Writing Is Free Now; Real Experience Is What Costs

Gergely Orosz has taken “Becoming a Better Writer” out from behind the paywall. He is the author of The Pragmatic Engineer and has long written about engineering management and career development. The article was originally published in January 2022, and the subtitle in the screenshot is clear: writing is increasingly important for engineering leadership, and the article offers advice on improving writing skills.

His reason for making it free this time is straightforward: he sees too many developers using AI to write low-quality content. He wants people who want to share their own experience to write in their own words.

The replies are more direct than the article itself.

One reply says that AI didn’t invent low-quality content; it just accelerated it. Developers’ generic posts have always existed, and now one can be produced in 10 seconds. Writing well starts with having actually experienced something and having the courage to say it. Another reply boils the test down to one sentence: the hallmark of fluff is that every sentence is correct, but none of them happened to anyone.

Gergely himself says in a reply that writing is thinking, and AI is especially dull at this; it is only good for summarizing. This judgment matches another observation in the replies: the hallmark of AI-written developer articles is that there is nothing in the article that could only have come from the author—no failed attempts, no numbers from the author’s own system. Using AI to tighten a draft is fine, but the experience has to belong to you first.

Others use it more concretely: first write a messy draft yourself, then have AI point out where it is unclear or too long. The story and the point of view remain with the author. Hiring an editor used to be expensive; now, if you know how to use AI, you can get cheap, fast feedback—just don’t hand over the whole act of writing.

One reply fits perfectly here: paste the article into Claude, ask it for the key points, and then say it missed the point. An article about avoiding fluff being handled this way is itself an example.

Others who are non-native speakers say AI makes English sound fluent but generic; some have started deliberately leaving typos so people know it was written by a human.

Put together, these replies point to a more specific change. AI has lowered the cost of expression, and it has also moved the value upstream: you first have to have done something, be able to pick out the parts worth writing about, and dare to cut most of it. Sentences can be outsourced; experience and editing cannot. Gergely’s article is free now, but the hardest part of it to replace was never at the sentence level.

Original article: Becoming a Better Writer

Tweet: Gergely Orosz’s tweet