But it's bad writing, as GP points out. The second paragraph is particularly confusing—its central metaphor is clumsy (in my experience LLMs struggle with metaphors).

That said, maybe it's an artifact of being machine-translated from the original Russian.

Let me make the author's case as they aren't here to defend themselves. This is the paragraph,

     > I still don't know why I remember it in such detail. I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before. And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute, as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece. Apparently I have a lot of free time now.

They set expectations with, "I still don't know why I remember it in such detail"

Then they set up the comparator to the past, "I used to forget what I'd had for dinner the night before" which is actually doing double work, because it also means that they were so busy that they used to forget what they had dinner.

This creates the character assumption that the person was / is a workaholic.

    > And now I remember the whole morning minute by minute

Heavily hinting that the person has been made redundant, because they've gone from forgetting what they had for dinner (as they'd munch along) to remembering their morning by the minute instead of being stressed by work.

    > as if someone had laid it out on a table and labeled every piece

Need for mechanical precision. This person is most likely autistic / nerdy.

    > Apparently I have a lot of free time now.

And now the final blow. It's because they're now effectively unemployed. Why? AI. They have a job on paper, but it's uncertain / doesn't truly exist.

It's incredibly concise and well written story telling. I haven't seen LLMs do punchy writing like this since GPT-4o days.

This is terrible writing, and if you can't tell, there is something deeply wrong.

Parts of this read like the early internal monologue sections of Cryptonomicon. Terrible or not, it's distinctive.

Having used Claude a fair bit, it reads like the very distinct style Claude settles on when it tries to write fiction. I mean it's hugely improved from the early attempts of LLMs to create fiction (remember the adverbs!), but it's still pretty awful.

> This is terrible writing, and if you can't tell, there is something deeply wrong.

This is subjective. Countless times in the history of human literature a piece of writing has been called garbage -- or at least, flawed -- by some authority, only to later become lauded as a great piece of writing. So not being able to tell (or in this case, to match your own taste) is simply par for the course.

Remember all that's been written about Shakespeare's Hamlet and his use of mixed metaphors, "[...] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [...]". What? How do you take arms against the sea? And why was it before "slings and arrows", what does that have to do with the sea? Mixed metaphors are a sin, etc, etc.

Well I think the verdict on Shakespeare is in, and it's positive. I assume you've read some, if you have you'd know that the positives outweigh any minor negatives. We still use some of his phrases today.

Of course Shakespeare made mistakes or made allusions that contemporary audiences struggle to understand, and he's not the be all and end all. Saying judgement is subjective does not mean judgement is useless or impossible. He's pretty good though and you can tell when you read him, it's gripping, human and tight.

Back to this particular text. From the start, it smells of AI:

> That morning I woke up at 6:58, two minutes before the alarm. I lay there and waited for it to ring. And it rang. We both did our jobs.

Short choppy sentences more suited to advertising than prose, ambiguity without purpose, pointless personification, melodrama and tension over the most mundane details.

It's possible this was written by a human so steeped in the language generated by LLMs they don't know what is human and real any more, but it seems much more likely it's a translation which was translated by LLM and 'improved' by taking its style suggestions, or simply generated/written by the LLM based on a much shorter prompt.

The most important thing though is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.

I think you missed the point of what I was saying about Shakespeare.

> However the most important thing is not who wrote it, but the quality of the writing, and I think the verdict of most people disagrees with you.

"Most people"? Please, show me where "most people" are saying this. Where's the verdict, are you keeping a tally? "Most people" don't agree on anything, either here in HN or elsewhere.

Are you the arbiter of what "most people" consider a good writing style?

The votes are keeping tally, seems pretty clear, but it's only internet points, feel free to disagree with me on this writing, I don't like it.

I think it's fair to say you don't like it. I don't like a lot of literature.

I don't see the points that state people disagreed with me, I see 188 upvotes to this story and many comments saying they liked it.

The comment that you wrote that if someone cannot see this is bad writing there's something "deeply wrong" is simply absurd.

> This is just good writing. The kind that AI is meant to emulate. Alas we're at an age where writing well is identical to writing like a machine.

Literally none of these statements are true.

It’s the imitation of good writing, only good on the surface.