Item — HN Reader

A lot of the copy on this page feels like the kind of copy an AI would produce. But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy so I don’t want to accuse them of doing that.

Marketing aside, this is the kind of thing (advancements in VCSes) that I’d usually be excited about, but which I’m less excited about coming from Zed because it makes me start to worry that they’re going to continue focussing less on the core editor experience.

I love Zed and I hope that it doesn’t start to go flakey.

5 comments

> But I’m assuming, surely, Zed writes their own copy

I've written my fair share of landing pages and copy lately. I start out with Claude for ideation and headlines it produces are almost always low effort word salads. Case in point:

"Software is made between commits"

It never fails to emphasize the last part, even if it bears no weight.

The only response to that headline is "Sure I guess".

It doesn't give you an idea of what problem it solves, doesn't sell you a vision or get you excited about the future. It's not even that insightful and is borderline factually incorrect.

Claude Design absolutely loves creating phrases like "Share the thread, not the PR". The amount of "do the xyz, not the abc" subheadings on docs in my workplace has exploded in the last 6 months, and it gets a bit tiring to see. I think it's a hard-coded alternative to em dashes or something.

Anytime a company/group announces some random new project now, I tend to immediately suspect over-reliance on AI. From what I’ve seen, AI addiction frequently manifests as an explosion in scope, possibly because LLMs make so much initial “progress” on new projects which you can then demo and have resource allocators extrapolate to some glorious shipping version. But then you have to go back & clean up the slop, progress slows to a crawl, and it’s all way less exciting. That initial rush can be addicting. Ultimately a supercharged version of eternal human impulses I guess.

God it’s so tiring reading this bullshit framing that you people constantly regurgitate.

Why? People care about their craft and people care about what they interact with the world.

The vast majority of people don't like using poorly made things, especially when it is forced upon them against their will.

The page design looks like it has Claude's fingerprints on it. Claude design is the new bootstrap.

You're too kind. It's obviously AI copy, and a huge negative signal (to me, anyway).

I'm always hesitant to assert something is definitely AI copy because everyone's tone of voice is different.

I'm also starting to wonder how much real, human-made copy is mimicking AI-created copy that has been filling marketing pages as of late. When people make marketing websites, they often riff and rip off other websites' (à la "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[0]) design ideas and language -- I wouldn't be surprised if there are humans now inadvertently adopting LLM's writing style like that.

[0] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#:~:text=Good%20arti...

Why do you think an AI-focused company would hesitate to put AI-generated copy on their website?

Hah :)

In my opinion / experience, AI copy is a generally more cumbersome to read and process. So I would assume a company at Series B stage would have a human (with marketing guidelines) go over the language used on a one-pager to announce a new product.

But -- evidently -- anyone's guess!

It's exactly because everyone's tone is different that I'm confident it's AI.

Granted, a bit of AI-influencing phrasing in human writing is common, but the idea that someone sat down, worked hard, and came back with an entire page of a pitch-perfect AI slop is simply incredible.