Commenting on VGR commenting on reacting to a blog about using LLMs to write
It's funny how quixotic people are getting about this.
Simon Willison's "How To Write With An LLM" is mostly an argument against the thing everyone assumes he's arguing for. Don't ask the model to produce prose, he says — ask it to produce pressure. Give it your draft and have it tell you what's unclear, what you've asserted without supporting, where you've said the same thing three times in slightly different clothes. The model is a tireless first reader who will never get bored of you, and that's worth more than a paragraph generator that sounds like a LinkedIn post about resilience.
The practical stuff is the usual Willison recipe: keep the artifact yours, use the model for the connective tissue and the research spelunking, make it summarize what it thinks you said so you can discover you didn't say it. He's blunt that publishing unreviewed model output is a form of littering — if you wouldn't defend every sentence under questioning, you haven't written anything, you've just increased the amount of text in the world. And there's a nice aside near the end about how the anxiety over em-dashes and "delve" is a category error: people are policing the surface features of a style instead of asking whether anyone actually thought about anything.
Venkatesh Rao · source v1
I think the compromise that you can have here with using generated text but also making that visually clear to readers is a nice middle ground. And honestly I don’t have a strong opinion here. I just wanted to try responding to a blyg.
In How To Write With An LLM, Simon Willison endorses Thomas Ptacek’s rule: use LLMs as copyeditors, but never adopt their suggested phrasing. Willison uses them for fact-checking, spelling, grammar, and occasional thesaurus help while keeping his blog’s prose his own. He argues that avoiding generated language preserves discipline and sidesteps its distinctive artificial feel. The post also points readers toward Ptacek’s copyediting tool and prompt.
—Brady Dale
September 26, 2026