Making Progress, Using Development Edits I’m an author. and one of the hardest things is to see what you’ve done wrong. ...

Making Progress, Using Development Edits I’m an author. and one of the hardest things is to see what you’ve done wrong. If you have a spare human to edit you, it’s easier.What About an LLM?Well, yes. Advait Sarkar has a lovely article on that in the October 2024 Communications of the Association For Computing Machinery. called AI Should Challenge, Not Obey.However, if I just ask for a dev edit, I’m really asking it to do two things:find out what a dev edit is, and also how to apply it, andhave it score your work against that standard.Of course, you don’t get to see what standard the LLM is using if you do that.Recurse!Instead of trying to do two things at once, drill down. Do one of them, inspect and debug it, and only then use it to do the second.In the case I was interested in, I asked Claude what a dev edit was. It gave me a recipe on how to do it as a human, but it contained a lot of sucking up. When I ran it against a particular story, the response was so saccharin that I wanted t...