It was human written, fed to AI, human adjusted, re-fed, and around again — for days, with dozens of reviewers in between. (GPT 5.6 Sol doing the AI half of the lifting, for what it's worth.) So "nobody even looked at it" is the one criticism I can rule out. Everybody looked at it.
But you aren't wrong. The marketting heavy parts are where the tone shows. And honestly those are the parts I write worst. Exactly why I lean on AI there. When I ran before/after comparisons past reviewers, the polished versions kept winning. Maybe that's the norm creeping into how all of us write now. I notice it in my own sentences too. The words I choose. But given the choice between slightly synthetic and authentically clumsy, I tested both and shipped the one that read better.
Personally I don't think that a release announcement needs to be "marketing heavy" in the first place.
That's really the heart of the problem - in an effort to sound exciting, many parts of the article are just wasting the reader's time rather than simply explaining how things work clearly and directly.
No release announcement has the time to explain how things work. I actually think in hindsight what Rich did by including a video in the Runes announcement worked well. I will have a livestream tomorrow.
To be clear I’m not making any statement or implication about Ryan’s work or his quality as a developer. As someone who knows nothing about Solid I’m trying to read the article and understand what the USP is and struggling. And remarking on the AI tells in the writing.
Hey, I want to say that I love Solid as an alternative to react. I've been using it for hobby projects for 5+ years.
I'm at least one example of someone who prefers authentically clumsy. Users like me will be less likely to give Solid a chance if they cannot see that there are real humans with a vision behind it.
The marketting heavy parts are where the tone shows. And honestly those are the parts I write worst. Exactly why I lean on AI there.
Everybody using AI to write slop do so because they think they can't write better but we all prefer a bad written article to the "correct" slop we are getting nowadays.
Because it's important. You don't want to read my raw writing. Try to read my HackMD and you see what you'd get. It's always taken me a lot of work to release my medium and dev.to articles. Grammarly working hard, and multiple human editors. It scales with how many people I think will read it. A release announcement is important. It needs to be clear and it needs to convey the most information in a very short span. You don't have the privledge to meander in this sort of thing. And meandering is exactly what I'd do if left on my own.
- meander freely and use the character limit to help you truncate
- split into one tweet per point, with one code snippet screenshot + quick explainer
- either bullets like this or 2-3 sentences each
Then your article becomes a slight expansion of the thread, where you can adjust language to make it flow better instead of starting with fluff and trying to carve it into something solid
(I think of it like mobile-first design applied to writing)
If the reason you don't like meandering or bad grammar is because you associate it with low quality/low effort writing, then the same can be said about standard LLM output. You may have gone through many iterations to land at this specific AI generated article, which stands up to your level of scrutiny over the content, but to anyone who doesn't scrutinize it just comes off like any other AI generated article.
The AI tone in the announcement is light enough to be barely noticeable, but it’s there. Note that posting AI-generated comments to HN is explicitly forbidden.
Anyone who has spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to heavily edit that out of my writing, but now AI uses the proper punctuation and fills in where I miss words. It's like what I hear in my head but better. Because it is grammatically sound.
After:
Anyone who's spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to spend whole editing passes beating that out of my drafts. Now AI handles the punctuation and fills in the words I skip. It's what I hear in my head, but grammatically sound.
The result is almost always terser, more clear, and to the point. And usually all it takes is one more pass over to adjust anything I wouldn't say. In this case I kept the after verbatim just to illustrate my point.
I like my wording for `miss` better but I like the AI ending much better. This was just in a small two sentence response. I find over the course of an article the impact is much greater.
FWIW I also prefer the before. "whole editing passes beating that out" and "what I hear in my head, but grammatically sound" might not be immediate AI tells like 'and honestly' and 'load-bearing', but they are phrases you'd expect in a magazine article, not a forum comment. That kind of language in this context makes it smell like AI.
It's when you go top to bottom reworking parts of an article. Often later changes can impact earlier prose, so often I end up doing editing in several passes. That being said AI decided that term. It's actually more accurate to the actual process than what I originally wrote.
Comments
It was human written, fed to AI, human adjusted, re-fed, and around again — for days, with dozens of reviewers in between. (GPT 5.6 Sol doing the AI half of the lifting, for what it's worth.) So "nobody even looked at it" is the one criticism I can rule out. Everybody looked at it.
But you aren't wrong. The marketting heavy parts are where the tone shows. And honestly those are the parts I write worst. Exactly why I lean on AI there. When I ran before/after comparisons past reviewers, the polished versions kept winning. Maybe that's the norm creeping into how all of us write now. I notice it in my own sentences too. The words I choose. But given the choice between slightly synthetic and authentically clumsy, I tested both and shipped the one that read better.
Personally I don't think that a release announcement needs to be "marketing heavy" in the first place.
That's really the heart of the problem - in an effort to sound exciting, many parts of the article are just wasting the reader's time rather than simply explaining how things work clearly and directly.
No release announcement has the time to explain how things work. I actually think in hindsight what Rich did by including a video in the Runes announcement worked well. I will have a livestream tomorrow.
Out of curiosity, did you use AI for this reply too? It reads a bit like it.
Ryan has given so much to this community... perhaps he gives too much.
To be clear I’m not making any statement or implication about Ryan’s work or his quality as a developer. As someone who knows nothing about Solid I’m trying to read the article and understand what the USP is and struggling. And remarking on the AI tells in the writing.
Is non-AI writing too much? I don't think his projects would have got as much attention if it was AI-written since the beginning.
AI knows how to spell “marketting”.
Hey, I want to say that I love Solid as an alternative to react. I've been using it for hobby projects for 5+ years.
I'm at least one example of someone who prefers authentically clumsy. Users like me will be less likely to give Solid a chance if they cannot see that there are real humans with a vision behind it.
Everybody using AI to write slop do so because they think they can't write better but we all prefer a bad written article to the "correct" slop we are getting nowadays.
And there we have it. "AI"s prime use case. Best instead of good enough.
Why do you need several human/ai iteration rounds and dozens of reviewers for a blog post?
Because it's important. You don't want to read my raw writing. Try to read my HackMD and you see what you'd get. It's always taken me a lot of work to release my medium and dev.to articles. Grammarly working hard, and multiple human editors. It scales with how many people I think will read it. A release announcement is important. It needs to be clear and it needs to convey the most information in a very short span. You don't have the privledge to meander in this sort of thing. And meandering is exactly what I'd do if left on my own.
Try writing the tweet announcement thread first
- meander freely and use the character limit to help you truncate
- split into one tweet per point, with one code snippet screenshot + quick explainer
- either bullets like this or 2-3 sentences each
Then your article becomes a slight expansion of the thread, where you can adjust language to make it flow better instead of starting with fluff and trying to carve it into something solid
(I think of it like mobile-first design applied to writing)
If the reason you don't like meandering or bad grammar is because you associate it with low quality/low effort writing, then the same can be said about standard LLM output. You may have gone through many iterations to land at this specific AI generated article, which stands up to your level of scrutiny over the content, but to anyone who doesn't scrutinize it just comes off like any other AI generated article.
:)
The AI tone in the announcement is light enough to be barely noticeable, but it’s there. Note that posting AI-generated comments to HN is explicitly forbidden.
Before:
Anyone who has spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to heavily edit that out of my writing, but now AI uses the proper punctuation and fills in where I miss words. It's like what I hear in my head but better. Because it is grammatically sound.
After:
Anyone who's spoken to me knows I talk in run-on sentences. I never complete a thought without interrupting myself. And I write the way I talk. I used to spend whole editing passes beating that out of my drafts. Now AI handles the punctuation and fills in the words I skip. It's what I hear in my head, but grammatically sound.
The result is almost always terser, more clear, and to the point. And usually all it takes is one more pass over to adjust anything I wouldn't say. In this case I kept the after verbatim just to illustrate my point.
I prefer the former version. It sounds like a human.
I like my wording for `miss` better but I like the AI ending much better. This was just in a small two sentence response. I find over the course of an article the impact is much greater.
It is! But not in the direction you think!
FWIW I also prefer the before. "whole editing passes beating that out" and "what I hear in my head, but grammatically sound" might not be immediate AI tells like 'and honestly' and 'load-bearing', but they are phrases you'd expect in a magazine article, not a forum comment. That kind of language in this context makes it smell like AI.
I prefer the before.
What's an "editing pass"?
It's when you go top to bottom reworking parts of an article. Often later changes can impact earlier prose, so often I end up doing editing in several passes. That being said AI decided that term. It's actually more accurate to the actual process than what I originally wrote.