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I have seen it expressed here a few times, but these LLM blog post tech proposal things really give off the vibe (pun intended) of someone being gaslit by claude into thinking they are onto something really important or innovative. It feels really weird reading it. A bit like reading someone's somewhat self aggrandizing journal entries, or walking in on someone... Doin' stuff. I don't hate LLMs, they have made some aspects of my job easier for sure, but I think some people are still pretty off base on where and how it's acceptable to offload to an LLM.
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> I find that if you put a decent bit of engineering effort into that "disaster recovery" synchronisation, it can often act as the main or only synchronisation process for quite a lot of systems.

Another benefit is that you get to exercise those disaster recovery mechanisms regularly as part of the normal functioning of the system, rather than a specialized path that is only rarely exercised (and thus may be broken when you need it the most).

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Maybe the LLM has written maximum 50 words of the article by just being directed to switch things around and improve grammar and or internal consistency
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"And here’s the absurd part: that history exists."

"It’s a jigsaw puzzle where the manufacturer had the original picture, cut it up, mailed me the pieces one at a time, lost a few in the post, mailed some twice, and printed nothing on the box."

"and that’s the entire problem: nothing announces a gap."

"None of this is any provider’s bug. Their webhooks work exactly as documented. The problem is what a webhook is: a notification, “something happened, here’s a POST about it.”"

Almost this entire section is clearly written by an LLM

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I think my is-this-LLM alert is triggered not by mere use of phrases / constructions beloved of popular LLMs, but by things like unmotivated magpie-ish use of those phrases.

I didn't get that reading this (I didn't read the whole piece but I had read the parts you quote before reading your comment).

Often the LLM-beloved constructions are good usage in the right contexts.

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Re-reading, I think the article is in a grey area, and I believe that there is a decent amount of human experience underpinning it. It certainly isn't 100% LLM, but it's a long way from 100% human.

But I wrote my commment after reading the article then the spec (https://welidev.github.io/scroll/), and so the spec was "top of mind".

The spec is just awash in LLM-isms. The cadence and rhetorical style are very Claudish. The visual style is basically "Claude's artifact plugin" (it may not be exactly that but it is an incredibly distinct signature). So the experience of reading the spec is very much an "AI slop" experience.

The reason I object to this is that the way these LLMs write is really well-tuned to gloss over small but critical details. And "small but critical details" are sort of the whole field of distributed systems.

This seems to be most true for Anthropic models (I am assuming there is some cultural defect in the way they give feedback), but it seems to be pretty universal, unless you give them some really strong stylistic anchor to a different style.

(As an aside, I sometimes wonder if this is part of the reason that LLMs seem from the outside to be succeeding disproportionately at mathematics: mathematics papers and mathematical notation may be a strong enough cultural force to override Anthropic's lack of taste and unlock the true power of the model).

I'm not saying there might not have been plenty of human guidance, but either way I don't think there's quite enough substance to this (based on everything I wrote in my comment) for this to feel like "a solution" either way.

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Detecting LLM-written text is a critical skill these days. If you believe only 50 words of this was slop, then that's a skill you could improve.
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