I had a nostalgia moment yesterday, and posted an article about Terry Pratchett, remembering the times when I was a teenager, sitting in the back of the classroom, and awkwardly hiding the fact that I was reading his novels1. It was a saturday afternoon, I had some spare time and thought it was a good occasion to write a blog post about it.
I sat in my couch and wanted my prose to sound funnier and more Terry-like, so I did what I do everyday as a “Software Engineer” (aka a professional agent wrestler/tamer): I wrote a draft of the blog post, then sent Claude a detailed prompt concatenated with my initial draft, then iterated on it until I was satisfied with the result.
The process mostly introduced some funny lines that I hadn’t thought of, but also introduced some drift: some stuff that I was indifferent to, but annoyed many on HN. For instance, to make one quote more compelling, Claude added a comment about the cosmology of Discworld. I didn’t think much of it, and just posted the article as it was.
The real Terry Pratchett quote:
“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
Claude’s jabbering:
Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.
What does it even mean?? No claude, there are 8 words in his quote, not 9. How do you still miscount words like that?!
Funnily enough, on HN, the main comment, even though (probably?) not AI written, also hallucinated that my purpose was to promote an AI company.
How to get your AI company’s blog to No. 1 on Hacker News:
- Pick an author nerds like.
- Tell Claude “Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style.”
- Don’t even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like “Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most”, or “Most physics departments would settle for that.” or “The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook”.
- Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.
Which AI company? I don’t know. This is a personal blog, not yet another clone of Manus AI or lovable2. I use it mostly to share silly stuff with my friends (check the maps section if you’re a french speaker) and play vibecoded word games with my wife without having to deal with one of those horrible bloated ad-saturated apps.
I did run an AI startup for 3 years, and one of my blog posts was about getting acqui-hired in 2025, so maybe they quickly misread and assumed I was currently running an AI startup? I also have a side-project that could count in the category, but if maximising its SEO was my purpose, posting on my personal blog would be a very poor way of achieving it.
This seemingly hallucinated comment dominated the discussion and probably led to the contribution being flagged.
The rest of the comment is on point. I should have cleaned up the AI nonsense, there is no excuse for my laziness.
I recognize that most of the comments were rightfully annoyed, AI smells are pervasive in articles that are written and posted on the internet these days. I’m even wondering if, despite writing this one that you’re reading right now, entirely by hand, it will not have an AI-smell to it, simply because my main interlocutor on a daily basis is Claude, and I find myself sometimes accidentally copying its communication style.
Conclusion
Some comments broke my heart. I didn’t mean to give bad emotions to anyone. I feel bad for letting you down and not writing a better piece about Terry, he definitely deserved the best in his remembrance.