???
Why in the world would that be an "ofc"?
If you're trying to establish yourself as a writer and communicator, LLM's are the last thing you want to color your personal voice with. They may have a role in cleaning up interpersonal communication or in helping non-professional communicators shape up their prose for formal occasions, but they are not some kind of magic neutral way to improve a writer's writing.
As you're seeing here, all that work would have been better received without the compromises and tells of LLM-ese because it would have been your writing, in your voice, as an intelligent analyst and communicator. The idiosyncrasies of that prose voice (your prose voice), are a durable signature that people come to associate with you individually and help them interpret tone, inflection, emphasis, insight in ways that the genericism and accent of an LLM scrubs out.
Give yourself more credit and don't do this; or at least don't treat it as an "of course"!
This is not really meant to single you out, since there's a lot of this going around, but I really don't think this should be a matter of "of course". Why should it be the default to let a tool that doesn't have your context, or your voice, override your own usage of language?
And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”
LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.
If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.
I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.
That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:
> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.
> The headlines say yes.
> Patriot crews shot down a Kinzhal over Kyiv on the night of May 4, 2023. Arrow-3 batteries killed Iranian ballistic missiles over Tel Aviv in April and October 2024. A pair of THAAD batteries in Israel emptied something close to a quarter of the US national inventory across twelve days of war in June 2025. The headline word in every one of those engagements was hypersonic.
> The headline is wrong.
> No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target. Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic. The Avangard, the only Russian vehicle that meets the strict definition, has sat in silos in Orenburg since 2019 without being touched. The Chinese DF-17 has never been used. The American Dark Eagle has not yet been ordered to fire.
> So when we ask “can you stop a hypersonic,” we are partly asking “what would happen if anyone fired one.”
There are assorted other issues with the article as well, like excessive use of passive voice, lack of parallelism, and too much meta-talk.
(Also "honest" assessments; the word "honest" has gone the way of "delve".)
Use LLMs to proofread and critique structure. Don't take a single word they generate and put it in your copy, not even simple vocabulary suggestions. The more work you put into a piece, the more important this rule is.
"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."
- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?
> The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics
> The honest 2026 answer is in three parts.
> The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried
Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.
Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably.
That said I enjoyed the article!
I will only look at AI slop if paid to do so.
(Scouting ahead for alternatives, I wouldn't mind a Lobste.rs invite, to see whether that's pleasantly anti-slop.)