On the one hand I don’t let Claude fully write for me. Even if I let it write a draft based on an outline, I so thoroughly rewrite that draft that it’s not really Claude’s anymore. It’s more like a bunch of babble in the direction of what I want that I can use to prune into what I want to say.
But on the other I find all kinds of docs where basically nothing is lost by letting Claude lead the writing.
Tech specs? Yep, I just let Claude own the words. All I care about are the decisions, and there’s little value in exactly how those decisions are expressed in words so long as the decisions are communicated clearly.
Research paper? Again, mostly can just let Claude own it. The words are just a means to convey some results. No one is reading this for the prose.
Claude skills? Also just let Claude write them. Yes I might make some small tweaks in the name of token efficiency, but it knows how to write for itself better than I can.
But an essay on my blog? A chapter in my book? Well, those places are where I express my ideas, and Claude can’t understand them better than I can unless I first clearly express them myself, at which point all Claude can offer is additional ways to explain the same ideas (which is sometimes helpful in editing!).
So in the end I find it really depends on the purpose of the writing. If it’s about the words and ideas, then I agree, don’t let LLMs write for you. But if it’s not so much about the words as about what the words are used to convey, then the words aren’t adding a lot of value by being written by you and you can safely let the LLM write them, just as I like the LLMs write code.
I agree with this directionally, but would add a caveat to your research paper caveat. If it’s a research paper of the type ‘I ran experiment X and found Y’ then yes, I suppose the words don’t matter so much beyond conveying the result—although I’ve found Claude to have a tendency to overclaim and overinterpret results that needs to be carefully kept in check, to the extent that I often think “man it’d have been easier to write this myself!”
But ‘I ran experiment X and found Y’ is not what every research paper is! For many research papers, I definitely care about the ideas of the author and how they convey them, so I’d rather they stay mostly LLM-free.
I’m quickly finding lots of caveats.
On the one hand I don’t let Claude fully write for me. Even if I let it write a draft based on an outline, I so thoroughly rewrite that draft that it’s not really Claude’s anymore. It’s more like a bunch of babble in the direction of what I want that I can use to prune into what I want to say.
But on the other I find all kinds of docs where basically nothing is lost by letting Claude lead the writing.
Tech specs? Yep, I just let Claude own the words. All I care about are the decisions, and there’s little value in exactly how those decisions are expressed in words so long as the decisions are communicated clearly.
Research paper? Again, mostly can just let Claude own it. The words are just a means to convey some results. No one is reading this for the prose.
Claude skills? Also just let Claude write them. Yes I might make some small tweaks in the name of token efficiency, but it knows how to write for itself better than I can.
But an essay on my blog? A chapter in my book? Well, those places are where I express my ideas, and Claude can’t understand them better than I can unless I first clearly express them myself, at which point all Claude can offer is additional ways to explain the same ideas (which is sometimes helpful in editing!).
So in the end I find it really depends on the purpose of the writing. If it’s about the words and ideas, then I agree, don’t let LLMs write for you. But if it’s not so much about the words as about what the words are used to convey, then the words aren’t adding a lot of value by being written by you and you can safely let the LLM write them, just as I like the LLMs write code.
I agree with this directionally, but would add a caveat to your research paper caveat. If it’s a research paper of the type ‘I ran experiment X and found Y’ then yes, I suppose the words don’t matter so much beyond conveying the result—although I’ve found Claude to have a tendency to overclaim and overinterpret results that needs to be carefully kept in check, to the extent that I often think “man it’d have been easier to write this myself!”
But ‘I ran experiment X and found Y’ is not what every research paper is! For many research papers, I definitely care about the ideas of the author and how they convey them, so I’d rather they stay mostly LLM-free.