February 12, 2026
Typos are the new trust badge?
ai;dr
Readers revolt: AI for code is fine — but hands off our words
TLDR: Author says AI is great for coding but drains the life from human writing, sparking a debate on effort and authenticity. Commenters split between co-writing with AI and demanding “proof-of-work” prose, with horror stories of chatbot fluff and a warning that the writer–reader social contract is at risk.
A fiery post just drew a line in the silicon sand: AI-generated code = progress; AI-written articles = soulless slop. The author says writing is a window into a person’s mind, and outsourcing that to a chatbot makes the “dead internet” theory (the idea that bots now drown out real people) feel a little too real. Spicy twist: typos now read as proof you’re human. Cue the crowd gasping.
The comments lit up. Team Nuance showed up first, with alontorres arguing that if there’s a long, hands-on back-and-forth with the model, the result can be legit, not lazy. The jokes flew too: soperj dunked on a stray “specially” with a deadpan “how we can tell it wasn’t written by an LLM,” and elischleifer called the “messier = better” line a bit much. The most upvoted anxiety? numbers’ tale of a boss whose AI-polished emails got so fluffy that the real message was buried “somewhere in the middle.” Meanwhile, losvedir dropped Oxide’s take: AI prose breaks the social contract—writing should usually take more effort than reading. The thread split between “proof-of-work prose” diehards and AI-as-coauthor pragmatists, with everyone agreeing on one thing: transparency matters, because nobody wants to decode corporate fluff wrapped in robot sparkle.
Key Points
- •The author views writing as a direct lens into human thought and values human-authored prose for its intention.
- •They use LLMs extensively for coding tasks and find them efficient, citing documentation, tests, and scaffolding as examples.
- •The author believes AI-generated articles feel low-effort and contribute to concerns about the authenticity of online content.
- •Signals like typos and imperfect grammar, once negative, now appear to indicate human authorship to the author.
- •The author acknowledges these human-like signals can be imitated, questioning their reliability as indicators of authenticity.