Simon Willison’s Weblog

This tutorial exists because of a particular quirk of mine: I love to write tutorials about things as I learn them. This is the backstory of TRPL, of which an ancient draft was "Rust for Rubyists." You only get to look at a problem as a beginner once, and so I think writing this stuff down is interesting. It also helps me clarify what I'm learning to myself.

— Steve Klabnik, Steve's Jujutsu Tutorial

# 13th November 2024, 3:35 am / version-control, writing

At first, I struggled to understand why anyone would want to write this way. My dialogue with ChatGPT was frustratingly meandering, as though I were excavating an essay instead of crafting one. But, when I thought about the psychological experience of writing, I began to see the value of the tool. ChatGPT was not generating professional prose all at once, but it was providing starting points: interesting research ideas to explore; mediocre paragraphs that might, with sufficient editing, become usable. For all its inefficiencies, this indirect approach did feel easier than staring at a blank page; “talking” to the chatbot about the article was more fun than toiling in quiet isolation. In the long run, I wasn’t saving time: I still needed to look up facts and write sentences in my own voice. But my exchanges seemed to reduce the maximum mental effort demanded of me.

— Cal Newport

# 3rd October 2024, 7:43 pm / writing, generative-ai, chatgpt, ai, llms

The people who are most confident AI can replace writers are the ones who think writing is typing.

— Andrew Ti

# 23rd June 2024, 5:22 am / writing, ai, generative-ai

You don’t need to be the world’s leading expert to write about a particular topic. Experts are often busy and struggle to explain concepts in an accessible way. You should be honest with yourself and with your readers about what you know and don’t know — but otherwise, it’s OK to write about what excites you, and to do it as you learn.

— Michal Zalewski

# 4th June 2024, 9:13 pm / writing, blogger

The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down

— Alex Jason, via Adam Savage

# 25th April 2024, 2:17 pm / writing, science

I literally lost my biggest and best client to ChatGPT today. This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. [...] Please do not think you are immune to this unless you are the top 1% of writers. I just signed up for Doordash as a driver. I really wish I was kidding.

— u/Ashamed_Apricot6626

# 11th April 2023, 6:20 pm / writing, ethics, chatgpt, ai, llms

I think now of all the kids coming up who are learning to write alongside ChatGPT, just as I learned to write with spell-check. ChatGPT isn’t writing for them; it’s producing copy. For plenty of people, having a robot help them produce serviceable copy will be exactly enough to allow them to get by in the world. But for some, it will lower a barrier. It will be the beginning of their writing career, because they will learn that even though plenty of writing begins with shitty, soulless copy, the rest of writing happens in edits, in reworking the draft, in all the stuff beyond the initial slog of just getting words down onto a page.

— Ryan Bradley

# 27th February 2023, 6:10 pm / chatgpt, writing, ai, generative-ai, llms

While copywriting is used to persuade a user to take a certain action, technical writing exists to support the user and remove barriers to getting something done. Good technical writing is hard because writers must get straight to the point without losing or confusing readers.

— Stephanie Morillo

# 28th December 2020, 3:58 pm / writing

I spent more time on my iPhone X review than anything I’ve written in years, and it went to paper twice. (Here’s a scan of my second printed draft, with handwritten revisions.) My thing is that I don’t use my favorite pen — which, of course, has black ink — but instead a pen with red ink. Editing is an angry, bloody act and therefore must be done in red.

— John Gruber

# 25th January 2018, 1:43 pm / john-gruber, writing

Could someone please send, to whomever the hell teaches communication skills/techniques at Microsoft, a copy of the Chicago Manual, and perhaps a sixth - grade grammar text? I swear, there's almost no one from that company who can write a proper English sentence.

— John C. Welch

# 12th July 2007, 6:23 pm / microsoft, john-c-welch, writing, english

When I write a new book [...] I plan to throw away something like the first 30 or so pages. And, because I know I'm going to do it, it doesn't worry me. I no longer have writer's block.

— Dave Thomas

# 24th March 2007, 3:05 pm / dave-thomas, writing