"The AI told me splattering em dashes everywhere was what I want—and I, the author of this AI written blog, agrees!"
The actual quote was this:
"Em dashes are great for inserting clarifying details, quick shifts, or sharp asides—without breaking the sentence. I love them. When used well, they add rhythm and emphasis. They help writing flow the way people actually talk."
Deciding you like em dashes— and writing a blog post saying so—because an AI told you they were good for human writers—is funny behavior—even if "you" weren't LLM output masquerading as an author.
It's very generous of you to assume a "human writer" wrote that blog post—is it not?
I cherish writing and find it a wonderful tool for thinking. So far, I've tried to do technical writing without much LLM help. I do run the final writing through a good model to point out factual inaccuracies.
I always enjoyed writing prose in Emacs, because all the tools I need are always at my fingertips - thesaurus, spellchecking, etymology lookup, dictionaries, translation, search, and these days LLMs as well.
And the level of integration some Emacs packages demonstrate is simply bananas - I can ask LLMs to help me at any point, whether I'm writing some notes, sending a Slack message to a colleague, editing a comment in a codebase or a git commit message, or even when running shell commands. You can easily manipulate the context applied to the conversation, see the payload, repeat with variability, swap models anytime, call external tools, replace things in place, examine the diff of the changes, search through your prior conversations, etc.
I honestly can barely contain my excitement at seeing how my ultimate choice gets vindicated. When I committed to Emacs while the world moved toward newer, shinier tools, it often felt isolating - like swimming against the tide. Then LLMs arrived, and for a moment I wondered if this revolutionary technology would finally render my beloved editor obsolete. Instead, the opposite happened: LLMs integrated so seamlessly into Emacs that the experience surpasses even specialized tools built exclusively for AI interaction. Years of investment weren't wasted - they were preparation for this moment of perfect synergy. The irony is beautiful: the very tool that seemed antiquated to most people keeps proving to be the most adaptable to the future.
hamelsmu•7mo ago
I’ve had similar frustrations. Maybe the next thing to try is fine tuning? Curious what others think.