[HN Gopher] What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude...
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What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the
space around AI
Author : benbreen
Score : 63 points
Date : 2026-02-18 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| jongjong wrote:
| I agree with the assessment that pure writing (by a human) is
| over. Content is going to matter a lot more.
|
| It's going to be tough for fiction authors to break through.
| Sadly, I don't think the average consumer has sufficiently good
| taste to tell when something is genuinely novel. People often
| prefer the carefully formulated familiar garbage over the
| creative gems; this was true before AI and, IMO, will continue to
| be true after AI. This is not just about writing, it's about art
| in general.
|
| There will be a subset of people who can see through the form and
| see substance and those will be able to identify non-AI work but
| they will continue to be a minority. The masses will happily
| consume the slop. The masses have poor taste and they're more
| interested in "comfort food" ideas than actually novel ideas.
| Novelty just doesn't do it for them. Most people are not curious,
| new ideas don't interest them. These people will live and breathe
| AI slop and they will feel uncomfortable if presented with new
| material, even if wrapped in a layer of AI (e.g. human-written
| core ideas, rewritten by AI).
|
| I feel like that about most books, music and pop culture in
| general; it was slop and it will continue to be slop... It was
| the same basic ideas about elves, dragons, wizards, orcs, kings,
| queens, etc... Just reorganized and mashed with different
| overarching storylines "a difficult journey" or "epic battles"
| with different wording.
|
| Most people don't understand the difference between pure AI-
| generated content (seeded by a small human input) and human-
| generated content which was rewritten by AI (seeded by a large
| human input) because most people don't care about and never cared
| about substance. Their entire lives may be about form over
| substance.
| apsurd wrote:
| What is the difference between writing and content?
| RyanHamilton wrote:
| I would guess he's looking to compare the equivalent of fast-
| food to fine-dining or nutritious eating.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Who or what is "the masses" actually?
| altruios wrote:
| Reminded of this clip.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg
|
| But as much as it pains me to admit... the current state of
| America is the slopocalypse. A slopalanche. A slopnado. AI
| cats waking people up in the middle of the night, blasting
| down doors, glitching out. All produced by slop-slingers.
| It's rather bleak for long form attention content, human
| created or not.
|
| Its a war of/on attention. A war to secure your attention
| during the time that you would otherwise think for yourself.
| Keep off the short form content, is my advice.
| pawelduda wrote:
| About the article that's referenced in the beginning - that
| sentiment presented in it honestly sounds like AI version of
| cryptocurrency euphoria just as the bubble burst. "You are not
| ready for what's going to happen to the economy", "crypto will
| replace tradfi, experts agree". The article is sitting at almost
| 100M views after just a week and has strong FOMO vibes. To be
| honest, it's very conflicting for me to believe that, because
| I've been using AI and compared to crypto, it doesn't just feel
| like magic, it also does magic. However, I can't help but think
| of this parallel and the possibilty that somehow the AI bubble
| could right now be starting to stall/regress. The only problem is
| that I just don't see how such a scenario would play out, given
| how good and useful these tools are
| davtyan1202 wrote:
| As we move further into a world where data exfiltration is
| becoming more sophisticated, local-first processing isn't just a
| luxury--it's a necessity. Hardware is finally powerful enough to
| handle what used to require a massive backend infrastructure.
| caseyohara wrote:
| My spidey-sense: the "it isn't X, it's Y" construct _and_ the
| dreaded em dash.
| apsurd wrote:
| Axios got traction because it heavily condensed news into more
| scannable content for the twitter, insta, Tok crowd.
|
| So AI is this on massive steroids. It is unsettling but it seems
| a recurring need to point out that across the board many of "it's
| because of AI" things were already happening. "Post truth" is one
| I'm most interested in.
|
| AI condenses it all on a surreal and unsettling timeline. But
| humans are still humans.
|
| And to me, that means that I will continue to seek out and pay
| for good writing like The Atlantic. btw I've enjoyed listening to
| articles via their auto-generated NOA AI voice thing.
|
| Additionally, not all writing serves the same purpose. The
| article makes these sweeping claims about "all of writing". Gets
| clicks I guess, but to the point, most of why and what people
| read is toward some immediate and functional need. Like work,
| like some way to make money, indirectly. Some hack. Some fast-
| forwarding of "the point". No wonder AI is taking over that job.
|
| And then there's creative expression and connection. And yes I
| know AI is taking over all the creative industries too. What I'm
| saying is we've always been separating "the masses" from those
| that "appreciate real art".
|
| Same story.
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| > "Post truth" is one I'm most interested in.
|
| I have this theory that the post-truth era began with the
| invention of the printing press and gained iteratively more
| traction with each revolution in information technology.
| Finbel wrote:
| So slightly before 1440 was peak Truth for humanity?
| yannyu wrote:
| I think you're right, but I also think it's worthwhile to
| look at Edward Bernays in the early 1900s and his specific
| influence on how companies and governments to this day shape
| deliberately shape public opinion in their favor. There's an
| argument that his work and the work of his contemporaries was
| a critical point in the flooding of the collective
| consciousness with what we would consider propaganda,
| misinformation, or covert advertising.
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| > There's an argument that his work and the work of his
| contemporaries was a critical point in the flooding of the
| collective consciousness with what we would consider
| propaganda
|
| I would rather say that Bernays was a keen observer and
| understood mass behavior and the potential of mass media
| like no one else in his time. Soren Kierkegaard has written
| about the role of public opinion and mass media in the 19th
| and had a rather pessimistic outlook on it. You have stuff
| like the Dreyfuss Affair where mass media already played a
| role in polarizing people and playing into the
| ressentiments of the people. There were signs that people
| were overwhelmed by mass media even before Bernays. I would
| say that Bernays observed these things and used those
| observations to develop systematic methods for influencing
| the masses. The problem was already there, Bernays just
| exploited it systematically.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| Doesn't matter when post-truth started because it's now over,
| and it's more accurate to characterize this era as "post-
| rationality". Most people do seem to understand this, but we
| are in different stages of grief about it.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Same. New yorker is the other mag I subscribed to.
|
| Until 3 weeks ago I had a high cortisol inducing morning read:
| nyt, wsj, axios, politico. I went on a weeklong camping trip
| with no phone and haven't logged into those yet. It's fine.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| People think I'm nuts when I tell them I ditched
| subscriptions for those sites and only check them maybe once
| a week, if that.
|
| But what you said is 100% true, it's fine. When things in
| your life provide net negative value it's in your best
| interest to ditch them.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I agree with this in general but with caveats. For example I
| think reading national-sized news every day sucks. But if
| you're of a specific demographic it might be useful to keep
| pretty up to date on nuanced issues, like if you're a gun
| owner you will probably want to keep up to date on gun
| licensing in your area. Or if you're a trans person it's
| pretty important nowadays to be very aware of laws being
| passed to dictate your legally going to whatever bathroom or
| something.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| > Additionally, not all writing serves the same purpose.
|
| I think this is a really important point and to add on, there
| is a _lot_ of writing that is really good, but only in a way
| that a niche audience can appreciate. Today 's AI can basically
| compete with the low quality stuff that makes up most of social
| media, it can't really compete with higher quality stuff
| targeted to a general audience, and it's still nowhere close to
| some more niche classics.
|
| An interesting thought experiment is whether it's possible that
| AI tools could write a novel that's better than War and Peace.
| A quick google shows a lot of (poorly written) articles about
| how "AI is just a machine, so it can never be _creative_ ,"
| which strikes me as a weak argument way too focused on a
| physical detail instead of the result. War and Peace and/or
| other great novels are certainly in the training set of some or
| all models, and there is some real consensus about which ones
| are great, not just random subjective opinions.
|
| I kind of think... there is still something fundamental that
| would get in the way, but that it is still totally achievable
| to overcome that some day? I don't think it's _impossible_ for
| an AI to be creative in a humanlike way, they don 't seem
| optimized for it because they are completely optimized for the
| sort of analytical mode of reading and writing, not the
| creative/immersive one.
| dtf wrote:
| _" Is Claude Code junk food, though? ... although I have barely
| written a line of code on my own, the cognitive work of learning
| the architecture -- developing a new epistemological framework
| for "how developers think" -- feels real."_
|
| Might this also apply to learning about writing? If have barely
| written a line of prose on my own, but spent a year generating a
| large corpus of it aided by these fabulous machines, might I also
| come to understand "how writers think"?
|
| I love the later description of writing as a "special,
| irreplaceable form of thinking forged from solitary perception
| and [enormous amounts of] labor", where "style isn't something
| you apply later; it's embedded in your perception" (according to
| Amis). Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as
| software development?
| girvo wrote:
| My current bugbear is how art is held up as creativity and
| worthy of societal protection and scorn against AI muscling in
| on it
|
| While the same people in the _same_ comments say it's fine to
| replace programming with it
|
| When pressed they talk about creativity, as if software
| development has none...
| arctic-true wrote:
| The easiest job to automate is someone else's.
| yason wrote:
| Art has two facets. First is if you like it. If you do, you
| don't need to care where it came from. Second is the art as
| cultured and defined by the artistic elites. They don't care
| if art is liked or likable, they care about the pedigree,
| i.e. where it came from, and that it fits what they consider
| worthy art. Between these two is what I call filler art:
| stuff that's rather indifferent and not very notable, but
| often crosses over some minimum bar that it's accepted by,
| and maybe popular among average people who aren't that
| seriously interested in art.
|
| In the first category, AI is no problem. If you enjoy what
| you see or hear, it doesn't make a difference if it was
| created by which kind of artist or AI. In the second
| category, for the elite, AI art is no less unacceptable than
| current popular art or, for that matter, anything at all that
| doesn't fit their own definition of real art. Makes no
| difference. Then the filler art.. the bar there is not very
| high but it will likely improve with AI. It's nothing that's
| been seriously invested in so far, and it's cheaper to let AI
| create it rather than poorly paid people.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| a lot of artists don't mind use AI for art outside their
| field
|
| I was in a fashion show in tokyo in 2024.
|
| i noticed their fashion was all human designed. but they had
| a lot of posters, video, and music that was AI generated.
|
| I point blank asked the curator why he used AI for some stuff
| but didn't enhance the fashion with AI. I was a bit naive
| because I was actually curious to see if AI wasn't ready for
| fashion or maybe they were going for an aesthetic. I
| genuinely was trying to learn and not point out a hypocrisy.
|
| he got mad and didn't answer. i guess it is because they
| didn't want to pay for everything else. big lesson learned in
| what to ask lol.
| jarjoura wrote:
| I haven't heard writers make any kind of stance on software
| engineering, but Brandon Sanderson has very publicly
| renounced AI writing because it lacks any kind of authentic
| journey of an authors own writing. Just as we would cringe at
| our first software projects, he cringes at his first
| published novel.
|
| I think that's a reasonable argument to make against
| generative art in any form.
|
| However, he does celebrate LLM advancements in health and
| accessibility, and I've seen most "AI haters" handwave away
| its use there. It's a weird dissonance to me too that its use
| is perfectly okay if it helps your grandparents live a
| longer, and higher quality of life, but not okay if your
| grandparents use that longer life to use AI-assisted writing
| to write a novel that Brandon would want to read.
| benbreen wrote:
| Thank you, this sort of insight is exactly why I've felt such
| kinship with what software engineers like Karpathy and Simon
| Willison have been writing lately. It seems obvious to me that
| there is something special and irreplaceable about the thought
| processes that create good code.
|
| However, I think there is also something qualitatively
| different about how work is done in these two domains.
|
| Example: refactoring a codebase is not really analogous to
| revising a nonfiction book, even though they both involve
| rewriting of a sort. Even before AI, the former used far more
| tooling and automated processes. There is, e.g., no ESLint for
| prose which can tell you which sentences are going to fail to
| "compile" (i.e., fail to make sense to a reader).
|
| The special taste or skillset of a programmer seems to me to
| involve systems thinking and tool use in a different way than
| the special taste of a writer, which is more about transmuting
| personal life experiences and tacit knowledge into words, even
| if tools (word processor) and systems (editors, informants,
| primary sources) are used along the way.
|
| Sort of half formed ideas here but I find this a really rich
| vein of thought to work through. And one of the points of my
| post is that writing is about thinking in public and with a
| readership. Many thanks for helping me do that.
|
| I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do think it
| might be comparable, yes. If you had good taste about what to
| get Opus 4.6 to write, and kept iterating on it in a way that
| exposes the results to public view, I think you'd definitely
| develop a more fine grained sense of the epistemological
| perspective of a writer. But you wouldn't be one any more than
| I'm a software developer just because I've had Claude Code make
| a lot of GitHub commits lately (if anyone's interested:
| https://github.com/benjaminbreen).
| ayoung5555 wrote:
| As much as the general public seems to be turning against AI,
| people only seem to care when they're aware it's AI. Those of us
| intentionally aware of it are better tuned to identify LLM-speak
| and generated slop.
|
| Most human writing isn't good. Take LinkedIn, for example. It
| didn't suddenly become bad because of LLM-slop posts - humans
| pioneered its now-ubiquitous style. And now even when something
| is human-written, we're already seeing humans absorb linguistic
| patterns common to LLM writing. That said, I'm confident slop
| from any platform with user-generated content will eventually
| fade away from my feeds because the algorithms will pick up on
| that as a signal. (edit to add from my feeds)
|
| What concerns me most is that there's absolutely no way this
| isn't detrimental to students. While AI can be a tool in STEM,
| I'm hearing from teachers among family and friends that
| everything students write is from an LLM.
|
| Leaning on AI to write code I'd otherwise write myself might be a
| slight net negative on my ability to write future code - but
| brains are elastic enough that I could close an n month gap in
| 1/2n months time or something.
|
| From middle school to university, students are doing everything
| for the first time, and there's no recovering habits or memories
| that never formed in the first place. They made the ACT easier 2
| years ago (reduced # of questions) and in the US the average
| score has set a new record low every year since then. Not only is
| there no clear path to improvement, there's an even clearer path
| to things getting worse.
| submeta wrote:
| I wonder whether we will see a shift back toward human generated,
| organic content, writing that is not perfectly polished or
| exhaustively articulated. For an LLM, it is effortless to smooth
| every edge and fully flesh out every thought. For humans, it is
| not.
|
| After two years of reading increasing amounts of LLM generated
| text, I find myself appreciating something different: concise,
| slightly rough writing that is not optimized to perfection, but
| clearly written by another human being
| kittikitti wrote:
| I think people hate AI generated writing more than they like
| human curated writing. At the same time, I find that people like
| AI content more than my writing. I write, comment, and blog in
| many different places and I notice that my AI generated content
| does much better in terms of engagement. I'm not a writer, I
| code, so it might be that my writing is not professional. Whereas
| my code-by-hand still edges out against AI.
|
| We need to value human content more. I find that many real people
| eventually get banned while the bots are always forced to follow
| rules. The Dead Internet hypothesis sounds more inevitable under
| these conditions.
|
| Indeed we all now have a neuron that fires every time we sense AI
| content. However, maybe we need to train another neuron that
| activates when content is genuine.
| 1necornbuilder wrote:
| The "cognitive debt" framing resonates, but from an unexpected
| direction. I'm not a developer. I've never written a line of
| code. I built enterprise software -- a live computer vision
| system monitoring industrial cranes, deployed on Google Cloud
| Run, generating $600K+ in contracts -- entirely by chatting with
| Claude. No IDE, no terminal muscle memory to lose. For me, there
| is no cognitive debt in the code. There's no ground truth I'm
| losing touch with, because I never had it. The ground truth I
| bring is domain knowledge: fifteen years of understanding what an
| industrial operator actually needs to see on a screen at 3am.
| What Breen describes as "junk food" -- the dopamine hit of
| watching Claude build a new feature -- is, for domain experts
| like me, the first time in history we could participate in
| building at all. The gap that existed wasn't "developer loses
| touch with code." It was "person closest to the problem could
| never build the solution." But his core point about writing
| holds, even here. The thinking that produces good software
| requirements -- the careful articulation of what needs to be
| built and why -- that remains irreducibly human. My most
| important contributions to my own codebase aren't commits.
| They're the precise questions I ask. Maybe cognitive debt is
| domain-specific. Developers accumulate it. Domain experts spend
| it.
| piker wrote:
| You vibe-coded a computer-vision product that is to be used in
| monitoring industrial cranes? And people are using it?
| AstroBen wrote:
| This type of cadence.
|
| You know the one.
|
| Choppy. Fast. Saying nothing at all.
|
| It's not just boring and disjointed. It's full-on slop via human-
| adjacent mimicry.
|
| Let's get very clear, very grounded, and very unsentimental for a
| moment.
|
| The contrast to good writing is brutal, and not in a poetic way.
| In a teeth-on-edge, stomach-dropping way. The dissonance is
| violent.
|
| Here's the raw truth:
|
| It's not wisdom. It's not professional. It's not even
| particularly original.
|
| You are very right to be angry. Brands picking soulless drivel
| over real human creatives.
|
| And now we finish with a pseudo-deep confirmation of your bias.
|
| ---
|
| Before long everyone will be used to it and it'll evoke the same
| eugh response
|
| Sometimes standing out or wuality writing doesn't actually
| matter. Let AI do that part
| vpribish wrote:
| well done. :)
|
| and at the same time the chop becomes long-form slop,
| stretching out a little seed of a human prompt into a sea of
| inane prose.
| rnakle wrote:
| That is a shallow piece of the new genre: I am a concerned
| academic who nevertheless uses these new tools to create vibe
| coded slop and has to tell the world about it.
|
| Everything is inevitable but my own job is secure. Have I already
| told you how concerned I am?
|
| No novelty. No intellectual challenge. No spirit. Just AI
| advertisements! /s
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