts, arguments, examples, etc, which were researched/discovered/developed with LLM assistance. (If you "borrow language" from the LLM, that no longer counts as "text written by a human".) + code (either in code blocks or in the new widgets) "LLM output" must go into the new LLM content blocks. You can put "LLM output" into a collapsible section without wrapping it in an LLM content block if all of the content is "LLM output". If it's mixed, you should use LLM content blocks within the collapsible section to demarcate those parts which are "LLM output". We are going to be more strictly enforcing the "no LLM output" rule by normalizing our auto-moderation logic to treat posts by approved^ [7] users similarly to posts by new users - that is, they'll be automatically rejected if they score above a certain threshold in our automated LLM content detection pipeline. Having spent a few months staring at what's been coming down the pipe, we are also going to be lowering that threshold. This does not change our existing quality bar for new user submissions. If you are a new user and submit a post that substantially consists of content inside of LLM content blocks, it is pretty unlikely that it will get approved^[8]. This does not suddenly become wise if you're an approved user. If you're confident that people will want to read it, then sure, go ahead, but please pay close attention to the kind of feedback you get (karma, comments, etc), and if this proves noisy we'll probably just tell people to cut it out. --------------------------------------------------------------------- As always, please submit feedback, questions, and bug reports via Intercom (or in the comments below, if you prefer). 1. ^^ Not comments or other content types that use the editor, like tags - those still have the same local backup mechanism they've always had, and you can still explicitly save draft comments, but none of them get automatically synced to the cloud as you type. Also, existing posts and drafts will continue to use the previous editor, and won't have access to the new features. 2. ^^ Prompted by @jimrandomh. 3. ^^ For somewhat contingent reasons involving various choices we made with our moderation setup. 4. ^^ See my curation notice on that post for some additional thoughts and caveats. 5. ^^ I think this recent thread is instructive. 6. ^^ We'll know it when we see it. 7. ^^ In the ontology of our codebase, a term which means "users whose content goes live without further review by the admins", which is not true of users who haven't posted or commented before, and is also not true of a smaller number of users who have. 8. ^^ I'm sure the people reading this will be able to conjure up some edge cases and counterexamples; go on, have fun. New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.) 46Raemon 1Three-Monkey Mind -10JenniferRM 45Neel Nanda 22habryka 9Neel Nanda 19Adele Lopez 11Ben Pace 3Neel Nanda 10habryka 12David Matolcsi 3Ninety-Three 2Neel Nanda 2cubefox 2David Matolcsi 11RobertM 5Neel Nanda 11habryka 5Neel Nanda 2habryka 8habryka 2Neel Nanda 1Luc Brinkman 3Gunnar_Zarncke 5Raemon 2Neel Nanda 31Jan_Kulveit 5RobertM 5Gunnar_Zarncke 12omegastick 9habryka 13Ninety-Three 3DusanDNesic 2the gears to ascension 12jimrandomh 11Katalina Hernandez 7dr_s 7jimrandomh 3gustaf 2dr_s 8RobertM 5habryka 6GeneSmith 6Rafael Harth 5RobertM 5XelaP -5habryka 5papetoast -4habryka 4J Bostock 4MondSemmel 6Kaj_Sotala 4Gunnar_Zarncke 2habryka 3cubefox 3JenniferRM 2RobertM 2JenniferRM 3Adele Lopez -7RobertM 3DavidHolmes 3Chris_Leong 5habryka 3StanislavKrym 7RobertM 3DavidHolmes 2dr_s 3DavidHolmes 2Chris_Leong 2Mateusz Baginski 2papetoast 2vals tutor 3Raemon 1kaiwilliams 1JohnWittle 1Luc Brinkman 1papetoast 77Comments 77 Site MetaAI Frontpage 113 New Comment Submit 77 comments, sorted by top scoring Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 11:01 PM Some comments are truncated due to high volume. ([?]F to expand all) Change truncation settings [-]Raemon1d46 22 My somewhat-dissenting-mod-opinion: I feel more worried than I think Habryka and Robert are about LLM-content corroding LW culture, and I think I maybe have a slightly different take on why LLM-generated text is not testimony matters. (For me, it's not the most important thing that people are making 'I' statements that are false if an LLM said them. More significant to me is the implicit vouching that each statement is interesting and is some kind of worthwhile piece of a broader conversation, whether it's your opinion or not) If I were making the policy and new features, I'd be framing it like: Look, I know AI is increasingly going to be a legitimate part of some people's workflows. But, I think for >75% of LW users, it's a mistake to use LLMs as a particularly significant part of your writing process, and I think the site should be somewhat pumping away from it. I think there are very occasional new users for whom it's the right call to use LLMs, but, I'd think of it more like "the people I trust to write LLM content are people who either have written, or pretty obviously could write, multiple posts that get 100+ karma." And even then I am slightly worried about people falling do ... (read more) Reply [exclamatio]1 1Three-Monkey Mind39m I'd like to agree with and amplify this. Writing something yourself is a proof-of-work that LLM use radically reduces, if not destroys. -10JenniferRM1d [-]Neel Nanda2d*45 27 I often write posts by dictating a verbatim rough draft, giving the audio to Gemini along with a bunch of samples of my past writing and instructions up preserve my voice as much as possible, and then edit what comes out until I'm happy (but in practice it's close enough to my voice that this is just light editing). Under these rules would I need to put the whole post in an LLM output block? EDIT: On reflection, the thing that annoys me about this policy is that it lumps in many kinds of LLM assistance, with varying amounts of human investment, into an intrusive format that naively reads to me as "this is LLM slop which you should ignore". For example, under my current reading, I would need to label several popular and widely read posts of mine as LLM content (my amount of editing varied from light to heavy between the posts, but LLM assistance was substantial). I think it would have been pretty destructive to make me label each post as LLM written (in practice I would have either violated the policy, or posted on a personal blog and maybe shared a link here) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/StENzDcD3kpfGJssR/ a-pragmatic-vision-for-interpretability https://www.lesswrong.com/ posts/jP9KD... (read more) Reply [Plus]1 [-]habryka1d22 14 I would feel better about eg self selecting a tag for the post about how much an LLM was integrated into the writing process, with a spectrum of options rather than a binary FWIW, this wouldn't achieve approximately any of the goals of the above policy. The whole point of the policy is to maintain speech as testimony on LessWrong. Having a post that is "50% AI written" basically doesn't help at all with that. LessWrong post writing should frequently and routinely refer to internal experiences like "I was surprised by X" or "Y felt off to me", and if the LLMs wrote a section with those kinds of phrases, usually no amount of editing will restore meaningful testimony, and so a post that just mixes LLMs that made up random internal experiences with actual experiences a person had is failing on this dimension, even if labeled as such. Reply 9Neel Nanda1d Fair enough. How about "I stand by the content of this piece as much as if I'd written it myself"? In my case, most but not all of the phrasing and wording is written by me, and I would cut anything the LLM added that I considered false testimony [-]Adele Lopez1d19 25 I basically don't trust people to correctly make this call, especially as LLMs get smarter and more persuasive. Reply [-]Ben Pace1d11 12 I certainly don't trust the daily deluge of new users who have this in their posts yet are substantially producing slop. Reply 3Neel Nanda1d If you don't trust the user, why does the policy matter? Surely you need some way to gauge post quality regardless [-]habryka21h10 2 I have been surprised by how bad people are at assessing whether this is actually true, but I do think it's roughly the actual standard I have for putting content into LLM content blocks. I would be fine with people messaging us on Intercom before publication and being like "hey, this was more heavily AI-edited but I do actually stand behind it all in testimony, can you sanity-check that that seems right to you?", and then we can give people permission to skip the LLM content blocks. This does seem like a bit of a pain for the people involved, but I don't super know what else to do. Reply [-]David Matolcsi1d12 4 I'm doing the same - verbatim dictating the text, giving the transcript to Claude with some of my past writing in the prompt and asking it to clean up the transcript, then manually editing the outcome. I don't notice the outcome being really worse or different than my normal writing. I don't notice LLMisms in the text, and my original dictation is detailed enough that the LLM doesn't need to fill in the gaps, and in the editing process, I haven't noticed the LLM inserting or omitting points in a way I didn't intend. I'm currently two-thirds done writing a long sequence this way - if I now can't post it without putting it all in an LLM content-block, I will be very sad. Reply 3Ninety-Three1d What exactly do you mean by "asking it to clean up the transcript"? I usually take that to mean merely editing out "um"s, "ah"s and stuttering, but you seem to mean something more extensive. 2Neel Nanda1d For me I'll often reword things, change my mind, go back and add some content to an earlier section, leave todos for myself, have kinda clumsy wording, etc and an LLM is helpful for all of these 2cubefox13h Helpful in what way? What exactly does it do when it "cleans up" the transcript? 2David Matolcsi1d It's mostly getting rid of the stuttering; I will need to look at the exact details. [-]RobertM1d11 2 All four of those posts look fine to me and none of them would've gotten flagged by the automated LLM content detection. If your epistemic state with respect to the claims made in your posts is such that you aren't worried about receiving questions like "Why are you so confident in [proposition X]?" and then it turning out to be the case that you in fact don't endorse what's written, because an LLM said something meaningfully different from what you would have said in that situation, then I think the end result is fine. If you want to link to this comment on future posts so that readers understand how LLMs were used in the process of writing them, I think that'd be fine, but supererogatory. Reply 5Neel Nanda1d Gotcha. I did not take that from the policy in the post, might be good to reword EDIT: In particular, as written, the below categories feel like they include my writing, but it sounds like this is not intended [-]habryka1d11 3 LLM transcription is IMO a completely different use-case (one I certainly didn't think of when thinking about the policy above), so in as much as the editing post-transcription is light, you would not need to put it into an LLM block. I also think structural edits by LLMs are basically totally fine, like having LLMs suggest moving a section earlier or later, which seems like the other thing that would be going on here. We intentionally made the choice that light editing is fine, and heavy editing is not fine (where the line is somewhere between "is it doing line edits and suggesting changes to a relatively sparse number of individual sentences, or is it rewriting multiple sentences in a row and/or adding paragraphs"). Also just de-facto, none of the posts you link trigger my "I know it when I see it" slop-detector, so you are also fine on that dimension. Reply 5Neel Nanda1d Gotcha. I would feel reasonably happy if the policy said "text written or dictated by a human", if we count my level of LLM editing followed by me editing to be overall light editing 2habryka21h Seems reasonable IMO! 8habryka1d Separately commenting on this part: I really very much actually tried to make the LLM content blocks as non-intrusive as possible. The design and cultural goal is definitely to communicate that it is totally fine to have a lot of LLM-generated content in your post, and that good writing will often include things that LLMs have written. Maybe we failed in the design of that, but I certainly tried very hard to make it non-intrusive. 2Neel Nanda1d Fair! I was reacting to the concept and didn't pay much attention to the design. Maybe I would get used to it? I do feel like the concept is what matters here though - I don't want to read most kinds of slop, and I expect to interpret an LLM block as "high probability of slop" EDIT: Looking more at the examples in the post, I retract "intrusive", but the changed font does create a subtle sense of wrongness/a weird vibe, that I could easily see becoming associated in my head with "skip, not worth my time" 1Luc Brinkman5h Maybe the design could be inverted, where authors can label specific sections as human-written instead of labeling (the majority of sections as) AI-written? I think getting asssistance from AI is going to be the default for and more people, and trusting on people to be up to date with LW policies AND the philosophies behind them (including how AI writing doesn't reflect internal thought processes and such) AND to self-report LLM content (when general social stigma works against that) feels like a lot of dependencies. (I can see other problems with this inversed design but will share the above anyway to spur creativity). There's also something with "this section is human written" that feels nicer to me -- more like an opt-in instead of a punishment. 3Gunnar_Zarncke1d I'm doing something like that too, but without the transcript part. I would interpret the rules pretty clearly as LLM output (mostly because of the last bullet point). 5Raemon1d I'm not sure what I expect habryka/Robert to to rule here, but I think it's at least notably different: vs I think one answer is "does the resulting stuff score highly on Pangram or not?" and "does this smell like LLM" also inputs into the decision. In the case of @Neel Nanda's linked posts, they all have a 0.0 on our LLM detector. (I haven't looked into them that hard). So I would guess it is fine to not put them in the LLM block. 2Neel Nanda1d What do you mean by without the transcript part? [-]Jan_Kulveit1d31 3 Good cyborg writing almost never has the form of clearly distinct "human blocks" and "AI blocks" Reply 5RobertM1d This depends on what you mean by "good cyborg writing", but I agree that the current feature doesn't neatly cleave reality at its joints. We're thinking about how to allow more nuanced representations, but this is a pretty tricky novel problem and increasing the surface area of a thing like this has a bunch of costs in terms of people being able to understand what's going on (for both authors and readers). 5Gunnar_Zarncke1d I understand the push as drawing a clear border at a human is behind all aspects of the writing, i.e. the readers can trust that the author holds all of the mental structure behind the writing in mind and there is no risk of the author going "on rereading this it's not what I meant." cyborg writing is not strong enough for that and would have to go into a LLM block. Actually, I would prefer if there were a standard for indicating different types of LLM writing. * LLM unedited * LLM transcribed * edited significantly by LLM * drafted by LLM, edited by human * cyborg/mixed added: maybe we should also have a human written block. maybe with the name(s) of the writer(s). [-]omegastick1d12 7 the readers can trust that the author holds all of the mental structure behind the writing in mind and there is no risk of the author going "on rereading this it's not what I meant." IMO pure human writing does not meet this bar. Reply 9habryka1d It's true, but it's much worse with LLM writing! [-]Ninety-Three1d13 3 I am happy with this policy erring on the side of "any substantial LLM involvement goes in the LLM block". My experience with content the author represents as moderately LLM-involved has been that after reading, it always seems to have not been worth my time in the same way that pure LLM output seems not worth my time. Reply [Plus]3 3DusanDNesic1d I agree, but posts by @Jan_Kulveit for example (despite being cyborg written) have ~always given me great value, and I do not notice newer ones giving me less value - I do notice them being more frequent and equally useful, despite LLM smell being present in some sentences. So writing like that is an example where it is actually a net positive and would be hard (or somewhat unfair!) to label everything in a box as heavily LLM made and ignore it. 2the gears to ascension11m There should be an option for cyborg writing, and the whole post should be in such a block. If people think being honest it a punishment that's on them, but Jan Kulveit in particular certainly shouldn't feel bad about it. [-]jimrandomh1d*12 2 I (and several others) found switching to sans-serif as a way of marking LLM text didn't really work as a marker; when I first saw it I mistakenly thought that only the paragraph with the LLM-name on it was LLM-generated, and I find alternate-font text inside of posts uncanny. I jokingly hypothesized that Habryka (its advocate) had serif-synaesthesia and that's why it worked for him as a marker, and that's the story of how the serif-synaesthesia test came to be. Reply [Plus]2[noun-laugh]2 [-]Katalina Hernandez1d*11 1 Regardless of how users may feel about the changes introduced, I applaud the significant improvement on clarity and transparency (compared to the previous policy). Thank you very much! I think this is at least fairer to users- like you said, especially to new users who may end up confused as to what they did wrong. I really do not mind disclosing how and much much LLM-assistance I used to write a post or comment. In fact, being ""forced"" to think how much of a sentence was purely mine vs Claude-written is helping me a lot with clear thinking. Like others mentioned, I also find it very useful to use dication mode, and it's true that the distinction can get blurry when you spent 30 minutes talking into the mic, and it's very different from doing bare minimum thinking. But I appreciate LW keeping me accountable on LLM-reliance- I mean, thinking better is why I am here . Reply [-]dr_s1d7 7 Everyone is going on about the LLM block, meanwhile I'm like "isn't letting users inject arbitrary JS in their post kinda dangerous?". Reply 7jimrandomh22h We did our homework on the browser security model; content in iframes (with sandboxing attributes) shouldn't be able to get login cookies/ etc from the parent page. This is load-bearing for advertisements not stealing everything, so we do expect browsers to treat weaknesses in this as real security issues and fix them. When post HTML is retrieved through the API, you have to do some assembly to put the iframes in, so third party clients can't be insecurely surprised by it. As for whether sandboxed frames can crash the outer page or make the outer page slow, eg by doing into an infinite loop or running out of memory, the story is a bit more complicated (depends on browser, browser heuristics, and amount of system RAM); we decided it's okay as long as it's limited to an embed in a post crashing its own post page (as opposed to the front page or a link preview). 3gustaf1d What dangers are you thinking of? Most dangers I would associate with "inject arbitrary JS" are not possible here because of the sandboxing by the browser. e.g. steal cookies, act on behalf of user, change UI that users trusts, ... If you look in the codebase you'll find what amounts to