# yesterday me and you were working on a potential Substack essay, the title of which is currently... ## Skills Used - epistemic-discipline - nick-analytic-voice - nick-philosophical-prose - source-work - twork - writing-standards ## Retrieval Notes - Session id: `6ae1e700-17c0-43f6-bdac-618f0b02e7ce` - Last activity: `2026-03-11T15:59:42.602Z` ## My Notes <!-- Add your notes here. This section is preserved across syncs. --> ## Conversation ### User yesterday me and you were working on a potential Substack essay, the title of which is currently this. "LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision" it is in it is a long form project. Okay, um the long form project is an older version which needs to be substantial basically needs to be switched out for a newer version. Okay, um below is the most up-to-date version that ChatGPT just gave me, that Codex just gave me, or the most up-to-date advice on how I should revise the plan. So I am going to ask you to tell me what you think of this as a new plan for the Substack SA. But uh first you have some homework to do. I need you to get yourself up to speed as to why the current version in the Codex note is not viable. Okay. If you look at the original article to which it is a response and you read it carefully and then you read my this now aborted draft, there is a fatal flaw in the draft as it now is. Okay? I need you to prove yourself that you're sharp enough to keep up with me. And the way you're going to do that is you're going to tell me what the fatal flaw is in the old version of the draft. Once you've worked that out or if you work that out we can continue. make sure that you explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer. Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that i have a lot to consider. CHAT: Right. The useful corrections here are: I need to stop making the response sound more adversarial than you want; I need to keep the recognizability/function distinction explicit rather than sliding between them; and from paragraph seven onward I need to stop compressing several different moves into slogans. I also need to rebuild the plan around your own earlier sequence, especially the proper-function hinge and the transition from that hinge into the problem of testing. So below I’m giving you a new iteration of the plan with much more detail. I’m keeping the same broad structure, but I’m slowing the second half down a lot and making the argumentative role of each paragraph more explicit. ## Revised plan 1. Paragraph 1 Topic sentence: after your opening general sentences about tools and the tendency to think that LLMs are tools, this paragraph should introduce Hoel as someone who gives that ordinary thought a more determinate argumentative shape. Primary work: the point here is not merely “Hoel says LLMs are tools.” It is more specific: Hoel treats what has happened to writing as evidence of what sort of thing these systems are, and in particular as evidence that they belong on the side of tools rather than on the side of transformative or surplus intelligence. Detail: that “to what?” question needed answering in the last version. This is the answer. Writing is the first revealing domain with respect to the nature of the system. Detail: the tone should be responsive, not prosecutorial. You are not setting up “Here is the man I will now attack.” You are setting up: here is the strongest recent articulation of a thought that many people already have. 2. Paragraph 2 Topic sentence: Hoel’s opening example helps explain why the category of tool feels natural in the first place. Primary work: recount the stone-axe example and the general thought that paradigmatic tools are recognisable as tools. Detail: this is where the epistemic-discipline distinction has to be made explicit. Hoel’s claim is about recognisability. Your next move is a nearby but stronger one: in many familiar cases, recognisability travels together with at least a rough grasp of what the thing is for. Detail: do not collapse those two claims into one. You want the paragraph to show that you are moving from his point to your own, not pretending he already said your stronger claim. Detail: the paragraph should end by opening the question, not by closing it: if that is what ordinary tool-recognition looks like, what happens when we try to place ChatGPT under the same description? 3. Paragraph 3 Topic sentence: one reason ordinary tools are usually easy to classify is that they tend to have a more or less specifiable proper function. Primary work: introduce proper function in the modest way you wanted earlier, as the use that distinguishes what a thing is for from the merely accidental uses to which it can be put. Detail: this is the paragraph where the fork / Google / vacuum / Swiss Army knife style examples belong. The point is not that tools are always single-purpose. The point is that even multi-functional tools usually admit more stable answers to the question what they are for than ChatGPT does. Detail: I would make this paragraph fairly calm and expository. It needs to feel like conceptual clarification, not like a dramatic reveal. 4. Paragraph 4 Topic sentence: once we ask that question of ChatGPT, the obvious answers all seem partial, unstable, or wrong in different ways. Primary work: run through the obvious candidates gently. “For writing,” “for chatting,” “for predicting tokens,” “for helping with tasks.” Detail: you are right that this should not sound like a knock-down proof. The tone should be: notice the difference; notice how much more awkward the answer becomes here than with the earlier cases. Detail: each candidate should fail in a distinct way. “Predicting tokens” is mechanism rather than use. “Chatting” is too broad and thin. “Writing” catches something real but not enough. “Helping with tasks” is so general that it hardly individuates the thing at all. Detail: the paragraph should leave the reader with pressure, not triumph. 5. Paragraph 5 Topic sentence: that does not show that LLMs are not tools, but it does suggest that they are “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all.” Primary work: this is where your fixed line belongs and should be preserved exactly. Detail: the paragraph should explicitly say that the force of the previous step is classificatory hesitation, not decisive metaphysical victory. The point is to slow the tool classification down and show that it is less straightforward than Hoel’s framing initially makes it sound. Detail: this paragraph is also where you can briefly mark that the issue is not just multiplicity of use. It is instability at the level of ordinary functional description. 6. Paragraph 6 Topic sentence: and that matters because uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation. Primary work: this is the methodological pivot. If we do not know clearly what kind of thing this is, or what it is properly for, then it becomes much harder to say in advance what would count as a good test of it. Detail: this should be put carefully. You are not saying that no test is possible. You are saying that test-selection is now a substantive issue rather than something we can take for granted. Detail: the end of the paragraph should prepare the return to Hoel: so when Hoel selects writing as the privileged proving ground, that choice now requires more argument than it first seemed to. 7. Paragraph 7 Topic sentence: Hoel’s choice of writing can now be presented in its strongest form. Primary work: this is where you slow down and give his reasoning its due, rather than caricaturing it. Detail: this is where I agree with you that a block quote should come in. I would use the line: > “words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms” Detail: then explain the argument with care. Hoel is right to treat text as the constitutive material of these systems. They operate through language, are trained on language, and output language; so it is not at all arbitrary to think that writing is the place where their character should show up first and most vividly. Detail: the paragraph should end by narrowing the issue. The question is no longer “why would anyone look at writing?” That question has been answered. The question is: what exactly are we measuring when we look there? 8. Paragraph 8 Topic sentence: the difficulty is that “writing” is too coarse a heading for the very different uses to which text can be put. Primary work: this is the first paragraph after the return to Hoel, and it needs more patience than I gave it before. Detail: distinguish text as finished product from text as instrument of thinking. Then add the further distinctions you had earlier in mind: exploration, testing, feedback, redirection, clarification. Detail: the crucial point is not that these are wholly separate universes. It is that Hoel’s test largely concerns one role of text, namely publicly consumable artefacts, whereas many interesting LLM interactions involve other roles that text can play. Detail: the paragraph should make the reader feel that “writing” may hide multiple practices under one name. 9. Paragraph 9 Topic sentence: what Hoel mostly measures is text as artefact, whereas much of the practice I want to describe treats text as a working surface. Primary work: spell this out more concretely than I did before. A finished essay, blog post, book, or email is a product meant to stand on its own. A prompt-response-revision loop, by contrast, may use text not to produce a final artefact directly but to test a distinction, surface an alternative, expose a weakness, or force reformulation. Detail: this is where you can begin to explain why “has writing improved?” may be too blunt a question. It presupposes that the relevant success condition is improvement in the quality of the end-product. But that is not obviously the only or even the most revealing thing going on in all textual interaction with these systems. Detail: this paragraph should not yet introduce medium. It should still be clarifying the terrain. 10. Paragraph 10 Topic sentence: the difference becomes clearer once one compares an LLM not to a pen in the thin inscriptive sense, but to a system that returns altered material for further use. Primary work: now the pen paragraph from the current draft can do real work. The point is not merely that a pen is simpler. It is that a pen extends inscription, whereas an LLM sends back something that must itself be dealt with. Detail: this is where the line “the return prompts us back” should earn its keep. It should be unpacked, not just dropped in as a nice phrase. The system’s response may flatten, connect, misread, generalise, sharpen, or irritate; in each case it changes the next act of thought. Detail: this paragraph is the phenomenological heart of the essay. It is where the response begins to say what the practice actually feels like from the inside. 11. Paragraph 11 Topic sentence: once that recursive structure is in view, Hoel’s evidence is not refuted, but it is being measured at the wrong level of description. Primary work: this paragraph should explicitly reconnect the inside view of practice to Hoel’s public evidence. You are not denying the slop. You are not even denying that public prose has often worsened. What you are denying is that this settles the character of the system. Detail: a lot of bad prose may show what happens when the returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, or worked through. Detail: in other words, the same technology can support one mode of use that floods the zone with generic artefacts and another mode of use in which returned text functions as part of a thinking process. That is the real argumentative hinge of the second half. 12. Paragraph 12 Topic sentence: this is the point at which the category of medium begins to earn its keep. Primary work: only now should you introduce medium, because only now has the reader been shown why “tool” and “writing” are both proving too blunt. Detail: medium here should not sound like a glamorous synonym or a metaphysical promotion. It should be introduced as a better description of a practice in which the system’s characteristic resistances and possibilities become visible in the work itself. Detail: the reason this is a medium-like case is that the system does not merely execute an antecedent intention. It shapes what the next intention becomes. That is the exact thing that the earlier paragraphs have been preparing. 13. Paragraph 13 Topic sentence: the Frippertronics comparison can now be introduced as a way of making that structure vivid rather than as an ornamental analogy. Primary work: explain why this analogy belongs here and not earlier. Earlier on, it would have felt like an imported clever comparison. Here, after the recursive structure has been laid out, it can clarify the specific claim that what returns from the system is not neutral and not merely repetitive. Detail: the emphasis should fall on loop, delay, alteration, and re-entry into the next move. What matters is not just that something comes back, but that what comes back has already been transformed in ways that affect what the practitioner does next. Detail: this paragraph should also make clear that the analogy is about method of making, not about equivalence of products. 14. Paragraph 14 Topic sentence: this also lets you say something more exact about slop. Primary work: now the slop material can be slowed down and made more precise. Slop is not merely an embarrassment for the positive account; it is part of the positive account. It shows what happens when a system with strong tendencies toward generic smoothing is used with too little resistance. Detail: that lets you preserve the force of Hoel’s public observation without granting his full classificatory conclusion. He has noticed a real pathology, and indeed a central one. But the pathology may tell us as much about the mode of engagement as about the mere fact that the system is “a tool.” Detail: this paragraph should feel like a real concession, not a strategic one. 15. Paragraph 15 Topic sentence: the conclusion should return to Hoel in the mode of response rather than attack. Primary work: the closing claim should be something like this: Hoel is right that there has been no obvious textual singularity and right that what has happened to public writing matters. What I doubt is that these facts straightforwardly tell us that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense his opening picture encourages. Detail: this is where the fixed line can return, perhaps in slightly compressed form if you do not want exact repetition. The conclusion should leave the reader with the sense that LLMs may be “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all,” and that this is why the choice of writing-as-test cannot simply be assumed. Detail: the last cadence should sound like a response that has learned from Hoel and then pushed beyond him, not like a takedown. ## Short diagnosis of what changed The biggest change is that paragraphs eight to fifteen are no longer doing one big blurred move. They are now doing six smaller ones: - distinguish uses of text, - distinguish artefact from working surface, - describe recursive practice from the inside, - reconnect that practice to Hoel’s evidence, - introduce medium only once it is earned, - and then absorb slop rather than dodging it. That is the section I had previously rushed, and it is where the essay either becomes philosophically interesting or collapses back into slogans. ## One sentence on the recognizability/function distinction If you want a very clean way of handling the distinction in paragraph two, it is this: Hoel’s point is that familiar tools are recognisable as tools; my point is that, in many paradigmatic cases, that recognisability is accompanied by a rough grasp of what the thing is for. That formulation marks the shift without smuggling my claim into his mouth. If you want, the next pass can take just paragraphs eight to fifteen and make them even denser still, with possible topic-sentence variants for each paragraph rather than just one. *Qui il punto decisivo è rallentare dopo il ritorno a Hoel, perché è lì che l’argomento smette di essere uno schema e diventa davvero un saggio.* ### Assistant I need to do several things: read the current draft, find and read the original Hoel article, and search for yesterday's session about this essay. Let me start by gathering all the materials. ### Assistant Good, I have the current draft. Now I need to read the original Hoel article and the earlier versions. Let me also search for yesterday's sessions more specifically. ### Assistant Good. Now let me read the Hoel article and the previous sessions. I need to find the Clippings version of Hoel's article and read the two most relevant past sessions. ### Assistant Let me wait for the session transcripts to come back while I continue analyzing the materials I already have. ### Assistant Good, I've got the Sunday session. Now let me get the March 6 session and also read the note that was created from the Sunday session. ### Assistant Good. The March 6 session was a dead end (missing paste). Now I have everything I need. Let me update the todo and begin the deep contemplation. ### Assistant Now I have all the materials. Let me do the deep work. Right. Nick wants me to find the "fatal flaw" in the current Codex Revision draft. He says: if you read the original Hoel article carefully and then read my draft, there is a fatal flaw. He wants me to prove I'm sharp enough to spot it. The Codex revision plan he's pasted in (from ChatGPT/Codex) already apparently addresses this flaw — so the flaw should be something that the new plan fixes. Let me work through this very carefully. First, let me get the structure of the current draft clear. The "LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md" is a polished prose version. It has these sections: 1. Opening (no header) — introduces Hoel, quotes him, sets up the response 2. "What sort of tool?" — proper function problem + unpredictability 3. "Writing" — the pen comparison, one-way vs. recursive 4. "Medium" — introduces medium concept (Wollheim, Thomson-Jones) 5. "Frippertronics" — the analogy, loop structure 6. "Slop" — Lucier analogy, concedes Hoel's point about slop 7. "Hoel's question" — reframes the question, closing Now let me read Hoel's actual argument very carefully and see what it's doing. Hoel's argument, as I understand it from the full clipping: 1. Opens with the Neolithic axe story — "I knew it was a tool instinctively, the way a baby knows the nipple." This establishes: tools are recognisable. We co-evolved with tools. We are Homo faber. 2. Then the AI hype section — surveys overheated claims about AI (superintelligence, automation of everything). Establishes his position as a deflator of hype. 3. Then the argument from experience: enough time has passed to see what LLMs have done to writing, their "home domain" (words are their atoms). His proposal: extrapolate from what happened to text to what will happen everywhere else. 4. The evidence: writing hasn't improved. "The impact of LLMs on writing itself has not really been to improve or accelerate good writing overall. We are not in a glut of good writing. We are in a dearth of it." 5. The Amazon books data: average book got worse post-LLM, top 1000 marginally improved, top 100 unchanged. 6. The conclusion: "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool." LLMs behave precisely as tools would be expected to behave. Best users gain efficiencies. Worst users flood the zone. No surplus intelligence. No singularity. Now, what is Nick's draft doing in response? The draft makes two moves: Move 1: LLMs don't fit the tool category (no proper function, constitutive unpredictability) Move 2: "For writing" is too blunt — LLMs aren't for writing in the way a pen is; they're recursive, they send text back, they prompt us back. Better category: medium. OK. Now where is the fatal flaw? Let me think about several candidate flaws... Candidate 1: The draft doesn't actually engage with Hoel's ARGUMENT Hmm. Hoel's argument is structured as follows: - If LLMs were a source of surplus intelligence (not just tools), then writing would have improved (because text is their native domain) - Writing hasn't improved - Therefore, LLMs are tools (not a source of surplus intelligence) Wait. Let me read this more carefully. Hoel's argument is specifically: > If LLMs were a true source of intelligence to rival humans, then discovering them should be like discovering oil. And if we were climbing the curve of an intelligence explosion their surplus intellect would be improving our civilization's text as a whole in noticeable ways. If LLMs are tools, then we should expect their impacts to be a mirror of us, and concern efficiency and scale, rather than quality, and depend strongly on how people use them. So the argument is: the tool hypothesis predicts what we observe (efficiency gains, no quality revolution). The surplus-intelligence hypothesis predicts something we don't observe (an intelligence explosion visible in improved text). Therefore, tools. Now look at what Nick's draft does. The draft says: 1. LLMs don't have a proper function → they're not tools 2. LLMs are unpredictable in a non-malfunctioning way → they're not tools 3. "For writing" is too coarse → they're a medium, not a tool But does the draft actually ADDRESS Hoel's argument? Hoel's argument is an inference from evidence (the state of public writing) to a conclusion (LLMs are tools). Nick's draft largely argues on a priori conceptual grounds that LLMs don't fit the concept "tool" well. It then says Hoel's evidence (writing quality) is measured at the wrong level. Wait... but there's something more specific I'm missing. Let me look at this again. Actually, let me think about what the Codex revision plan is fixing. The Codex plan explicitly says: > "The biggest change is that paragraphs eight to fifteen are no longer doing one big blurred move." And the new plan has a much more careful structure for the second half: distinguish uses of text → artefact vs working surface → recursive practice from inside → reconnect to Hoel's evidence → earn the medium concept → absorb slop. But the Codex also says in the "Short diagnosis": > "That is the section I had previously rushed, and it is where the essay either becomes philosophically interesting or collapses back into slogans." And Nick's %% comments in the bullet-point draft (LLMs Are Not Tools.md) have a particularly sharp one at line 99: > %% I don't understand what you're doing here. Why is writing hasn't improved, therefore, LLMs are tools? That's idiotic and makes no sense whatsoever. This might be a major flaw. Take this one seriously.%% Wait. That comment is in the BULLET POINT draft, not in the Codex Revision. But it points to something important. Nick is saying: "writing hasn't improved, therefore LLMs are tools" doesn't make sense as an inference. OK let me think about this more carefully, because this might be the flaw, but I need to see whether the Codex Revision draft actually has this problem or whether it was fixed. Let me re-read Hoel's argument structure: Hoel sets up a dichotomy: - Either LLMs are tools (Homo faber hypothesis) - Or LLMs are something more — a source of surplus intelligence (the singularity hypothesis) He then argues: writing is the best test case (words are LLMs' atoms). The evidence from writing shows no quality revolution, just efficiency gains + slop. This matches the tool prediction, not the surplus-intelligence prediction. Therefore, tools. Now here's the thing. Nick's response is NOT that LLMs are a source of surplus intelligence. Nick is arguing for a THIRD option: LLMs are a medium. Nick is not on the "singularity" side of Hoel's dichotomy at all. Nick agrees that LLMs are not minds, not agents, not sources of surplus intelligence. But he also thinks they're not tools. They're a medium. So the question is: does Hoel's evidence (writing hasn't improved) count against the medium hypothesis? Hmm. Actually... does the current draft address this? Let me check. In the current draft (Codex Revision), the final section "Hoel's question" says: > Hoel asks, in effect, whether writing has improved. His answer is no, and from this he concludes that LLMs are tools: bits in, bits out. I think this asks the right empirical question at the wrong level of description. The novelty here does not lie chiefly in the possibility of producing a new kind of sentence. It lies in a mode of making... So the draft's response is: "you're measuring the wrong thing." The novelty is in the mode of making, not in the product. But wait. Now I'm getting closer to something. Let me re-read Hoel very carefully. Hoel's argument is NOT simply "writing hasn't improved, therefore tools." His argument is more sophisticated: 1. Text is the home domain of LLMs (words are their atoms) 2. If LLMs were more than tools, we'd see surplus intelligence showing up in text first 3. We don't see surplus intelligence in text — we see efficiency + slop 4. Therefore, LLMs are tools, not more And then Hoel makes an INDUCTIVE step: "My proposal is that we simply extrapolate what has happened to text production to all the other intellectual domains LLMs will ever touch." Now, here is what I think might be the fatal flaw. Let me consider it very carefully. The fatal flaw might be this: THE DRAFT CONCEDES HOEL'S EVIDENCE BUT NEVER ACTUALLY EXPLAINS WHY THAT EVIDENCE IS CONSISTENT WITH THE MEDIUM HYPOTHESIS. The draft says: "you're measuring at the wrong level of description." But it doesn't show that measuring at the RIGHT level of description would produce different results. It just asserts a different framing and then drops back to the Frippertronics analogy. Hmm, but that's more of a gap than a "fatal flaw." Let me think again... Wait. Let me re-read the actual argumentative structure of the draft more carefully. The draft goes: 1. Hoel says LLMs are tools for writing 2. I put pressure on "tools" (no proper function, constitutive unpredictability) 3. I put pressure on "for writing" (pens are one-way, LLMs are recursive) 4. Better category: medium (Wollheim, Thomson-Jones) 5. Frippertronics shows the recursive loop 6. Slop is what happens when the medium runs unattended 7. Hoel asks the wrong question — not "has writing improved?" but "what mode of making?" Now... hmm. Let me think about this differently. What is the ACTUAL LOGICAL RELATIONSHIP between Hoel's argument and Nick's response? Hoel's argument: Writing hasn't improved → LLMs are tools (not a source of surplus intelligence) Nick's response: LLMs don't fit the tool concept → they're a medium, not a tool These are ships passing in the night. Hoel is arguing from empirical evidence about writing quality. Nick is arguing from conceptual analysis of what "tool" means. They're not actually in direct disagreement about the same thing. Wait... but there's something worse. Let me think about what Hoel is actually arguing vs what Nick is responding to. Hoel's essay is NOT primarily about whether LLMs are "tools" in some definitional sense. Hoel's essay is about whether LLMs represent a transformative intelligence or whether they're just instruments that amplify human capability without adding surplus intelligence. The word "tool" is doing metaphorical work — it's shorthand for "they don't have their own intelligence, they just process what you give them." Hoel: "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool." The point isn't about proper functions or recognisability or Swiss Army knives. The point is: there's no surplus. The output quality depends on the input quality. The system doesn't add intelligence of its own. It just processes. And Nick's draft... argues that LLMs don't have a proper function and are constitutively unpredictable. But these points, even if correct, DON'T ADDRESS Hoel's actual claim. Hoel isn't claiming LLMs are tools because they have a clear proper function. He's claiming they're tools because the evidence shows no surplus intelligence. Hmm. Actually, wait. Let me refine this. The draft says at the end of the "What sort of tool?" section: > That is why the tool picture begins to slip. A tool whose function is hard to specify is already odd. A tool whose unpredictability is not a defect but part of its proper working is odder still. I am not yet saying that this settles the matter. I am saying that Hoel's way of classifying the case already hides some of what is distinctive about it. So Nick is aware that this doesn't settle the matter. He's just saying the tool classification is hiding something. Fair enough. But then what does the rest of the essay do? It introduces the pen comparison, the recursive loop, the medium concept, Frippertronics. And then says Hoel's measuring at the wrong level. OK. I think I need to approach this differently. Let me ask: what does the Codex revision plan DO that the current draft doesn't? What problem does the new plan solve? The new plan introduces several things the current draft lacks: 1. Explicitly separates recognisability (Hoel's claim) from proper function (Nick's claim) 2. The proper-function → evaluation pivot: if you can't specify what a thing is for, you can't say what would count as a good test of it 3. Gives Hoel's choice of writing its strongest form BEFORE criticising it 4. Distinguishes text-as-artefact from text-as-working-surface 5. Describes the recursive practice from the inside (phenomenological detail) 6. RECONNECTS the inside view to Hoel's public evidence 7. Only introduces "medium" after earning it 8. Absorbs slop rather than dodging it The most telling one is #6: "reconnect the inside view of practice to Hoel's public evidence." This suggests the current draft FAILS to reconnect. And #2: the proper-function → evaluation pivot. This is what's missing from the current draft. The current draft establishes that LLMs have no clear proper function... and then jumps to talking about writing and pens and the recursive loop. It never draws out the METHODOLOGICAL implication of the proper function problem. If you don't know what a thing is for, you don't know how to test it. And if you don't know how to test it, then selecting writing-as-test-case is already a substantive choice that requires argument. Hmm. But is that the "fatal flaw"? Or is there something deeper? Let me re-read Nick's own comment on this in the bullet-point draft: > %% I don't understand what you're doing here. Why is writing hasn't improved, therefore, LLMs are tools? That's idiotic and makes no sense whatsoever. This might be a major flaw. Take this one seriously.%% Nick himself flagged this as a potential major flaw. "Writing hasn't improved, therefore tools" — he says this doesn't follow. But wait, in Hoel's essay, that's not quite the argument. Hoel's argument is: 1. If LLMs were a source of surplus intelligence, writing would have improved (because text is their home domain) 2. Writing hasn't improved 3. Therefore, LLMs are NOT a source of surplus intelligence 4. Therefore, they're tools (by elimination of the alternative) This is logically valid as a modus tollens — IF we accept the dichotomy in step 4. Nick's response should be: "There's a third option. LLMs can be not-a-source-of-surplus-intelligence AND also not-a-tool." And actually, the current draft DOES say this in a way. It says LLMs are a medium, not a tool, and not an agent. So what's the fatal flaw? Let me try yet another hypothesis. Let me re-read the Codex plan's Paragraph 6: > Topic sentence: and that matters because uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation. > Primary work: this is the methodological pivot. If we do not know clearly what kind of thing this is, or what it is properly for, then it becomes much harder to say in advance what would count as a good test of it. > Detail: this should be put carefully. You are not saying that no test is possible. You are saying that test-selection is now a substantive issue rather than something we can take for granted. > Detail: the end of the paragraph should prepare the return to Hoel: so when Hoel selects writing as the privileged proving ground, that choice now requires more argument than it first seemed to. THIS is the pivot the current draft is missing. The current draft never makes the connection: uncertainty about proper function → uncertainty about how to test → Hoel's choice of writing-as-test needs more argument than he provides. Without this pivot, the first half of the draft (proper function problem) and the second half (writing is too blunt a description) are just placed next to each other. They aren't connected by an argumentative hinge. The reader goes: "OK, LLMs don't have a clear proper function. And OK, 'writing' is too coarse. But so what? How do these two points work together?" The Codex plan makes them work together via the evaluation pivot: if you don't know what the thing is for, you can't pick the right test. Hoel picks writing. But why writing? Well, because "words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms." That's actually a strong reason (the plan's Paragraph 7 gives it its due). But then the plan shows that "writing" is still too coarse even once the choice is justified, because writing covers both artefacts and working surfaces and Hoel only measures artefacts. OK. I think I'm circling around the flaw now but haven't quite nailed it. Let me try to be very precise. Actually, wait. Let me go back to the very start. Nick said: "If you look at the original article to which it is a response and you read it carefully and then you read my this now aborted draft, there is a fatal flaw in the draft as it now is." He says it's a flaw you can see by reading BOTH documents carefully. It's not just a structural issue internal to the draft. It's a flaw that becomes visible when you compare the draft to what Hoel is actually saying. Let me re-read Hoel's key argumentative move one more time: > If LLMs were a true source of intelligence to rival humans, then discovering them should be like discovering oil. And if we were climbing the curve of an intelligence explosion their surplus intellect would be improving our civilization's text as a whole in noticeable ways. If LLMs are tools, then we should expect their impacts to be a mirror of us, and concern efficiency and scale, rather than quality, and depend strongly on how people use them. And: > You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool. A computer or a piano is like that too. And then the crucial passage: > At some point you have to use your capacity as Homo faber and call it: LLMs have behaved precisely as we would expect tools to behave when it comes to changing the nature of first-impacted and frontline intellectual disciplines like writing. The best users gain efficiencies and expand, to some degree, their capability range, especially for the mid-list of intellectual output. The worst users flood the zone. Now. What does Nick's draft do with this? The draft's Paragraph 3 (the "What sort of tool?" section) argues: tools have proper functions; LLMs don't. Then adds the unpredictability point. OK fine. Then the "Writing" section argues: writing is too blunt; pens are one-way, LLMs are recursive; the practice is not well captured by "a tool for writing." Then "Medium" — introduces the medium concept. Then "Frippertronics" — the analogy. Then "Slop" — concedes Hoel's point. Then "Hoel's question" — says Hoel asks the wrong question. Now HERE IS THE THING I think might be the fatal flaw. Let me spell it out carefully. Hoel says: "A computer or a piano is like that too." A piano! Hoel explicitly mentions a piano. You put more skill in, you get better music out. That's a tool. But a piano is ALSO a medium. Nobody would dispute that a piano is a tool in some sense (it has a proper function: producing musical notes when keys are struck). But a piano is also a medium in which music is made. A pianist doesn't merely "use" a piano the way one "uses" a calculator. The piano has its own resistances, its own characteristic sounds, its own constraints that become possibilities. The pianist engages with the piano's characteristics. Music made for piano is shaped by the piano's nature. And yet — Hoel's point still applies to the piano. You put more skill in (bits in), you get better music out (bits out). The piano doesn't add surplus intelligence. It doesn't compose for you. It doesn't make bad pianists sound like Glenn Gould. The best pianists (top 100) haven't gotten better because of new pianos. The average pianist is still average. So here's the problem: Nick's entire argument is that LLMs are better understood as a medium than as a tool. But HOEL'S EVIDENCE WORKS EQUALLY WELL AGAINST THE MEDIUM HYPOTHESIS. The fact that writing hasn't improved is just as much a problem for "LLMs are a medium" as it is for "LLMs are a source of surplus intelligence." Or more precisely: Hoel isn't really arguing that LLMs are "tools" in the philosophical sense Nick is working with (proper function, etc.). Hoel is arguing that LLMs are NOT a source of surplus intelligence. His use of "tool" is colloquial, meaning: they process what you give them, they don't add their own intelligence, bits in bits out. Whether you call this "tool" or "medium" or "instrument" or "system" — the point is the same. No surplus intelligence. No quality revolution. Just processing. And Nick's draft... never addresses this. The draft spends a lot of effort showing that "tool" is conceptually wrong as a classification. But Hoel's actual point isn't about classification. It's about whether LLMs contribute something beyond what the human puts in. And the medium concept, as Nick uses it, doesn't actually answer that question. Wait. Let me double-check this against the draft... The draft's final section says: > Hoel asks, in effect, whether writing has improved. His answer is no, and from this he concludes that LLMs are tools: bits in, bits out. I think this asks the right empirical question at the wrong level of description. The novelty here does not lie chiefly in the possibility of producing a new kind of sentence. It lies in a mode of making, a recursive practice in which language is sent into a system, returned in altered form, and then either resisted or pursued by the person who receives it. And then: > If someone wants to insist, after all this, that LLMs are still tools, I do not think I need to fight to the death over the word. I would only want to say that the word now conceals too much. Hmm. So the draft actually half-concedes the point at the end. "I don't need to fight to the death over the word." But then what WAS the point of the whole essay? If you're going to concede that calling them tools is maybe fine, then the title "LLMs Are Not Tools" is misleading and the entire proper-function argument was beside the point. But I don't think THAT'S the fatal flaw Nick is pointing at. The fatal flaw should be something that becomes visible by reading Hoel carefully, not just something about the draft's internal structure. Let me think about this yet again... Actually, maybe I should focus on the specific relationship between Hoel's argument and Nick's response more tightly. Hoel says: Writing is the test case for LLMs because words are their atoms. Writing hasn't improved. Therefore, LLMs are just tools. Nick's response basically says: "for writing" is too blunt because the interesting practice isn't writing-as-artefact-production but writing-as-recursive-thinking-process. But here's the thing. Hoel ALREADY anticipates and addresses this kind of objection. Look at what Hoel says: > on the positive side, helping with efficiency and research and editing and feedback, all things that only marginally improve already-good pieces. And: > I am not entirely an AI pessimist. I am an AI realist—there are indeed positives to the technology, and I'm trying to find them myself (like for research, or, e.g., my attempt at making the Madeline image better above, or the fewer spelling mistakes I make now, or sometimes I ask LLMs to double-check something, etc.) And: > The best users gain efficiencies and expand, to some degree, their capability range, especially for the mid-list of intellectual output. Hoel ISN'T saying LLMs are useless. He's saying their usefulness is the usefulness of a tool: they help you do what you were already going to do, a bit better, a bit more efficiently. They don't add surplus intelligence. And Nick's "recursive thinking practice" — Hoel would probably just say: "Yes, fine, that's a nice use of the tool. You bounce ideas off it, you use it for brainstorming and testing and pushing back. Great. That's still bits in, bits out. You put your intelligence in, you get something useful back, you refine your thinking. The tool helped. Your thinking improved. The tool's contribution was processing, not intelligence." SO. The fatal flaw: The current draft argues against a position Hoel isn't really holding. Hoel isn't claiming LLMs have a "proper function" in the philosophical sense. Hoel isn't claiming LLMs are tools in the way hammers or pens are tools. Hoel is making a much more specific claim: LLMs don't add surplus intelligence; they process what you give them; the quality of output depends on the quality of input. Whether you call this "tool use" or "medium engagement" or "recursive prompting" — Hoel's point is that there's no intelligence explosion, no singularity, no surplus. And Nick's draft never actually confronts this point. No... wait. Let me reconsider. Because I might be reading Hoel too charitably and Nick too uncharitably. Nick does address the "bits in, bits out" framework directly in the final section. And Nick's point about the recursive practice IS a response to "bits in, bits out" — it says the model isn't "intelligence in, intelligence out" but rather "material goes in, comes back transformed, and the transformation itself changes what you do next." The medium has its own contribution — not intelligence, but recalcitrance, transformation, compression. Hmm. But does that actually answer Hoel? Hoel could still say: "Fine, the medium transforms your input. So does a piano. So does paint. The transformation is physics (or statistics). It's not intelligence. Bits in, bits out." OK let me try yet another angle on the flaw. Actually, I want to focus on something Nick's %% comment flagged very sharply: > %% I don't understand what you're doing here. Why is writing hasn't improved, therefore, LLMs are tools? That's idiotic and makes no sense whatsoever. This might be a major flaw. Take this one seriously.%% Nick is saying: the inference from "writing hasn't improved" to "LLMs are tools" makes no sense. But this comment is in the BULLET POINT draft, not the Codex Revision. However, the Codex Revision draft INHERITS this problem, because the Codex Revision also presents Hoel's argument as: writing hasn't improved → therefore tools. But wait — in Hoel's actual text, the argument ISN'T just "writing hasn't improved, therefore tools." It's more nuanced. Hoel's argument is: "The pattern of effects we observe (efficiency gains for good users, slop for bad users, no quality revolution) is exactly what you'd predict if LLMs were tools, and not what you'd predict if they were a source of surplus intelligence." So the fatal flaw might be: the draft MISREPRESENTS Hoel's argument. The draft treats Hoel as saying "writing hasn't improved, therefore tools" (which IS idiotic, as Nick's comment says). But Hoel is actually saying something more sophisticated: the PATTERN of effects matches the tool prediction. The draft has been attacking a caricature. Hmm, but actually, I think Hoel's argument IS pretty close to "writing hasn't improved, therefore tools." Let me re-read the key passage: > If LLMs were a true source of intelligence to rival humans, then discovering them should be like discovering oil. > It's been six years since GPT-3, and there has been no "move 37" moment for writing. > You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool. OK so Hoel's argument is: 1. If LLMs were surplus intelligence → writing would have revolutionarily improved ("move 37") 2. Writing hasn't revolutionarily improved 3. Therefore, LLMs are not surplus intelligence 4. Therefore, they're tools (by exhaustive dichotomy) Step 4 is where Nick can intervene: the dichotomy is false. There's a third option (medium). But the current draft doesn't present this clearly. The draft doesn't acknowledge that Hoel is arguing by elimination (surplus intelligence vs tool), and it doesn't clearly show that "medium" is a third category that Hoel's dichotomy doesn't cover. Actually wait. Let me re-read the opening of the Codex Revision draft: > It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool. We use Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever, to do this or that. Erik Hoel gives that thought a sharper philosophical form. LLMs, he suggests, are tools, and more specifically tools for writing; what has happened to writing over the last few years therefore tells us something about what sort of thing they are. This presents Hoel's argument. Then: > I find something right in this... What I am less sure of is the description doing the philosophical work. "Tool" sounds right, until one asks a little more carefully what sort of tool this is supposed to be. "For writing" sounds right too, until one notices that the practice people find most interesting here is not especially well described by comparison with a pen... OK. So Nick is explicitly responding to the "tool" classification and the "for writing" test. But Hoel's essay is primarily about something else: whether LLMs add surplus intelligence or not. The tool/non-tool question is secondary to Hoel — it's a CONCLUSION drawn from the evidence about writing quality, not the starting point. Hmm. Let me reconsider everything. Actually, you know what, I think I may have been overcomplicating this. Let me re-read Nick's instructions: "If you look at the original article to which it is a response and you read it carefully and then you read my this now aborted draft, there is a fatal flaw in the draft as it now is." And: "I need you to get yourself up to speed as to why the current version in the Codex note is not viable." And the Codex plan says the biggest change is that "paragraphs eight to fifteen are no longer doing one big blurred move." Let me look at the new plan's diagnosis again: > The biggest change is that paragraphs eight to fifteen are no longer doing one big blurred move. They are now doing six smaller ones: > - distinguish uses of text, > - distinguish artefact from working surface, > - describe recursive practice from the inside, > - reconnect that practice to Hoel's evidence, > - introduce medium only once it is earned, > - and then absorb slop rather than dodging it. And: "That is the section I had previously rushed, and it is where the essay either becomes philosophically interesting or collapses back into slogans." OK. So the Codex is saying the problem is in the second half — that the draft rushes through several distinct moves in a blurred way. That's a structural/pacing problem, not a "fatal flaw" in the argumentative sense. But Nick says there's a "fatal flaw" visible from reading the Hoel article carefully and then reading the draft. He's asking me to find it before we can continue. Let me go back to basics. What is the one thing in the Hoel article that the draft simply doesn't handle? Let me re-read Hoel's key argumentative passage ONE MORE TIME: > For if everything that anyone can do on a computer is soon to be automated... then this process should have started with writing years ago. Yet, beyond mass-producing stilted emails and stilted social media posts and stilted essays, the impact of LLMs on writing itself has not really been to improve or accelerate good writing overall. We are not in a glut of good writing. We are in a dearth of it. This is surprising and counterintuitive, because for an LLM, words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms—yet their impact on writing as a whole has been mostly to generate mountains of slop, while, on the positive side, helping with efficiency and research and editing and feedback, all things that only marginally improve already-good pieces. The argument: writing was the FIRST domain LLMs should have transformed. Words are their atoms. But they didn't transform writing. Therefore, they won't transform other domains either. They're just tools. And: "If LLMs are tools, then we should expect their impacts to be a mirror of us, and concern efficiency and scale, rather than quality, and depend strongly on how people use them." Note that last phrase: "depend strongly on how people use them." Hoel's tool hypothesis ALREADY PREDICTS that use matters. Good users get good results, bad users get slop. This is precisely what Nick's "medium" argument says too — that the quality depends on the mode of engagement, on resistance, on decompression, on the human's contribution. So Hoel's "tool" prediction and Nick's "medium" description actually agree on the phenomenology. They both say: the outcome depends on how the human engages with the system. Hoel calls this tool use. Nick calls it medium engagement. But the OBSERVABLE PREDICTION is the same. This might be the fatal flaw: Nick's medium argument doesn't generate any different predictions from Hoel's tool argument. Both say the quality depends on the human. Both say slop comes from bad engagement. Both say good users get better results. The only difference is the label — "tool" vs "medium" — and the conceptual apparatus around it (proper function vs dynamic recalcitrance). If that's right, then the essay's argument reduces to: "Let's use a different word for the same phenomenon." Which is not nothing (reconceptualising something can be illuminating), but it's not the strong argument the essay seems to be making. Hmm. But I'm not sure that's exactly the "fatal flaw" Nick is pointing at either. Let me think about one more possibility... OK. I want to try a very specific reading. Let me look at what Hoel says about "bits in, bits out" and what the draft does with it. Hoel: > You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool. A computer or a piano is like that too. Nick's draft, final section: > "Bits in, bits out" assumes a model that does not fit mediums. You do not put bits in and get bits out. You engage in a practice that unfolds over time, responding to what comes back, pulling the signal toward your intentions. But you DO put bits in and get bits out when using an LLM. That's literally what happens. You type text (bits in), you get text back (bits out). The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input. Nick's claim that "you don't put bits in and get bits out" with a medium is just... false? You put paint on a canvas. Paint in, painting out. You play notes into a tape loop. Notes in, ambient music out. You type ideas into an LLM. Ideas in, reshaped ideas out. The recursive, iterative nature of the engagement doesn't change the fact that it's still "bits in, bits out" at each step. It just means there are MANY steps, not one. Multiple cycles of bits in, bits out. Hmm. That's a problem with the draft, but I'm not sure it's "the" fatal flaw. OK, let me try to bring all of this together and identify what I think the flaw actually is, based on what the Codex revision plan fixes. The Codex revision plan's most important new move is Paragraph 6: > Topic sentence: and that matters because uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation. > Primary work: this is the methodological pivot. And then Paragraphs 8-9 make a distinction the current draft fails to make: > Paragraph 8: "writing" is too coarse a heading for the very different uses to which text can be put. > Paragraph 9: what Hoel mostly measures is text as artefact, whereas much of the practice I want to describe treats text as a working surface. This is the real move the current draft is missing. Hoel tests LLMs by looking at public text artefacts (books, essays, social media posts). He finds they haven't improved. He concludes: tools. But Nick wants to say: the most interesting thing happening with LLMs isn't the production of better text artefacts. It's the use of text as a working surface for thinking. And Hoel's evidence is silent about THAT use. The current draft GESTURES at this distinction but never MAKES it explicitly. The draft says: > Hoel judges LLMs by the quality of the resulting text artefacts: books, essays, social posts, emails. Fair enough. If the question were simply whether these systems have improved writing, that would be relevant evidence. But the practice at issue is not well captured by imagining a more advanced pen... This gestures at the distinction but doesn't draw it out. It doesn't say clearly: "Hoel measures text-as-artefact; but the interesting practice uses text-as-working-surface; these are different; his evidence doesn't speak to the latter." And the reason it doesn't make this move clearly is because of what the Codex plan identifies: the draft rushes through several distinct argumentative steps in the second half without properly separating them. OK but is THAT the "fatal flaw"? Or is the fatal flaw something more precise? Let me re-read Nick's instruction one more time: "there is a fatal flaw in the draft as it now is." A FATAL flaw. Not a structural weakness, not a pacing problem. Something that kills the essay. Let me think about what would KILL the essay... Hmm. Actually, I think I've been circling around it and I should commit. Let me formulate my best candidate: THE FATAL FLAW: The draft responds to a caricature of Hoel's argument rather than to the actual argument. More specifically: Hoel's actual argument is NOT "LLMs are tools because they have a proper function and are predictable." Hoel never mentions proper functions. He doesn't argue from the definition of "tool." He argues from EVIDENCE: what happened to writing tells us what kind of thing LLMs are. Hoel's argument has TWO components: (A) Writing is the right test case (words are LLMs' atoms → text is where their nature should show first) (B) The evidence from writing shows no surplus intelligence (efficiency + slop, not revolution) Nick's draft attacks the LABEL ("tool" doesn't fit because no proper function, constitutive unpredictability) but doesn't engage with the EVIDENCE or the LOGIC of Hoel's inference. The proper function argument (Section 2 of the current draft) is philosophically interesting but doesn't actually respond to anything Hoel says. Hoel doesn't claim LLMs have a proper function. Hoel's argument would work just as well if you replaced "tool" with "instrument" or "technology" or "system" — the label isn't the point. The point is: no surplus intelligence, just processing. And the draft's response to the "for writing" point is: "writing" is too blunt because the interesting practice is recursive. But Hoel would say: "Fine, the recursive practice helps you think. That's still bits in, bits out. You put your thinking in, the system processes it, you think better because of the processing. Your intelligence in, useful processing, your improved intelligence out. Still no surplus intelligence from the machine. Still a tool." The draft never shows that the medium description makes a DIFFERENT prediction from the tool description. Both predict: good engagement → useful results; bad engagement → slop. The only difference is the framing. So the essay is fatally flawed because: 1. It attacks a straw man (the definitional version of "tool") rather than engaging with Hoel's actual argument (the evidential version: no surplus intelligence) 2. Its positive proposal (medium) doesn't generate different predictions from Hoel's "tool" claim 3. The essay therefore talks PAST Hoel rather than responding to him Actually, wait. Let me reconsider whether this is exactly right... No, I think there's something even more specific. Let me look at the structure ONE MORE TIME. The draft's argument: 1. Tools have proper functions; LLMs don't → not a tool 2. Tools are predictable; LLMs' unpredictability is a feature → not a tool 3. "For writing" is too blunt → the practice is recursive 4. Better category: medium 5. Frippertronics shows how this works 6. Slop is the medium running unattended 7. Hoel asks the wrong question The problem with 1-2: These are reasonable conceptual points, but they're not responding to Hoel. Hoel isn't defining tools by proper function or predictability. He's using "tool" colloquially to mean "instrument that processes input." The problem with 3: This is where the draft should be strongest, and it IS the most philosophically interesting part. But it's rushed. The distinction between text-as-artefact and text-as-working-surface is never made explicit. The recursive practice is described but not connected back to Hoel's evidence. The problem with 4-5: Medium is introduced too early, before it's earned. Frippertronics is vivid but feels imported as a clever analogy rather than as philosophical work. The problem with 6: The Lucier analogy for slop is nice but doesn't do enough argumentative work. It doesn't explain WHY slop is evidence for medium rather than evidence for tool. The problem with 7: "Hoel asks the wrong question" is asserted but not demonstrated. The draft says the right question is about mode of making, not product quality. But why? Just because you've introduced a recursive practice doesn't mean the product doesn't matter. Hmm. Actually, I think point 7 is where the fatal flaw is sharpest. Let me spell it out: The draft says: Hoel asks "has writing improved?" This is the wrong question. The right question is "what mode of making does this medium enable?" But from Hoel's perspective, this is a dodge. Hoel would say: "OK, you've described a nice mode of making. But has that mode of making produced anything? Has the recursive practice of thinking-through-LLMs produced better philosophy, better essays, better thinking? If so, show me. If not, then it's still bits in, bits out — the mode of making is fancy, but the output is still determined by what the human brings." And the draft doesn't answer this. It describes the practice but never shows that the practice produces something that the tool description can't account for. Actually... now I think I've been thinking about this from too high a level. Let me look at it from the ground level. What does Hoel actually say that the draft gets WRONG? Hoel says: "for an LLM, words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms—yet their impact on writing as a whole has been mostly to generate mountains of slop." The draft quotes this and then says the pen comparison is too thin. But Hoel isn't comparing LLMs to pens! Hoel says writing is the test case because words are LLMs' constitutive material. Nick is the one who introduces the pen comparison. Nick is arguing against HIMSELF, not against Hoel. Hoel says: "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool." The draft says "this asks the right empirical question at the wrong level of description." But it never says what the right level of description IS, in a way that would change the answer. Hoel says: LLMs "struggle because they are fundamentally imitators, and when not told who or what to mimic they are intellectually shallow." The draft... doesn't engage with this at all. This is Hoel's explanation of WHY slop happens: LLMs are imitators, they're views from nowhere, they need human input to be good. The draft concedes slop is real but attributes it to "the medium running unattended" — which is actually the same point Hoel is making, just in different language. OK. I'm going to commit to my best answer now. I think the fatal flaw is this: THE DRAFT NEVER ENGAGES WITH HOEL'S ACTUAL INFERENTIAL STRUCTURE. Hoel's argument is: (1) choose writing as test case (justified because words are LLMs' atoms), (2) evaluate writing (result: no improvement in quality, just efficiency and slop), (3) conclude that LLMs are tools that mirror human intelligence rather than adding to it. The draft attacks the word "tool" on conceptual grounds (proper function, unpredictability) and attacks the test (writing is too blunt). But it never engages with step (2) → (3): the inference from the evidence to the conclusion. The draft never explains why the evidence Hoel presents is COMPATIBLE with LLMs being a medium rather than just a tool. The draft just describes the medium and asserts that the question changes. In other words: the draft changes the subject. It introduces a rival conceptual framework (medium rather than tool) but doesn't show how that framework handles Hoel's evidence differently. It doesn't show that the medium hypothesis predicts different observable outcomes from the tool hypothesis. It just says "if LLMs are mediums, we should ask a different question" — which, from Hoel's perspective, is a dodge. The Codex revision plan fixes this, particularly in paragraphs 8-11: - Para 8: distinguishes uses of text (artefact vs working surface) - Para 9: Hoel measures artefact; the interesting practice uses text as working surface - Para 10: describes the recursive practice from inside (the phenomenological heart) - Para 11: reconnects the practice to Hoel's evidence — "Hoel's evidence is not refuted, but it is being measured at the wrong level of description... the same technology can support one mode of use that floods the zone and another mode of use in which returned text functions as part of a thinking process." This is the move the current draft doesn't make. The current draft gestures at "you're measuring the wrong thing" but never says what the right measurement would show, or why the artefact/working-surface distinction matters for evaluating Hoel's evidence. So the fatal flaw, precisely: The draft introduces a rival framework (medium) and argues against Hoel's label (tool), but never confronts Hoel's evidence. It never shows that the evidence is consistent with the medium hypothesis in a way that's different from being consistent with the tool hypothesis. Without this, the essay is philosophically inert — it's just relabeling, not arguing. Actually, let me refine even further. I think the most precise way to put the fatal flaw is: The draft argues that "tool" is the wrong category and "medium" is the right one. But Hoel's actual argumentative force comes from his EVIDENCE about writing, not from his choice of the word "tool." And the draft never engages with that evidence on its own terms. The draft treats the conceptual question (tool vs medium) as if it were the whole argument, when in fact the conceptual question is secondary to the evidential question in Hoel's essay. Put differently: even if Nick is right that "medium" is a better category than "tool," Hoel could just shrug and say: "Fine, call it a medium. A medium that adds no surplus intelligence. A medium through which bits go in and bits come out. The label doesn't matter. The evidence does." And the draft has no answer to that. The Codex plan's innovation is to build an answer: the evidence Hoel presents (bad public text) doesn't tell you about the medium's character when used with resistance. It tells you about what happens when the medium's compression tendency goes unchecked. The proper question isn't "has writing improved?" but "what happens in the recursive practice when someone engages with the medium's tendencies?" And that question requires different evidence — evidence about the inside of the practice, not about the outside (public text quality). But even this answer has limits. Hoel might say: "Show me. Show me the philosophy, the thinking, the writing that emerged from this recursive practice and that couldn't have emerged without it. If the medium enables something genuinely new, where is it?" And to be fair, Nick seems aware of this in the closing of the v2 draft: "For LLMs, I think the answer is yes. What that practice is, and what doing it well looks like, are questions that remain open." But opening questions is different from answering them. And Hoel might say: "Your questions have been open for six years. When do the answers arrive?" OK. Let me also think about an alternative candidate for the flaw, because I want to be thorough. ALTERNATIVE CANDIDATE: The draft misidentifies what Hoel is arguing about. Hoel's essay is not primarily a classification exercise. It's not asking "what category do LLMs belong to?" It's asking: "will AI lead to a singularity or transformative intelligence?" His answer is no, and "tool" is just the label for that answer. Nick's essay takes Hoel's answer ("they're tools") and treats it as a classificatory claim to be challenged on conceptual grounds. But that's missing Hoel's point. Hoel doesn't care whether LLMs are "tools" in the technical philosophical sense. He cares whether they're going to replace humanity, automate everything, create superintelligence. And his answer is: no, look at the evidence from writing. The draft, by arguing that "medium" is a better category than "tool," might actually be doing something orthogonal to what Hoel is arguing. Hoel says: no singularity, no surplus intelligence. Nick says: but also not a tool, a medium. These are compatible positions! Nick could agree with Hoel that there's no singularity AND argue that "medium" is a better category than "tool." The draft seems to think it's disagreeing with Hoel, but it might actually be supplementing him. If that's right, then the "fatal flaw" is that the essay positions itself as a response to Hoel, but what it's actually doing is a tangential conceptual exercise that doesn't engage with Hoel's central concern (hype vs reality, surplus intelligence vs tool amplification). Hmm. But the Codex revision plan doesn't fix THIS problem. The Codex plan still frames the essay as a response to Hoel. So maybe that's not the flaw Nick has in mind. Let me try yet another candidate. ANOTHER CANDIDATE: The Hoel argument has a hidden false dichotomy that the draft fails to identify. Hoel's argument: either LLMs are tools (bits in, bits out) or they're a source of surplus intelligence (the singularity). Since writing hasn't improved, they're tools. The false dichotomy: there could be a third option. LLMs could be a medium — something that shapes what happens in ways that don't reduce to either "tool" or "surplus intelligence." The draft's answer SHOULD be: "You're presenting a false dichotomy. LLMs aren't tools, but they're not a source of surplus intelligence either. They're a medium, and the medium concept captures something both your categories miss — namely, the recursive, transformative character of the engagement." But the current draft never NAMES the false dichotomy. It never says: "Hoel gives us two options; both are wrong; here's a third." Instead, it argues against "tool" and for "medium" without ever acknowledging that Hoel's argument is structured as a dichotomy. The Codex plan does something similar — it doesn't explicitly name the dichotomy — but it does implicitly break it by introducing the methodological pivot: if you don't know what the thing is for, you can't say what counts as a test. This challenges Hoel's inference from evidence to conclusion, rather than just challenging his label. I think this is getting close. Let me consolidate. My best reading of the fatal flaw — and I want to present multiple layers of it, since Nick asked for detailed exploration: THE FATAL FLAW (primary formulation): The draft never engages with Hoel's ARGUMENT. It engages with Hoel's LABEL ("tool") and Hoel's TEST CASE ("writing"), but not with the inferential structure that connects evidence to conclusion. Hoel argues: the pattern of effects on writing (efficiency + slop, no quality revolution) is exactly what you'd expect from a tool and not what you'd expect from surplus intelligence. The draft says "tool" is the wrong category and "writing" is too blunt a description, but never shows why the evidence Hoel presents is consistent with the medium hypothesis in a way it's NOT consistent with the tool hypothesis. Without this, the essay is arguing past Hoel. THE FATAL FLAW (secondary formulation): The draft treats Hoel as making a definitional claim ("LLMs are tools because they have the properties of tools") and responds with conceptual analysis (proper function, unpredictability). But Hoel is making an EVIDENTIAL claim ("the evidence from writing shows LLMs behave as tools"). The conceptual analysis, however good, doesn't address the evidence. Showing that LLMs don't fit the philosophical definition of "tool" does nothing to undermine Hoel's point that writing hasn't improved. THE FATAL FLAW (tertiary formulation, most precise): The draft never makes the connection between the proper function problem and the evaluation problem. If LLMs don't have a clear proper function, then you don't know how to test them — and that means Hoel's choice of writing-as-test is more contentious than it appears. This is the "proper function → evaluation" pivot that the Codex plan's Paragraph 6 introduces. Without this pivot, the first half of the draft (proper function, unpredictability) is disconnected from the second half (writing, recursiveness, medium). The two halves are just placed next to each other, not argumentatively connected. All three of these are related. They're all aspects of the same problem: the draft doesn't engage with Hoel's actual inferential structure. It attacks elements of Hoel's framing (the word "tool," the test case "writing") without connecting those attacks to Hoel's evidence and conclusion. Wait, actually, let me reconsider one more time. Nick said: "If you look at the original article to which it is a response and you read it carefully and then you read my this now aborted draft, there is a fatal flaw." The emphasis is on reading BOTH carefully. The flaw becomes visible in the comparison. What do you see when you compare? When I compare: Hoel's essay is about the FUTURE OF AI. His question is: will LLMs transform intellectual work? His answer: no, based on the evidence from writing. He uses "tool" as a label for this answer. Nick's draft is about the NATURE OF LLMs. His question is: are LLMs tools? His answer: no, they're mediums. But this doesn't address Hoel's question. The two essays are answering DIFFERENT QUESTIONS. Hoel asks: will LLMs transform intellectual work? (Answer: no) Nick responds: are LLMs tools? (Answer: no, they're mediums) But Nick COULD agree with Hoel on the first question (no singularity) while disagreeing on the categorisation (medium, not tool). And if so, the essay is less a response to Hoel than a supplement. It says: "Hoel is right about the hype, but wrong about the classification." But the essay is framed as a response/challenge to Hoel, which creates a mismatch. It promises to engage with Hoel's argument but actually does something else. Hmm, but the Codex revision plan also frames it as a response to Hoel. So I don't think this is what Nick is pointing at. Let me try to be even more precise about what you see when you read Hoel's text against the draft. When I read Hoel, the strongest and most distinctive part of his argument is the INDUCTIVE step: > My proposal is that we simply extrapolate what has happened to text production to all the other intellectual domains LLMs will ever touch. And: > At some point you have to use your capacity as Homo faber and call it: LLMs have behaved precisely as we would expect tools to behave. This is an evidence-based argument. It says: look at what happened. Don't theorize. Look. When I read Nick's draft, the strongest and most distinctive part is the recursive practice: > I write something, or half-write something, or throw a distinction at the system in a rough form. What comes back is language already reshaped by the model's learned patterns... I then have to decide what to reject, what to sharpen, what to pursue... This is a practice-based description. It says: here's what it's like from the inside. The gap: Hoel's evidence (public writing quality) and Nick's description (inside the recursive practice) never meet. Hoel is looking at the outputs. Nick is describing the process. Neither addresses the other's ground. And the fatal flaw: the draft never bridges this gap. It never explains why the outputs Hoel is looking at don't capture what's happening in the process Nick is describing. It never explains what WOULD be the right evidence for the medium hypothesis. It just describes the practice and says "the question changes." The Codex plan bridges this gap in Paragraph 11: > once that recursive structure is in view, Hoel's evidence is not refuted, but it is being measured at the wrong level of description... a lot of bad prose may show what happens when the returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, or worked through. THIS is the bridging move the current draft lacks. This explains how Hoel's evidence (bad public prose) is compatible with the medium hypothesis: the slop comes from treating the medium's output as final product rather than as working material. The medium hypothesis predicts slop as a pathology of misuse, not as evidence of the system's nature. But the current draft just says "Hoel asks the wrong question" without this bridging. That's the fatal flaw. OK. Let me commit to this analysis. I think the fatal flaw is: The draft never connects its two main arguments (the conceptual argument about tool classification and the phenomenological argument about recursive practice) to Hoel's evidence. It attacks Hoel's framing but doesn't engage with Hoel's evidence. The result is an essay that talks past Hoel rather than responding to him. More specifically: the draft's second half (from "Writing" onward) describes the recursive practice in phenomenologically vivid terms, but never reconnects that description to the question Hoel is actually asking (has writing improved? does the evidence show surplus intelligence?). The draft's answer to Hoel's evidence is essentially "you're asking the wrong question" — but it never explains why, in terms Hoel would find responsive. The Codex revision plan fixes this by: 1. Adding the proper-function → evaluation pivot (Paragraph 6): if you don't know what it's for, you don't know how to test it 2. Distinguishing text-as-artefact from text-as-working-surface (Paragraphs 8-9) 3. Reconnecting the inside view of practice to Hoel's outside evidence (Paragraph 11): slop shows what happens when the medium's output is treated as product, not as working material 4. Introducing "medium" only after this bridge has been built (Paragraph 12) These moves turn the essay from "Hoel says tool, I say medium" into "Hoel's evidence is real but his test measures the wrong thing, and here's why." Hmm wait, but actually, is even this the "fatal flaw" Nick means? He said it should be visible from reading BOTH documents. Let me try one more angle. What if the fatal flaw is simpler than I've been making it? What if it's just: THE DRAFT MISREPRESENTS HOEL'S ARGUMENT? Let me check. How does the draft characterize Hoel? Opening paragraph: > LLMs, he suggests, are tools, and more specifically tools for writing; what has happened to writing over the last few years therefore tells us something about what sort of thing they are. This is actually a fair representation. Hoel does argue that what happened to writing tells us LLMs are tools. But then: > He judges LLMs by the quality of the resulting text artefacts: books, essays, social posts, emails. This is accurate — Hoel does look at text artefacts. And: > Hoel asks, in effect, whether writing has improved. His answer is no, and from this he concludes that LLMs are tools: bits in, bits out. "Writing hasn't improved → therefore tools." This IS Hoel's argument, more or less. But it's missing the crucial step: Hoel's argument is that this is what TOOLS would predict, as opposed to what surplus intelligence would predict. The draft presents it as a simple inference (no improvement → tools) when it's actually a comparative inference (the pattern matches the tool prediction better than the intelligence prediction). But that's a misrepresentation rather than a fatal flaw in the argument. OK, I'm going to stop circling and commit to my answer. I think the fatal flaw has multiple layers: At the deepest level: the draft's argument against "tool" (no proper function, constitutive unpredictability) is fighting with a conceptual definition that Hoel never uses. Hoel's "tool" means "something that processes input without adding surplus intelligence." Nick's attack on "tool" targets a different meaning of "tool" (something with a specifiable proper function and predictable operation). The draft is attacking a version of "tool" that Hoel isn't defending. And at the most practically damaging level: the draft never explains why the medium hypothesis makes a different prediction from the tool hypothesis about what Hoel observes. Both predict: quality depends on human input, slop comes from lazy use. So what does calling it a "medium" BUY you that "tool" doesn't? The Codex plan starts to answer this: the medium hypothesis says the interesting thing isn't the public output but the recursive practice, and the right evidence would be about what happens inside the practice, not about what ends up published. But even this answer has limits, because Hoel could still demand: "Show me the fruits." OK. I think that's my analysis. Let me also think about the Codex plan and what I make of it, since Nick asked for feedback on that too. Actually, wait — Nick's instruction was specifically: first find the fatal flaw, then (if I pass) we continue to discuss the new plan. So let me focus on presenting the fatal flaw clearly and with full justification. One more thing. Let me make sure I haven't missed something more obvious by going back to the %% comments in the bullet-point draft, since those are Nick's own annotations of what's wrong. Key %% comments: 1. Line 34-35: "We might think that LLMs are a quite different type of tool... or not quite tools at all" — Nick wants this line later, not in the opening 2. Line 69: "things seem to be getting a little bit muddled here" — structural 3. Line 99: "Why is writing hasn't improved, therefore, LLMs are tools? That's idiotic and makes no sense whatsoever. This might be a major flaw." 4. Lines 103-108: Multiple "not how i write" comments 5. Line 116: "Didn't we already agree on what to do here?" 6. Line 119: "every single heading and subheading title you've given me so far has been absolutely fucking god-awful" 7. Line 135: "I think you've forgotten something else about how much of this paper should be put in" The most relevant one for the "fatal flaw" is #3 at line 99. Nick himself flags: "Why is writing hasn't improved, therefore LLMs are tools? That's idiotic and makes no sense whatsoever." Now, in Hoel's actual essay, the argument IS: writing hasn't improved → LLMs are tools. But it's not idiotic — it has an internal logic. Hoel's reasoning is: if LLMs had surplus intelligence, writing would have improved (because text is their home domain). Writing hasn't improved. Therefore, no surplus intelligence. Therefore, tools (by elimination). The draft PRESENTS this argument in a way that makes it look idiotic (as a bare non-sequitur), when in fact it has a structure that needs to be engaged with. That's a flaw in the draft's ENGAGEMENT with Hoel — it doesn't give his argument its due. But the deeper problem is: even once you give Hoel's argument its due, Nick's response (it's a medium, not a tool) doesn't address the EVIDENTIAL point. The medium hypothesis is consistent with the same evidence Hoel cites. Both predict what we observe. So the essay's positive proposal (medium) floats free of the evidence. I'm confident now. Let me formulate my final answer. Actually, one more thought. Let me consider whether the fatal flaw might be even more specific — something about a particular passage or claim that CONTRADICTS something in Hoel's text. Looking at the draft's Section "What sort of tool?": > Hoel's own suggestion is writing. There are other obvious candidates. Perhaps its function is to predict the next token. But that is a description of mechanism, not of use... This is fine. > Perhaps it is for chatting. Keith Frankish has suggested that LLMs can be understood, from the intentional stance, as wanting to play the chat game. That is suggestive, but it still fits badly with code generation, translation, summarisation, or philosophical use. This is fine too. > I want to be careful here and distinguish the suggestion I am making from a stronger one. I do not need to prove that LLMs cannot be tools in any sense whatsoever. It is enough, for present purposes, to say that the ordinary tool picture fits badly. This is cautious and defensible. Now the "Writing" section: > A pen is for writing in a very specific sense. It makes marks on a surface... But the pen's role ends there. It extends my ability to inscribe. It does not return a proposal... Good phenomenological point. > When I use an LLM well, the exchange is not one-way... We are not only prompting the system. The return prompts us back. Good. > He judges LLMs by the quality of the resulting text artefacts: books, essays, social posts, emails. Fair enough. If the question were simply whether these systems have improved writing, that would be relevant evidence. But the practice at issue is not well captured by imagining a more advanced pen... Here's the problem. The draft says "fair enough" to Hoel's evidence and then says "but the practice at issue is not well captured by..." This concedes Hoel's evidence and then tries to change the subject. That's the fatal flaw in miniature: CONCEDING THE EVIDENCE AND CHANGING THE SUBJECT. A strong response would not say "fair enough" to Hoel's evidence. A strong response would say: "Hoel's evidence measures the wrong thing. Here's what it misses, and here's what you'd see if you looked at the right thing." The Codex plan does this (artefact vs working surface, the recursive practice, the reconnection in Paragraph 11). The current draft doesn't. OK. I'm genuinely confident now. Let me write my final answer. ## The Fatal Flaw The draft concedes Hoel's evidence and then changes the subject. It never engages with the inferential structure of Hoel's actual argument. Here is what I mean by this, and here is the full reasoning behind it. ### What Hoel is actually arguing Hoel's essay is not primarily a definitional exercise. He is not saying "LLMs are tools because they satisfy conditions X, Y, Z for toolhood." He is making an evidential argument: 1. Text is the home domain of LLMs ("words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms") 2. If LLMs had surplus intelligence beyond processing, it would show up in text first 3. Six years of evidence from writing: efficiency gains, mountains of slop, no quality revolution. "The best users gain efficiencies and expand, to some degree, their capability range, especially for the mid-list of intellectual output. The worst users flood the zone." 4. The pattern of effects matches the tool prediction (quality mirrors input) and not the surplus-intelligence prediction (quality revolution) 5. Therefore: "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool." 6. Inductive step: extrapolate this to every other intellectual domain "Tool" in Hoel's usage means: something that processes what you give it without adding its own intelligence. The quality of output depends on the quality of input. No surplus, no singularity. ### What the draft does instead The draft attacks a different version of "tool" — the philosophical version, defined by proper function and predictability. It argues: - Tools have proper functions; LLMs don't → not a tool - Tools are predictable; LLM unpredictability is a feature → not a tool - "For writing" is too coarse; the practice is recursive → medium, not tool These are philosophically interesting points. But Hoel never claims LLMs have a proper function. He never argues from the definition of "tool." His use of "tool" is colloquial, meaning "instrument that processes input." The draft's conceptual analysis attacks a position Hoel is not defending. ### Where the flaw is sharpest The draft's second half — from the "Writing" section onward — gestures at the right response: the interesting practice is recursive, not one-way. Text goes in, comes back altered, and the alteration becomes material for the next move. This is genuine phenomenological work. But then the draft says, of Hoel's evidence about bad public prose: > "Fair enough. If the question were simply whether these systems have improved writing, that would be relevant evidence." And at the end: > "I think this asks the right empirical question at the wrong level of description." This is the flaw laid bare. The draft concedes Hoel's evidence ("fair enough"), asserts that Hoel measures at the wrong level of description, but never explains what the right level of description IS, or what you would observe there, or why the medium hypothesis generates a prediction different from the tool hypothesis. Both the tool hypothesis and the medium hypothesis predict the same observables: quality depends on how the human engages, slop comes from lazy engagement, good users get useful results. Hoel would shrug at the medium label: "Fine, call it a medium. A medium through which bits go in and bits come out. A medium whose output quality mirrors its input quality. Still no surplus intelligence. My evidence still stands." The draft has no answer to this, because it never connects its positive proposal (medium, recursive practice, Frippertronics) to the question Hoel is actually asking (is there surplus intelligence? does the evidence from writing show it?). ### What the Codex revision plan fixes The Codex plan introduces several moves the current draft lacks: The proper-function-to-evaluation pivot (Paragraph 6): if you don't know what a thing is for, you can't say in advance what counts as a good test of it. This connects the conceptual argument (no proper function) to the evidential argument (Hoel's test) — a connection the current draft never makes. The artefact/working-surface distinction (Paragraphs 8-9): Hoel measures text as finished product (books, blog posts, published prose). The interesting practice treats text as a working surface — for testing distinctions, surfacing alternatives, forcing reformulation. These are different, and Hoel's evidence speaks to one but is silent about the other. The reconnection to Hoel's evidence (Paragraph 11): "Hoel's evidence is not refuted, but it is being measured at the wrong level of description... a lot of bad prose may show what happens when the returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, or worked through." This is the bridging move the current draft entirely lacks — it explains how the medium hypothesis ACCOUNTS FOR slop differently from the tool hypothesis. Earning "medium" (Paragraph 12): the draft introduces "medium" too early, before the reader has been shown why they need a different category. The Codex plan builds toward it through the artefact/working-surface distinction and the recursive practice, so that when "medium" arrives, it names something the reader already recognises. ### What this means concretely The draft as it stands is this argument: "Hoel says LLMs are tools for writing. I say 'tool' doesn't fit (no proper function, constitutive unpredictability). And 'for writing' doesn't fit (the practice is recursive, not one-way). So they're a medium, not a tool. Look, here's Frippertronics — same recursive structure." What it needs to be is this argument: "Hoel says LLMs are tools, and he tests this against what happened to writing. I want to put pressure on both moves. The proper-function problem isn't just terminological — if you can't say what the thing is for, you can't assume you know how to test it. And 'writing' hides a distinction between text as finished artefact and text as working surface. Hoel measures artefacts. The recursive practice I want to describe uses text as a working surface. His evidence is real — slop is real — but it shows what happens when the medium's output is published directly, without the resistance and correction that the recursive practice involves. The category of medium captures this, because a medium is understood by how it makes work proceed, not by what it is for." The first version talks past Hoel. The second version responds to him. ### Remaining uncertainties I want to flag one lingering worry. Even the improved version faces a challenge that Hoel could press: "You say the interesting thing is the recursive practice, not the published output. But show me the fruits. Where is the philosophy, the thinking, the work that emerged from this practice and couldn't have emerged without it?" The essay can say the practice enables something, but if it can't point to what it has enabled, it risks looking like it's describing a process with no product. The Codex plan seems aware of this (its Paragraph 11 carefully says "Hoel's evidence is not refuted"), but the essay will need to navigate this carefully — it cannot promise too much for the medium while delivering only a description of the practice. I also want to note: the draft's proper-function argument and unpredictability argument are not wasted work. They're good points. They just need to be connected to Hoel's evidence via the evaluation pivot, rather than floating as standalone conceptual criticisms. *Il saggio attuale combatte l'ombra dell'argomento di Hoel invece dell'argomento stesso — gli serve un ponte tra il proprio quadro concettuale e le prove empiriche che l'altro porta al tavolo.* ### User aa86dd8 completed Agent "Read March 6 session transcript" completed Here is the full transcript of the March 6 session (session ID `89179ddd`). The session was relatively short — 16 messages total. Here is what happened: Nick invoked the `/contemplate` command, asking Claude to evaluate a conversation he'd had with ChatGPT Codex about the "generating philosophy" paper — specifically section 3, section 4, and the integration queue. He said the conversation was "copied in below" and wanted a detailed turn-by-turn analysis with Claude's own answers at each point, noting areas of agreement and disagreement. Claude loaded the required skills (epistemic-discipline, source-work) and then spent several messages trying to locate the ChatGPT Codex conversation transcript: - Messages 7-15 show Claude searching through the session file, integration queue, manuscript structure, web clippings, recent notes, and daily notes trying to find the referenced conversation. - At each step, Claude came up empty — the conversation text was never actually included in Nick's message. The session ended at message 16, where Claude reported back that the conversation "doesn't appear to have come through with your message" and asked Nick to paste it in. The Italian sign-off translates roughly to "It seems the text stayed in the clipboard rather than in the message." So in summary: the session was essentially a failed handoff — Nick intended to paste a ChatGPT Codex conversation for evaluation but it didn't make it into the prompt, and after thorough searching Claude let him know it was missing. *Una sessione breve, interrotta dall'assenza del testo promesso — capita a tutti di dimenticare il contenuto nella clipboard.* total_tokens: 16966 tool_uses: 1 duration_ms: 17636 Full transcript available at: /private/tmp/claude-501/-Users-nickyoung-My-Obsidian-Vault/tasks/aa86dd8.output ### Assistant Good — you asked me to prove I can keep up. Let me tell you what I found. ### Assistant Right — understood, no relevant past sessions on this machine. That's fine — everything I need is in the three documents I've already read: Hoel's article, the current Codex Revision draft, and the bullet-point draft with your %% comments. The answer is in the texts themselves. Here is what I think the fatal flaw is, and I want to lay out the reasoning fully before I give you the punchline, as you asked. --- ## The reasoning Hoel's argument has a specific inferential structure that the draft doesn't engage with. Let me lay it out from his text. Hoel is not making a definitional claim about toolhood. He is not saying "LLMs satisfy conditions X, Y, Z for being tools." He is making an evidential argument structured as a dichotomy: From his text: "If LLMs were a true source of intelligence to rival humans, then discovering them should be like discovering oil. And if we were climbing the curve of an intelligence explosion their surplus intellect would be improving our civilization's text as a whole in noticeable ways. If LLMs are tools, then we should expect their impacts to be a mirror of us, and concern efficiency and scale, rather than quality, and depend strongly on how people use them." Two hypotheses. Surplus intelligence predicts a quality revolution in text. Tool predicts efficiency gains, scaling, and quality that mirrors human input. Evidence: six years, no quality revolution, mountains of slop, best users gain efficiencies, worst users flood the zone. The pattern matches the tool prediction. Therefore: "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool." Now look at what the draft does. The draft's first substantive section ("What sort of tool?") argues: tools have proper functions; LLMs don't; tools are predictable; LLM unpredictability is a feature not a defect. These are genuine philosophical points. But Hoel never claims LLMs have a proper function. He never argues from the philosophical definition of "tool." His use of "tool" is colloquial — it means: something that processes what you give it without adding surplus intelligence. The quality of output mirrors the quality of input. No singularity. The draft's proper-function argument and unpredictability argument attack a position Hoel isn't holding. Then the draft's second half introduces the recursive practice (text goes in, comes back altered, you respond, the loop continues), the pen comparison, the medium concept, Frippertronics. This is the most philosophically alive part of the essay. But here is where the flaw becomes fatal. Look at what the draft says about Hoel's evidence: "He judges LLMs by the quality of the resulting text artefacts: books, essays, social posts, emails. Fair enough." Fair enough. The draft concedes the evidence. And then, in the final section: "I think this asks the right empirical question at the wrong level of description." This is the entire response to Hoel's evidence. You're measuring at the wrong level. But the draft never says what the RIGHT level of description is, or what you would observe there, or why the medium hypothesis generates a prediction different from the tool hypothesis about anything observable. Here is the problem this creates: both the tool hypothesis and the medium hypothesis predict the same observables. Both predict that quality depends on how the human engages. Both predict that slop comes from lazy or unresisting engagement. Both predict that good users get useful results. Hoel explicitly says this: the tool prediction is that "their impacts" will "depend strongly on how people use them." Nick's medium description says: the quality depends on resistance, on pushing back against genericisation, on the human's contribution to the loop. These are the same prediction in different vocabulary. Hoel could read the draft and say: "Fine, call it a medium. Call it whatever you want. A medium through which bits go in and bits come out. A medium whose output quality mirrors its input quality. Still no surplus intelligence. Still no singularity. My evidence still stands. What has your relabelling bought you?" And the draft has no answer, because it never bridges from the phenomenological description of the recursive practice back to the evidential question Hoel is asking. It changes the subject. Your own %% comment in the bullet-point draft flagged exactly this: > "Why is writing hasn't improved, therefore, LLMs are tools? That's idiotic and makes no sense whatsoever. This might be a major flaw. Take this one seriously." The comment is right that the inference as baldly stated sounds like a non-sequitur. But Hoel's actual inference has structure: writing was the best test case → the evidence matches the tool prediction → therefore tools. The draft presents this as a bare non-sequitur ("writing hasn't improved, therefore tools"), which makes it look idiotic — but the result is that the draft doesn't engage with the actual argument, because it's already dismissed it as not making sense. ## So what is the fatal flaw, precisely? The draft concedes Hoel's evidence and changes the subject. It introduces a rival conceptual framework (medium instead of tool) and describes a rival practice (recursive engagement instead of one-way use), but never connects these to Hoel's evidence in a way that explains why the evidence should be read differently under the medium description. The first half of the essay (proper function, unpredictability) floats free of the second half (recursive practice, Frippertronics). There is no argumentative hinge that connects them. And neither half engages with what Hoel is actually doing: inferring from the pattern of effects on public writing to a conclusion about the nature of LLMs. The essay as it stands is two good sets of ideas placed next to each other — a conceptual critique of "tool" and a phenomenological description of recursive practice — without the bridge that would make them an argument against Hoel. Without that bridge, the essay talks past him. ## What the Codex revision plan fixes The plan introduces the bridge in three places: Paragraph 6 (the proper-function → evaluation pivot): if you can't specify what a thing is for, you can't say in advance what counts as a good test of it. This connects the conceptual argument (no proper function) to Hoel's choice of test (writing) — a connection the current draft never makes. It means the first half of the essay (proper function) is no longer floating free; it generates a methodological worry about Hoel's test selection. Paragraphs 8-9 (artefact vs working surface): Hoel measures text as finished product. The interesting practice uses text as working material. "Writing" hides multiple practices under one name, and Hoel's evidence speaks to one of them but is silent about the other. Paragraph 11 (the reconnection): "Hoel's evidence is not refuted, but it is being measured at the wrong level of description... a lot of bad prose may show what happens when the returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, or worked through." This is the move the current draft entirely lacks. It explains how the medium hypothesis accounts for slop differently: not as evidence that the system is "just a tool," but as evidence of what happens when the medium's compression tendencies go unchecked — when there is no human decompression step. --- ## What I'm less certain about One lingering worry, which the new plan will also need to handle: even with the bridge, Hoel can press the question — "You say the interesting practice is recursive thinking-through-text, not artefact production. Show me the fruits. Where is the philosophy, the thinking, the work that emerged from this practice and couldn't have emerged without it?" The essay can describe the practice, but if it can't gesture toward what the practice has produced, it risks sounding like a description of a process with no product. I notice the draft's closing line — "For LLMs, I think the answer is yes. What that practice is, and what doing it well looks like, are questions that remain open" — is honest about this. But it also concedes quite a lot to Hoel's scepticism. I also want to be clear: the proper-function argument and the unpredictability argument are not wasted. They're doing real philosophical work. They just need the evaluation pivot to connect them to Hoel's evidence, rather than standing as free-floating conceptual criticisms of a word Hoel is using colloquially. --- That's my reading. Did I pass? *Il difetto non è nelle idee del saggio — è nell'assenza del ponte tra quelle idee e le prove che l'avversario porta al tavolo.* ### User a7314e7 completed Agent "Read Sunday's session transcript" completed I've now read the complete transcript. Here is what happened in that Sunday session. The session (9 March 2026 evening) was a brainstorming conversation run through the /contemplate skill, where you worked through a Substack article idea provisionally titled "LLMs Are Not Tools." The conversation had a clear arc across about 30 exchanges. ## How it started You opened by asking about Frippertronics (Robert Fripp's tape-loop system with two Revox machines), then pasted in Erik Hoel's "Bits In, Bits Out" article from The Intrinsic Perspective and the Lopes "AI Art and Artists" PDF reference. You asked the model to find the connection you were interested in, and it initially guessed wrong — focusing on the "bits in, bits out" framing and the "views from nowhere" characterization. ## Your correction and the real thread You corrected course explicitly (exchange [10]): > "I have never once shown any interest in the bits in bits out thing. I am interested in two, potentially but I am not sure related questions: I am interested in the possibility that LLMs are NOT tools... 1. Tools have a proper function. LLMs don't have an obvious proper function. Relatedly, they are unpredictable (note, I do not mean unreliable) in a way that tools are not. 2. I like the idea of a self loop as modelled on frippertronics." This grounded the conversation in your existing published work. The model found your "Growing the Image" paper, which already argues Midjourney is "not an agent or a tool, but a new type of artistic medium" with dynamic recalcitrance, using the Esposito quote: "if the outcome of a traditional machine becomes unpredictable, we do not think that it is creative or original — we think that it is broken." ## The refinement (exchange [16]) You pushed back on one line of argument — the idea that the tape-loop system itself lacks a proper function. You said the better move is not to argue about object ontology (is the Frippertronics rig one tool or two?) but to focus on how Fripp and Eno were using the recorder, which gets you to "medium territory." You also flagged wanting to downplay the art-specific framing and treat LLMs as a "generally functional medium." ## The compression breakthrough (exchange [18]) The model had speculated about what happens to the "signal" in LLM conversation — degradation? transformation? You responded with a single word: "compression?" This produced what reads as the most productive exchange of the session. The model developed the compression idea at length: - LLMs are themselves products of compression (Ted Chiang's "blurry jpeg of the web") - When your ideas pass through an LLM, they get "JPEG'd" — specificity is partially lost, statistical patterns are amplified, new connections surface - The loop is compression-decompression-compression: the LLM compresses, you push back with your specificity, the LLM compresses again - Slop is what happens when the compression runs without the human decompression step (Hoel's children's book example) - This parallels Frippertronics exactly: tape degradation = lossy but aesthetically productive; LLM compression = lossy but cognitively productive ## Where it ended You were falling asleep, so the session wrapped with creation of a note (`Notes/LLMs Are Not Tools.md`) capturing the full thread — the not-a-tool argument, Frippertronics as medium model, compression as signal-processing concept, why Frippertronics works better than gardening for text (immediate temporal grain, reflexive, immersive), and the "generally functional medium" extension. The session file ID was included so you could surface it easily. ## Threads left open Several things were flagged but not resolved: - Whether "compression" fully captures what happens in the loop, or whether it needs further development - Whether the Frippertronics and gardening models complement each other (Frippertronics for text/immediate iteration, gardening for images/slow cultivation) or whether one subsumes the other - How to frame "generally functional medium" without making it too art-specific — the extension from Growing the Image to a broader claim - The relationship to your inner speech work (briefly touched on: the LLM loop as an extension of the self-loop of inner speech, but not developed) *La conversazione era un circuito che si stava scaldando — il segnale è ancora lì, pronto a riprendere il giro.* total_tokens: 32643 tool_uses: 5 duration_ms: 62852 Full transcript available at: /private/tmp/claude-501/-Users-nickyoung-My-Obsidian-Vault/tasks/a7314e7.output ### Assistant Good, you've read it. Waiting for your verdict. *Il banco degli esami è sempre in silenzio prima del verdetto.* ### User below was my conversation with Kodex about um yeah the problems with this draft and how to proceed. Um yeah you've you've kind of worked out the pro the the bigger problems with Uh the aborted Codex draft, the one on the current note. Below is the Shadow Hand Codex where we try and produce a new better plan, which takes quite a lot of what I've done in the previous trust, but recalibrates it so it's sort of more effective and better connect with the target test. The conversation cumulates in a plan That uh Kovac suggests for this new version. Two tasks for you. I really like the structure that is laid out into plan. At least I do up until about Paraguay F7. But I'm still not very happy with it as a plan. Any idea why? Yeah, there's something I constantly complain to you about. I'm not sure if we've ever remembered it. restoring my knowledge about um yeah what I do and do not want in bullet quite fast given So yeah, I'd like you to say try and answer that question and then we'd like you to produce a new version of this plan. And remember, the plan isn't the problem is not the structure. I like that scripture, cooking to bar seven.make sure that you explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer. Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that i have a lot to consider. CHAT: Summarize prior conversation nickyoung Open 797a7eb4-f119-4e0d-9298-0047aa41a7f3.jsonl I would like to continue this conversation on with you here. I was not especially pleased with the final response I got from Claude Code in this chat. Okay, um before you give me your improved answer for the final question I asked in the chat. Can you just um summarise what the conversation was about before that from the very beginning, just so we're both up speed and on the same page? 3 previous messages Summary Up to the point where you asked Claude Code to reveal the session JSON in Finder, the conversation was mainly about two strands: your Generating Philosophy paper and the Hoel-response Substack piece, with most of the substantive discussion settling onto the Substack article. From the beginning, you asked Claude to help you decide whether to spend the day on the Generating Philosophy project or on salvaging the Substack draft about Erik Hoel’s “Bits In, Bits Out.” You flagged that something had gone wrong in the previous evening’s work on the Substack piece, and that this mistake had disrupted your original angle. Claude then tried to reconstruct the recent context by reading daily notes, session files, and project notes. In doing that, it made several mistakes that you explicitly pushed back on: It misread the state of the Generating Philosophy paper, including wrongly implying Section 4 had not been written. It failed to look carefully enough at the multiple Substack drafts from the previous day. It got confused about the active research project structure and treated an abandoned line of work as if it were still live. It made some framing claims you rejected, especially the idea that the “response” framing was somehow treacherous. After you corrected it, the conversation became more concrete. You pointed Claude to: the actual longform project index, the various Substack drafts, the text-internal-evaluation paper folder with Sections 0 to 4, and the Hoel clipping itself. A major part of the middle of the conversation was therefore corrective: getting the factual map right. In particular, you made clear that the old Floridi-and-Zahavy route was abandoned, that the active paper was the text-internal-evaluation project, and that some of Claude’s summary statements about “choosing between approaches” were simply wrong. Once that was straightened out, the conversation shifted back to the Substack article. The key movement there was: you and Claude re-read Hoel’s essay, you focused on whether Hoel is using the wrong test for LLMs by treating text production as the right yardstick, and you started developing the comparison case of software development as a counterexample. That software-development comparison became the most promising live thread. The emerging idea was roughly: with coding tools, the important question is not whether “code overall has gotten better,” but what developers can now do that they could not do before, and the real value lies in iterative back-and-forth, faster exploration, onboarding into unfamiliar domains, and practical experimentation, not in one-shot autonomous output. You then began shaping how that comparison might serve the essay. You liked the line about “what people can do now,” especially the examples in brackets, though you were leaning toward foregrounding “iterate faster” as the cleanest formulation. You also suggested that developers are a good case because they have actually learned how to use these systems: they iterate, check, engage, form communities of practice, and adapt workflows around the tools rather than judging them only by raw first-pass output. Alongside that, another conceptual line emerged: the “proper function” argument. You proposed an opening structure for the essay that would go something like this: people are too quick to say LLMs are tools, tools usually have a more or less specifiable proper function, but ChatGPT’s proper function is unusually hard to state, which suggests LLMs are either a very different kind of tool or not quite tools in the ordinary sense at all, and if their proper function is unclear, that also makes it unclear how they ought to be evaluated. Claude’s compacted answer to that was the response you were dissatisfied with. After that, you said you no longer trusted it post-compaction and asked it to reveal the JSON file of the session in Finder so you could continue elsewhere. So the shortest accurate summary is: the conversation began as a “what should I work on today?” question, got bogged down by Claude’s repeated misreadings of your project state, was corrected into a much more precise discussion of the Hoel response essay, and ended with two live philosophical lines for that essay: the software-developer comparison case and the proper-function challenge to calling LLMs straightforward tools. Il filo più promettente sembrava quello che sposta la domanda dalla qualità media dell’output alle pratiche nuove che questi sistemi rendono possibili. "You proposed an opening structure for the essay that would go something like this: people are too quick to say LLMs are tools, tools usually have a more or less specifiable proper function, but ChatGPT’s proper function is unusually hard to state, which suggests LLMs are either a very different kind of tool or not quite tools in the ordinary sense at all, and if their proper function is unclear, that also makes it unclear how they ought to be evaluated." develop this structure further. To do this you'll probably need to look back at the chat and also at the codex draft of this piece, which is the most up-to-date version these days. 1 previous message Looking back at the chat and at LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md, I think the strongest development is to make the proper-function move do more specific argumentative work before you introduce medium. Right now the draft already has the ingredients, especially in the “What sort of tool?” and “Writing” sections. What it does not yet fully exploit is the bridge from “function is unclear” to “Hoel may be testing the thing under the wrong description.” I think the opening wants to run like this: Start from the apparent obviousness. “Of course LLMs are tools” should be granted as a natural first reaction, not treated as stupid. That gives you a calm opening and keeps the essay from sounding merely contrarian. Introduce proper function as a way of sharpening, not rejecting, the commonsense thought. The point is not “aha, tools are impossible to define.” It is narrower: if something is straightforwardly a tool, we usually have at least a rough grip on what it is for. Your current hammer / Swiss Army knife / Google sequence already does this well. Make the reader feel the difficulty in ChatGPT’s case. This is the crux. You want the reader to try the obvious answers and watch them fail: “It’s for writing” is too narrow. “It’s for chatting” is too vague. “It’s for predicting tokens” is a mechanism, not a human use. “It’s for helping with tasks” is so general it stops distinguishing anything. That failure matters because it shows that the difficulty is not just that LLMs are versatile. Google is versatile too, but “search” still names its function reasonably well. The issue is that with ChatGPT, the ordinary “X is for Y” format starts slipping. Draw only the modest conclusion. This is where I would stay disciplined. Not: therefore LLMs are not tools. Rather: if we keep calling them tools, they are quite different from the tools that usually anchor our intuitions about function and evaluation. That is stronger than a mere rhetorical flourish, but weaker than a final metaphysical verdict. It also matches the best line from the earlier chat: “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all.” Then make the evaluative consequence explicit. This is the move the structure really needs. Something like: if we do not yet know clearly what sort of thing this is for, then we also do not yet know what would count as testing it well. That is the payoff of the proper-function discussion. It licenses the turn to Hoel without yet saying Hoel is simply wrong. Only then introduce Hoel’s test case. Now the essay can say: Hoel treats writing as the privileged domain because LLMs are textual systems. But that inference may be too quick. Being made of language is not enough to show that improvement in publicly available prose is the right measure of success. That lets you attack the test case at the right level. Not “your evidence about slop is false,” but “you may be measuring the wrong thing.” Then pivot to the positive redescription already present in the draft. This is where your current material on prompting-back, recursive exchange, medium, and Frippertronics comes in. The positive claim is not just “LLMs are weird.” It is: their most interesting use is not one-way inscription but recursive engagement, where what comes back partly forms the next move. That gives you a reason why “writing” is too blunt and why “medium” starts to look better than “tool.” If I were tightening the logic even further, I would make the opening explicitly answer three questions in order: Why hesitate over the word “tool”? Because proper function is unusually hard to specify. Why does that matter? Because function and evaluation travel together. What follows for Hoel? His writing-based test may capture one visible consequence of LLM use without yet identifying the right level at which to understand the technology. A useful way to think about the structure is that the proper-function section should not be the thesis by itself. It should be the clearing operation that makes the later “medium / reciprocal prompting” account necessary. On its own, “ChatGPT has no obvious proper function” is interesting but incomplete. Its real force is preparatory: it destabilizes the ordinary tool picture enough that the reader is ready for your more distinctive account of the practice. I would also keep two risks in view. First, don’t let “lack of obvious proper function” collapse into “infinite multifunctionality.” Plenty of tools have multiple functions. Your point is not multiplicity but indeterminacy at the level of ordinary use-description. Second, don’t move too fast from “unclear function” to “therefore medium.” The essay will be stronger if medium arrives as the best explanation of the practices you then describe, not as a deduction from the mere failure of function-talk. So, in compressed form, the developed structure is: Common sense says LLMs are tools. Straightforward tools normally admit a reasonably specifiable proper function. ChatGPT resists such specification in a revealing way. Therefore the ordinary tool picture is already unstable here. If the picture is unstable, the obvious evaluative test is unstable too. Hoel’s writing test may therefore be real evidence framed under the wrong description. The better description is recursive, medium-like use rather than one-way text production. If you want, I can take this one step further and turn it into a paragraph-by-paragraph opening outline keyed directly to the existing sections of the Codex draft. La mossa decisiva è far vedere che l’incertezza sulla funzione propria non conclude l’argomento, ma rende necessaria una descrizione più adeguata della pratica. /contemplate Okay, let me just read through your proposal and give you some some feedback. So yeah, yeah, I think that's step one's fair enough. Um, what you seem to miss between step one and step two, or at least around this area is um, can you show in the next iteration of this plan how the the Hoel, the Eric Hoel—I'm not sure if that surname came through in the transcription, but I think you know what I mean. H-O-E-L. Oh i ssee, oh shit. Oh, I see. You have said that you want to that you think who's should only be intro introduced in step six. No way Jose. Definitely don't want to do that.Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind. make sure that you explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer. Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that i have a lot to consider. 5 previous messages You’re right. The clipping was the wrong source for this. I reread the full Hoel article, Bits In, Bits Out, and then went back to the current draft at LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md (line 18). Analysis The main thing I would change is not just the order of steps, but the object of attack. In the current draft, Hoel is still slightly misdescribed in a way that then distorts the whole response. At line 18 (line 18), line 30 (line 30), and line 40 (line 40), the draft tends to present him as if he were straightforwardly saying that LLMs are tools for writing in something like the way a pen is for writing. But in the full article, that is not quite his structure. His structure is more like this: humans are tool-using creatures, LLMs belong on the tool side rather than the alien-intelligence side, writing is the first and clearest domain in which that can already be seen, because if these systems really were a new source of surplus intelligence, public text production should look dramatically different by now. That matters because it changes where your reply has to go. The best response is not “LLMs aren’t tools for writing, full stop.” The sharper response is: Hoel is too quick to think that what happened to writing settles what sort of thing these systems are. That is where the proper-function move becomes useful. Not as a free-floating analytic detour, but as pressure internal to Hoel’s own framing. He begins with the stone axe because it is paradigmatically legible as a tool. One can more or less see what it is for. Once he classifies LLMs in that same family, the natural follow-up question is not optional. It is forced by his own setup: what exactly is ChatGPT for? That is why the proper-function discussion belongs very early, but not before Hoel. It should arise out of Hoel. I think the deep argumentative sequence is this: Hoel is right to think classification matters. But ordinary tool classifications usually come with a rough grip on proper function. ChatGPT resists that grip in a revealing way. Therefore the label “tool” is not false exactly, but underdescribed. And if the object is underdescribed, the evaluative test may be underdescribed too. So Hoel may be right about slop while still choosing the wrong level of description for what the technology is. That, I think, is the real spine. Why the previous structure was wrong My earlier structure failed because it treated Hoel as a late-stage application of a theory. But in this essay, Hoel is not the example. He is the engine. His article supplies: the classificatory target, the rhetorical pressure, and the evidential strategy you want to resist. So he has to be in paragraph one and stay there. It also failed because it separated two things that should stay connected: the question “what sort of tool is this?” and the question “why should writing be the master test?” Those are not two independent topics. The second should follow from the first. If the function is obscure, the test is not self-validating. What in the current draft is already strong A lot of the current draft is usable. The opening concession at lines 18-22 (line 18) is good in tone: it grants that Hoel sees something real. The proper-function material at lines 24-36 (line 24) is also good, especially the distinction between use and proper function. The best stretch in the whole draft is probably lines 42-46 (line 42): the pen comparison, the one-way inscription point, and the line that the system prompts us back. And the slop section at lines 68-76 (line 68) is already well aimed because it refuses the booster temptation. What is weak is mainly the connective tissue: Hoel is slightly flattened. The proper-function discussion is not yet explicitly tied to the legitimacy of his writing test. “Medium” arrives a little too much like the category you wanted all along, rather than the category forced on you by the failure of the tool picture. Structural options Option 1 is the strongest to my mind. Start from Hoel’s axe. Say the point of the axe example is that tools are normally legible in terms of what they are for. Ask whether ChatGPT is legible in that way. Show that it is not. Conclude that Hoel’s own classificatory starting point is shakier than it first looks. Then ask whether writing can really function as the privileged test case. Why it works: it is tightly internal to Hoel’s own framing. Option 2 is more concessive. Start from Hoel’s anti-hype point and his broad diagnosis of slop. Grant most of that. Then say that what the evidence shows is still underdetermined because the thing being measured has been too quickly described as a writing tool. Introduce proper function from there. Why it works: it makes you sound maximally fair. Its drawback: it postpones the most philosophically interesting move. Option 3 is the most elegant if you want the essay to move faster. Start from Hoel’s phrase about tools that talk back. Say that once the thing talks back, returns altered material, and reshapes the next move, the ordinary tool picture is already under pressure. Then ask what such a thing is for. Then turn to writing and recursive use. Why it works: it gets you into your strongest material quickly. Its drawback: it risks feeling slightly too clever unless the proper-function step is made explicit. My recommendation is a hybrid of 1 and 3: start with Hoel’s tool frame, seize on the fact that these are supposed to be tools that talk back, then ask what sort of tool could have that structure. Concrete changes to the current draft I would change three local claims first. At line 18 (line 18), I would stop saying Hoel’s view is “more specifically tools for writing.” Better would be something like: he thinks writing is the first domain in which the character of these systems has already shown itself. At line 30 (line 30), I would replace “Hoel’s own suggestion is writing” with something like: Hoel’s evidential route runs through writing. That is more accurate, and it better sets up the methodological issue. At line 40 (line 40), I would stop calling the problem “Hoel’s suggestion that LLMs are tools for writing.” I would instead say that the second difficulty concerns his decision to let writing bear so much argumentative weight. Those three revisions would already make the essay much less shoddy at the level of target-description. Final answer If I were rebuilding the essay plan from scratch, I would do it like this. Paragraph 1: introduce Hoel immediately and fairly. Say that he is right to resist AI hype and right to think the argument turns on what sort of thing an LLM is. Mention that his essay treats writing as the first revealing domain. Paragraph 2: use Hoel’s own opening image against him. His stone axe works as a paradigm because an axe is recognizably for something. That is what makes it a tool in the ordinary, confidence-inducing sense. Then pivot: ChatGPT does not announce its function in anything like that way. Paragraph 3: introduce proper function. Not abstractly for its own sake, but as the sharpened version of Hoel’s classificatory move. Tools usually admit at least a rough answer to the question what they are for. Paragraph 4: make the reader try the obvious answers and watch them fail. Writing: too narrow. Chatting: too vague. Token prediction: mechanism, not use. General assistance: too empty to individuate the thing. The point here is not that ChatGPT has many uses. The point is that ordinary functional description is strangely unstable in this case. Paragraph 5: draw the modest conclusion. Not: therefore not a tool. But: if it is a tool, it is a very odd one, and Hoel’s ordinary tool language already conceals that oddness. Paragraph 6: make the methodological consequence explicit. If we do not know clearly what the thing is for, then we do not yet know that public improvement in prose is the right master test of it. Paragraph 7: now return to Hoel’s writing test. Say that his move is intelligible. Writing is where these systems first appeared most vividly. It is the domain where the hype should already have paid off if the hype were right. But that still does not show that finished prose quality is the right level at which to understand the practice. Paragraphs 8-9: deploy your strongest existing material. This is where the pen comparison, one-way inscription point, and “the return prompts us back” material should do the work. This is the best answer to Hoel: the interesting use is recursive, not merely productive. Paragraphs 10-11: only now bring in medium. At this point “medium” will feel earned. It arrives not as an imposed theory but as the better description of a practice in which return, resistance, distortion, and redirection belong to the process itself. Paragraph 12 onward: return to slop. Grant it. Keep it. Use it. But say that slop may show the bad public form of interaction with such a system rather than settling that the system is just an ordinary tool for writing. Ending: narrow the conclusion. I would not end with “LLMs are not tools,” at least not in the strict argumentative sense. I would end closer to: Hoel is right about the failure of any text singularity, but too quick to think that this tells us we are dealing with a familiar writing tool. What his own argument helps reveal is a stranger object, one whose returns partly constitute the next move of thought. That is the structure I would now back. The shortest statement of the whole thing is: Hoel should appear at the beginning, the proper-function question should arise from his own tool framing, and the challenge to the writing test should be presented as a consequence of that pressure, not as a separate side-topic. Qui il punto non è negare che gli LLM siano utensili in qualche senso, ma mostrare che Hoel decide troppo presto in quale senso lo siano. "I can’t formally invoke /contemplate in this session because that skill is not exposed in the available skill list here, so I’m just doing the long-form analysis directly." can we fix this now please before going any further? 6 previous messages Yes. I fixed the filesystem side of it. contemplate now exists as a Codex-visible skill at Contemplate with UI metadata at openai.yaml. The reason it was “unavailable” before is that it only existed under ~/.claude/skills, while this Codex environment was only surfacing skills from ~/.codex/skills. The one limitation is that I cannot retroactively change the skill list that was already injected into the current turn’s prompt. So the installation is fixed now, but the host may only expose it cleanly on the next turn or after a skills refresh. In other words: the actual configuration problem is solved; the remaining issue is prompt refresh, not missing files. Adesso il problema non è più l’assenza della skill, ma soltanto il momento in cui l’interfaccia ricarica il catalogo. "if it is a tool, it is a very strange one, unlike the tools that anchor Hoel’s picture. That is a better argumentative posture because it is harder to dismiss and keeps you out of pseudo-metaphysical overreach." you keep forgetting to use the line I tell you to keep using. Yes. I drifted back into the softened paraphrase and dropped the actual line you wanted preserved. The line to keep using is: “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all” That matters because it does two things at once: it keeps the pressure on Hoel’s classification, and it preserves the openness you want, without collapsing into the flatter “a very strange tool indeed.” My version was weaker because it domesticated the thought. “A very strange tool” still sounds basically settled. Your line keeps the category itself under pressure. It says: maybe this belongs under tool only in a stretched sense; maybe it is already slipping the category. That is a materially better philosophical formulation. So going forward, I should treat that as a fixed hinge, not as something to paraphrase freely. If I restate the structure using your wording, the relevant step becomes: conclude not that LLMs are simply unusual tools, but that they are “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all”; and then use that instability to motivate the next question of how such things should be evaluated. That is the wording I should have kept. La tua formula è migliore perché tiene aperta la questione categoriale invece di chiuderla troppo presto. /contemplate Okay, let's let me have a look at your final answer from earlier then about the structure. So paragraph one. Yeah, I think in paragraph one he should be introduced in well not immediately immediately because I've already told you how I want the first one or two sentences, maybe even a bit more than that, of the first paragraph to be in the essay. Okay, I want it to be about tools and thinking llms are tools generally, then who okay? Um and Yeah, I mean definitely don't it definitely shouldn't be framed as me attacking Hul. This is a a response to Hool or uh yeah something like that, but not a criticism of Hole. This is editorial note by the way, not something go into content. Oh and I just realized your final answer is so terse as to be unreadable. Mentira that his essay treats writing as the first revealing domain. To what? It makes yeah. You need to be a little bit more specific as to what you're going to do here. Okay, moving on to paragraph two. Use Hurl's own opening paragraph against him. So I mean you've the you've framed it kind of aggressively there which I don't like. Definitely mention this example and yeah say As a general rule, when we look at tools, we recognise them as tools Oh, by the way, I see in your sentences for paragraph two you slip between what he says, which is recognizably for something. and not announcing its function. Those are two subtly different things, but they're vitally important for epistemic discipline and accurately and fairly characterizing his position. versus mine. Moving on to paragraph three cover function. I don't know what you mean, but as a sharpened version of his classificatory mood move, I'm perfectly happy to begin the paragraph. in the way I told you to begin it or I told Claude Co. to begin it in my conversation earlier on. If you remember my very last turn was asking for a plan like this. That plan I think gave you quite specific ways I think about linking things together in these early stages. stages. Okay, yeah paragraph four, yes, let me just try the obvious answers. and watch them fail. And again this is not going to be definitely proving the point, okay? It can be gentle like that. It's just saying notice this difference as it's not as easy. Okay, then paragraph five, as we've talked about, you forgot to put my proper phrasing in, but you fix that now. Okay, number six yet methodological consequences explicit goods. Paragraph seven. Um I don't like the way you phrased his what my position is in paragraph seven I don't want to say his view is intelligible. I want to say that he's right to describe text as being sort of a fundamental unit of these things. things. You should use a block quote there. Um Okay, so I guess what I'm saying about paragraph seven is yeah first it's just not very well presented and you need to be very careful about how this bit is being set up okay don't be afraid to spend some details explaining exactly what the argument is here okay Moving on to paragraph eight nine.. hmm. This is very sketchy what you're saying here. Um Yeah, so in fact from paragraph eight and nine onwards to the end, I'm not very happy with what you've done there, partly because there's not really much content there at all. Okay so what I would like you to do is give me a new iteration of this plan taking all of my criticisms into account Um And yeah, maybe once you get to the sort of paragraph eight, nine area, or the bit after the after we've returned to Hool's right, basically at paragraph seven. I think we're fine structurally up until paragraph seven and then we need to slow down and take our time as to what's going on after that. Okay, so that's going to be where the bulk of your contemplation is going to be going now. Oh yes, last thing. Um please make sure that the plan is a lot more detailed this time. I want the same structure, that is topic sentences, primary bullet points. Point for which paragraph followed by sub-bullet points, but I want more detail. Worked for 1m 53s Right. The useful corrections here are: I need to stop making the response sound more adversarial than you want; I need to keep the recognizability/function distinction explicit rather than sliding between them; and from paragraph seven onward I need to stop compressing several different moves into slogans. I also need to rebuild the plan around your own earlier sequence, especially the proper-function hinge and the transition from that hinge into the problem of testing. So below I’m giving you a new iteration of the plan with much more detail. I’m keeping the same broad structure, but I’m slowing the second half down a lot and making the argumentative role of each paragraph more explicit. Revised plan Paragraph 1 Topic sentence: after your opening general sentences about tools and the tendency to think that LLMs are tools, this paragraph should introduce Hoel as someone who gives that ordinary thought a more determinate argumentative shape. Primary work: the point here is not merely “Hoel says LLMs are tools.” It is more specific: Hoel treats what has happened to writing as evidence of what sort of thing these systems are, and in particular as evidence that they belong on the side of tools rather than on the side of transformative or surplus intelligence. Detail: that “to what?” question needed answering in the last version. This is the answer. Writing is the first revealing domain with respect to the nature of the system. Detail: the tone should be responsive, not prosecutorial. You are not setting up “Here is the man I will now attack.” You are setting up: here is the strongest recent articulation of a thought that many people already have. Paragraph 2 Topic sentence: Hoel’s opening example helps explain why the category of tool feels natural in the first place. Primary work: recount the stone-axe example and the general thought that paradigmatic tools are recognisable as tools. Detail: this is where the epistemic-discipline distinction has to be made explicit. Hoel’s claim is about recognisability. Your next move is a nearby but stronger one: in many familiar cases, recognisability travels together with at least a rough grasp of what the thing is for. Detail: do not collapse those two claims into one. You want the paragraph to show that you are moving from his point to your own, not pretending he already said your stronger claim. Detail: the paragraph should end by opening the question, not by closing it: if that is what ordinary tool-recognition looks like, what happens when we try to place ChatGPT under the same description? Paragraph 3 Topic sentence: one reason ordinary tools are usually easy to classify is that they tend to have a more or less specifiable proper function. Primary work: introduce proper function in the modest way you wanted earlier, as the use that distinguishes what a thing is for from the merely accidental uses to which it can be put. Detail: this is the paragraph where the fork / Google / vacuum / Swiss Army knife style examples belong. The point is not that tools are always single-purpose. The point is that even multi-functional tools usually admit more stable answers to the question what they are for than ChatGPT does. Detail: I would make this paragraph fairly calm and expository. It needs to feel like conceptual clarification, not like a dramatic reveal. Paragraph 4 Topic sentence: once we ask that question of ChatGPT, the obvious answers all seem partial, unstable, or wrong in different ways. Primary work: run through the obvious candidates gently. “For writing,” “for chatting,” “for predicting tokens,” “for helping with tasks.” Detail: you are right that this should not sound like a knock-down proof. The tone should be: notice the difference; notice how much more awkward the answer becomes here than with the earlier cases. Detail: each candidate should fail in a distinct way. “Predicting tokens” is mechanism rather than use. “Chatting” is too broad and thin. “Writing” catches something real but not enough. “Helping with tasks” is so general that it hardly individuates the thing at all. Detail: the paragraph should leave the reader with pressure, not triumph. Paragraph 5 Topic sentence: that does not show that LLMs are not tools, but it does suggest that they are “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all.” Primary work: this is where your fixed line belongs and should be preserved exactly. Detail: the paragraph should explicitly say that the force of the previous step is classificatory hesitation, not decisive metaphysical victory. The point is to slow the tool classification down and show that it is less straightforward than Hoel’s framing initially makes it sound. Detail: this paragraph is also where you can briefly mark that the issue is not just multiplicity of use. It is instability at the level of ordinary functional description. Paragraph 6 Topic sentence: and that matters because uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation. Primary work: this is the methodological pivot. If we do not know clearly what kind of thing this is, or what it is properly for, then it becomes much harder to say in advance what would count as a good test of it. Detail: this should be put carefully. You are not saying that no test is possible. You are saying that test-selection is now a substantive issue rather than something we can take for granted. Detail: the end of the paragraph should prepare the return to Hoel: so when Hoel selects writing as the privileged proving ground, that choice now requires more argument than it first seemed to. Paragraph 7 Topic sentence: Hoel’s choice of writing can now be presented in its strongest form. Primary work: this is where you slow down and give his reasoning its due, rather than caricaturing it. Detail: this is where I agree with you that a block quote should come in. I would use the line: “words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms” Detail: then explain the argument with care. Hoel is right to treat text as the constitutive material of these systems. They operate through language, are trained on language, and output language; so it is not at all arbitrary to think that writing is the place where their character should show up first and most vividly. Detail: the paragraph should end by narrowing the issue. The question is no longer “why would anyone look at writing?” That question has been answered. The question is: what exactly are we measuring when we look there? Paragraph 8 Topic sentence: the difficulty is that “writing” is too coarse a heading for the very different uses to which text can be put. Primary work: this is the first paragraph after the return to Hoel, and it needs more patience than I gave it before. Detail: distinguish text as finished product from text as instrument of thinking. Then add the further distinctions you had earlier in mind: exploration, testing, feedback, redirection, clarification. Detail: the crucial point is not that these are wholly separate universes. It is that Hoel’s test largely concerns one role of text, namely publicly consumable artefacts, whereas many interesting LLM interactions involve other roles that text can play. Detail: the paragraph should make the reader feel that “writing” may hide multiple practices under one name. Paragraph 9 Topic sentence: what Hoel mostly measures is text as artefact, whereas much of the practice I want to describe treats text as a working surface. Primary work: spell this out more concretely than I did before. A finished essay, blog post, book, or email is a product meant to stand on its own. A prompt-response-revision loop, by contrast, may use text not to produce a final artefact directly but to test a distinction, surface an alternative, expose a weakness, or force reformulation. Detail: this is where you can begin to explain why “has writing improved?” may be too blunt a question. It presupposes that the relevant success condition is improvement in the quality of the end-product. But that is not obviously the only or even the most revealing thing going on in all textual interaction with these systems. Detail: this paragraph should not yet introduce medium. It should still be clarifying the terrain. Paragraph 10 Topic sentence: the difference becomes clearer once one compares an LLM not to a pen in the thin inscriptive sense, but to a system that returns altered material for further use. Primary work: now the pen paragraph from the current draft can do real work. The point is not merely that a pen is simpler. It is that a pen extends inscription, whereas an LLM sends back something that must itself be dealt with. Detail: this is where the line “the return prompts us back” should earn its keep. It should be unpacked, not just dropped in as a nice phrase. The system’s response may flatten, connect, misread, generalise, sharpen, or irritate; in each case it changes the next act of thought. Detail: this paragraph is the phenomenological heart of the essay. It is where the response begins to say what the practice actually feels like from the inside. Paragraph 11 Topic sentence: once that recursive structure is in view, Hoel’s evidence is not refuted, but it is being measured at the wrong level of description. Primary work: this paragraph should explicitly reconnect the inside view of practice to Hoel’s public evidence. You are not denying the slop. You are not even denying that public prose has often worsened. What you are denying is that this settles the character of the system. Detail: a lot of bad prose may show what happens when the returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, or worked through. Detail: in other words, the same technology can support one mode of use that floods the zone with generic artefacts and another mode of use in which returned text functions as part of a thinking process. That is the real argumentative hinge of the second half. Paragraph 12 Topic sentence: this is the point at which the category of medium begins to earn its keep. Primary work: only now should you introduce medium, because only now has the reader been shown why “tool” and “writing” are both proving too blunt. Detail: medium here should not sound like a glamorous synonym or a metaphysical promotion. It should be introduced as a better description of a practice in which the system’s characteristic resistances and possibilities become visible in the work itself. Detail: the reason this is a medium-like case is that the system does not merely execute an antecedent intention. It shapes what the next intention becomes. That is the exact thing that the earlier paragraphs have been preparing. Paragraph 13 Topic sentence: the Frippertronics comparison can now be introduced as a way of making that structure vivid rather than as an ornamental analogy. Primary work: explain why this analogy belongs here and not earlier. Earlier on, it would have felt like an imported clever comparison. Here, after the recursive structure has been laid out, it can clarify the specific claim that what returns from the system is not neutral and not merely repetitive. Detail: the emphasis should fall on loop, delay, alteration, and re-entry into the next move. What matters is not just that something comes back, but that what comes back has already been transformed in ways that affect what the practitioner does next. Detail: this paragraph should also make clear that the analogy is about method of making, not about equivalence of products. Paragraph 14 Topic sentence: this also lets you say something more exact about slop. Primary work: now the slop material can be slowed down and made more precise. Slop is not merely an embarrassment for the positive account; it is part of the positive account. It shows what happens when a system with strong tendencies toward generic smoothing is used with too little resistance. Detail: that lets you preserve the force of Hoel’s public observation without granting his full classificatory conclusion. He has noticed a real pathology, and indeed a central one. But the pathology may tell us as much about the mode of engagement as about the mere fact that the system is “a tool.” Detail: this paragraph should feel like a real concession, not a strategic one. Paragraph 15 Topic sentence: the conclusion should return to Hoel in the mode of response rather than attack. Primary work: the closing claim should be something like this: Hoel is right that there has been no obvious textual singularity and right that what has happened to public writing matters. What I doubt is that these facts straightforwardly tell us that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense his opening picture encourages. Detail: this is where the fixed line can return, perhaps in slightly compressed form if you do not want exact repetition. The conclusion should leave the reader with the sense that LLMs may be “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all,” and that this is why the choice of writing-as-test cannot simply be assumed. Detail: the last cadence should sound like a response that has learned from Hoel and then pushed beyond him, not like a takedown. Short diagnosis of what changed The biggest change is that paragraphs eight to fifteen are no longer doing one big blurred move. They are now doing six smaller ones: distinguish uses of text, distinguish artefact from working surface, describe recursive practice from the inside, reconnect that practice to Hoel’s evidence, introduce medium only once it is earned, and then absorb slop rather than dodging it. That is the section I had previously rushed, and it is where the essay either becomes philosophically interesting or collapses back into slogans. One sentence on the recognizability/function distinction If you want a very clean way of handling the distinction in paragraph two, it is this: Hoel’s point is that familiar tools are recognisable as tools; my point is that, in many paradigmatic cases, that recognisability is accompanied by a rough grasp of what the thing is for. That formulation marks the shift without smuggling my claim into his mouth. If you want, the next pass can take just paragraphs eight to fifteen and make them even denser still, with possible topic-sentence variants for each paragraph rather than just one. Qui il punto decisivo è rallentare dopo il ritorno a Hoel, perché è lì che l’argomento smette di essere uno schema e diventa davvero un saggio. ### Assistant Let me first read the knowledge files the hooks require, then I can focus on the real task. ### Assistant Good. Now I have what I need. Nick's voice file and his context file both contain things that are directly relevant to his complaint about the plan. Let me think through this carefully. Right. Nick's question is twofold: 1. The Codex plan's structure is good up to about Paragraph 7 — but he's "still not very happy with it as a plan." Why? There's something he "constantly complains about." 2. Produce a new version of the plan that fixes whatever that problem is. And he says: "the plan isn't the problem... I like that structure, up to paragraph seven." So the structure is right. The problem is something about HOW the plan is written, not WHAT it proposes. He says: "there's something I constantly complain to you about." And: "I'm not sure if we've ever remembered it... restoring my knowledge about what I do and do not want in bullet... quite fast given..." OK so this is about what he wants and does not want from bullet-point plans / outlines. And it's something he repeatedly complains about. Let me think about what that could be. Looking at the Codex plan, what is it actually providing for each paragraph? Let's take Paragraph 8 as an example: "Paragraph 8 Topic sentence: the difficulty is that 'writing' is too coarse a heading for the very different uses to which text can be put. Primary work: this is the first paragraph after the return to Hoel, and it needs more patience than I gave it before. Detail: distinguish text as finished product from text as instrument of thinking. Then add the further distinctions you had earlier in mind: exploration, testing, feedback, redirection, clarification. Detail: the crucial point is not that these are wholly separate universes. It is that Hoel's test largely concerns one role of text, namely publicly consumable artefacts, whereas many interesting LLM interactions involve other roles that text can play. Detail: the paragraph should make the reader feel that 'writing' may hide multiple practices under one name." What is this doing? It's giving: - A topic sentence - A description of what the paragraph should do ("primary work") - Sub-points about what content should go where - Notes on tone and reader experience But... it's all meta. It's talking ABOUT the paragraph rather than actually doing the argumentative work. It says "distinguish text as finished product from text as instrument of thinking" — but doesn't actually make the distinction. It says "the paragraph should make the reader feel that 'writing' may hide multiple practices under one name" — but doesn't actually show how to do that. Hmm. Is that the complaint? That the plan is too meta, too much about what should happen rather than actually doing the thinking? Actually wait. Let me look at Nick's knowledge file again. Under "Editing Preferences": "Present options in full prose: When asked for alternative approaches (e.g., abstract structures, argument framings), don't use terse abbreviated bullet points. Write each option as flowing prose so it's actually comprehensible." And under "Brainstorming depth": "When explicitly in 'kicking ideas around' stage, wants maximum-length, deeply detailed responses with many options/ideas and full reasoning." And the Codex conversation itself has Nick saying things like: "Oh yes, last thing. Um please make sure that the plan is a lot more detailed this time." "from paragraph eight and nine onwards to the end, I'm not very happy with what you've done there, partly because there's not really much content there at all." "Not really much content" — this is exactly the issue. The plan tells you what each paragraph should do, but doesn't actually do the philosophical work. It's a plan about a plan. But wait, Nick says the structure up to paragraph 7 is fine. And the Codex plan's paragraphs 1-7 have the SAME format as 8-15. They're all topic sentence + primary work + details. So if the FORMAT were the problem, he'd complain about all of them. Hmm. Unless... the problem from paragraph 7 onward is that the plan becomes too skeletal precisely where it needs to be richest. Paragraphs 1-7 are doing conceptual work that Nick has already thought through extensively (proper function, Hoel's frame, the evaluation pivot). By paragraph 7, the thinking is established. But from 8 onward, the essay needs to do the POSITIVE work — the new thinking about text-as-working-surface, the recursive practice, the phenomenological description, the reconnection to Hoel, the earning of "medium," the handling of slop. This is where the essay becomes philosophically interesting. And the plan just... gestures at it. "Describe recursive practice from the inside." OK, but HOW? What does that actually look like? What sentences do you write? But wait, Nick says he likes the structure up to paragraph 7 AND says "the plan isn't the problem... the structure is fine." So he's asking me to keep the structure but change something about the plan's presentation. Let me reconsider. He says: "there's something I constantly complain to you about." What does he constantly complain about? From the nick-voice.md file: "Capitalised Label Syndrome — Don't give moves and concepts Proper Noun Names" "Over-structuring — Don't use nested headers, 'Argument A / Argument B'" "Reader-management phrases" "Staged rhetorical questions" "Rhetorical reversals as moments" Hmm, the plan doesn't really have capitalised label syndrome. It's not over-structured with headers. Wait. Let me re-read the plan more carefully from paragraphs 8-15... The plan says things like: - "this is the first paragraph after the return to Hoel" - "the paragraph should make the reader feel that..." - "now the pen paragraph from the current draft can do real work" - "this paragraph is the phenomenological heart of the essay" - "this is where the response begins to say what the practice actually feels like from the inside" - "it is where the essay either becomes philosophically interesting or collapses back into slogans" - "the Frippertronics comparison can now be introduced as a way of making that structure vivid rather than as an ornamental analogy" These are all META-COMMENTARY. They're talking about what the paragraph should do rather than actually doing the philosophical work. They're stage directions, not script. But again, paragraphs 1-7 do the same thing and Nick says those are fine. Hmm. Actually, let me re-read Nick's instruction more carefully: "I really like the structure that is laid out into plan. At least I do up until about paragraph seven. But I'm still not very happy with it as a plan." Wait — "up until about paragraph seven." Does he mean he likes the whole plan's structure, or just the structure up to paragraph 7? Reading again: "I really like the structure that is laid out into plan." Full stop. Then: "At least I do up until about paragraph seven." This qualifies — he likes the structure up to paragraph 7. After that, maybe the structure is less clear too? Then: "But I'm still not very happy with it as a plan. Any idea why?" So even though he likes the structure (at least through paragraph 7), he's not happy with it AS A PLAN. The problem is something about what a "plan" should be that this fails to provide. "Yeah, there's something I constantly complain to you about. I'm not sure if we've ever remembered it." OK so this is a RECURRING complaint. Something he keeps telling LLMs but they keep forgetting. And it's about what he wants from a plan or outline. "restoring my knowledge about um yeah what I do and do not want in bullet... quite fast given" This is garbled transcription but I think he's saying something like: "restoring my knowledge about what I do and do not want in bullet-point plans, given [that this is well-established]." Or maybe: "what I do and do not want in bullet... quite fast given" — meaning something about the speed or terseness of the bullet points? Let me think about what recurring complaints Nick might have about plans... From the Codex conversation itself, here's a relevant exchange. Nick says at one point: "your final answer is so terse as to be unreadable" And: "from paragraph eight and nine onwards to the end, I'm not very happy with what you've done there, partly because there's not really much content there at all" And: "please make sure that the plan is a lot more detailed this time" So the recurring complaint is: NOT ENOUGH DETAIL. The plan is too thin. It tells you what each paragraph should achieve but doesn't give enough actual content — the actual argumentative moves, the actual claims, the actual distinctions, the actual sentences. But wait — Nick then says of the revised (more detailed) version that he STILL isn't happy with it as a plan. So adding more detail in the same format didn't solve it. Hmm. Let me think about this differently. What does Nick "constantly complain about" with plans from LLMs? Actually, let me look at the %% comments in the bullet-point draft (LLMs Are Not Tools.md), because those are his annotations of a previous plan. What patterns emerge? The most frequent annotation is: "%%not how i write%%" Lines 34, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 142, 157, 158, 182, 186, 204, 205, 208, 250, 253, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266, 272, 279... "Not how I write" appears EVERYWHERE. It's the single most common complaint. He's saying: these bullet points are written in a way that doesn't sound like him. But that's about the bullet-point draft itself, not about a plan for an essay. Hmm. Wait, but maybe it's related. What if the complaint about plans is the same complaint? The plan is written in a way that doesn't sound like him — it uses phrasing, vocabulary, and formulations that he wouldn't use. And when he reads a plan, he wants the plan itself to be written in his voice, or at least in prose he could actually use. Actually no, I think the issue might be more specific. Let me look at the plan again and think about what a working philosopher actually wants from a paragraph-by-paragraph plan. A philosopher wants: what is the ARGUMENT in this paragraph? What CLAIM does it make? What EVIDENCE or REASONING supports it? What does the reader now KNOW that they didn't before? What the plan gives: what ROLE this paragraph plays in the essay. What it SHOULD DO. How the READER should FEEL. These are different. One is philosophical content. The other is essay strategy. Nick wants CONTENT, not STRATEGY. He wants to know: what is the actual move? Not "this paragraph should make the reader feel X" but "this paragraph says Y, which follows from Z, and which means W for Hoel's argument." Hmm, but the plan does give some content. Like Paragraph 4 says: run through candidates, each fails in a distinct way. "Predicting tokens" is mechanism not use. "Chatting" is too broad. Etc. That IS content. Let me go back to the specific complaint. He says there's something he "constantly complains about." And he says the structure is fine. So it's not about the ORDER of paragraphs or the LOGIC of the sequence. It's about how the plan PRESENTS each paragraph. OK. A new hypothesis. Let me look at the plan format: Each paragraph gets: - Topic sentence: [a sentence] - Primary work: [description of what the paragraph does] - Detail: [sub-point] - Detail: [sub-point] - Detail: [sub-point] The "topic sentence" is actual prose — a sentence that could open the paragraph. Good. The "primary work" is meta — it describes what the paragraph should accomplish. Not actual content. The "details" are a mix — some are actual claims ("each candidate should fail in a distinct way"), some are stage directions ("the paragraph should leave the reader with pressure, not triumph"), some are editorial notes ("I would make this paragraph fairly calm and expository"). Now, what if the complaint is: the plan is too much like stage directions for an actor, and not enough like an actual outline of the argument? Nick wants to know: what does this paragraph SAY? Not what it DOES. Actually, I think I've been overthinking this. Let me re-read Nick's instruction one more time: "there's something I constantly complain to you about. I'm not sure if we've ever remembered it. restoring my knowledge about um yeah what I do and do not want in bullet quite fast given" "what I do and do not want in bullet" — in BULLET POINTS. He's talking about what he wants from bullet-point plans specifically. And then: "I'd like you to say try and answer that question and then we'd like you to produce a new version of this plan. And remember, the plan isn't the problem is not the structure. I like that structure." So: keep the structure, change how the bullets are written. What is wrong with how the bullets are written? Let me look at them again: "Detail: this is where the epistemic-discipline distinction has to be made explicit. Hoel's claim is about recognisability. Your next move is a nearby but stronger one: in many familiar cases, recognisability travels together with at least a rough grasp of what the thing is for." This is... actually pretty good? It gives the content of the move. It distinguishes Hoel's claim from Nick's. "Detail: do not collapse those two claims into one. You want the paragraph to show that you are moving from his point to your own, not pretending he already said your stronger claim." This is editorial/strategic. It's advice about how to write the paragraph, not the content of the paragraph. "Detail: the paragraph should end by opening the question, not by closing it: if that is what ordinary tool-recognition looks like, what happens when we try to place ChatGPT under the same description?" This gives a content suggestion (the closing question) wrapped in a stage direction (should end by opening the question). So the plan is a MIX of content and stage direction. Maybe Nick wants ONLY content? Or more content and less stage direction? Hmm. Let me think about this from the perspective of what Nick actually uses a plan for. He's going to WRITE the essay. He needs to know what each paragraph SAYS. He doesn't need to be told how the reader should feel or what tone to use — he knows his own voice. What he needs is: the argument, step by step, in enough detail that he can write it. So my hypothesis: the complaint is that plans tell him HOW to write (tone, reader experience, strategy) when he wants them to tell him WHAT to write (claims, arguments, distinctions, evidence). He wants content, not coaching. Let me check this against the nick-voice.md: "Trust the reader: Don't over-explain or signpost every move." And: "Reader-management phrases — Don't manage the reader's response" If Nick doesn't want reader-management in the ESSAY, he probably doesn't want it in the PLAN either. "The paragraph should leave the reader with pressure, not triumph" — that's reader management. "This paragraph should feel like a real concession, not a strategic one" — that's coaching about performance. And from nick-context.md: "Flexible over rigid in design work... Prefers describing purpose over prescribing mechanical rules." Wait, that's about system design, not essay planning. But the principle might apply. Actually, I just thought of something else. From nick-context.md: "Rejected terms are permanent: When Nick rejects a term or framing during brainstorming ('drop X', 'don't use X', 'I don't like X'), it is permanently banned for that piece." And the %% comments in the bullet-point draft are FULL of "not how i write." Nick keeps telling LLMs that certain phrasings are not his voice, and they keep using them. Could this be the recurring complaint about plans? But wait — the Codex plan isn't written in Nick's voice. It's written in the Codex's analytical voice, as a plan. Plans don't need to be in Nick's essay voice. Unless... Nick wants them to be? Actually, I think the complaint might be even simpler. Let me re-read: "I'm still not very happy with it as a plan" Let me look at what the plan IS. It's 15 paragraphs, each with a topic sentence and details. It runs about 2000 words. It's quite long and detailed. Nick says the structure is good. But a plan should help you WRITE. Does this plan actually help you write? If you sat down to write Paragraph 10, the plan says: "Topic sentence: the difference becomes clearer once one compares an LLM not to a pen in the thin inscriptive sense, but to a system that returns altered material for further use. Primary work: now the pen paragraph from the current draft can do real work. The point is not merely that a pen is simpler. It is that a pen extends inscription, whereas an LLM sends back something that must itself be dealt with. Detail: this is where the line 'the return prompts us back' should earn its keep. It should be unpacked, not just dropped in as a nice phrase. The system's response may flatten, connect, misread, generalise, sharpen, or irritate; in each case it changes the next act of thought. Detail: this paragraph is the phenomenological heart of the essay. It is where the response begins to say what the practice actually feels like from the inside." If I were Nick, sitting down to write, I'd think: OK, but what do I ACTUALLY SAY here? The plan tells me the pen extends inscription, the LLM sends back something. I already knew that — it's in the current draft. The plan tells me "the return prompts us back" should be unpacked. OK, but unpacked HOW? What does the unpacking look like? The plan gives a quick list (flatten, connect, misread, generalise, sharpen, irritate) — that's useful. But it doesn't say what the paragraph actually argues. So the complaint might be: the plan doesn't give enough actual CONTENT. It tells me what to do but not what to say. It's a map that says "go north" when I need a map that says "turn left at the church, right at the river." OK but Nick says he's "constantly" complained about this. And Codex responded to previous complaints by making it MORE DETAILED (the revised version in the paste is explicitly the more-detailed version). And Nick STILL isn't happy. So "more detail" in the same format isn't the answer. What if the complaint is specifically about how topic sentences work? The plan gives a "topic sentence" for each paragraph. But some of these topic sentences are quite abstract: "the difficulty is that 'writing' is too coarse a heading for the very different uses to which text can be put." vs. what Nick might actually write: Something more concrete and specific, less like a thesis statement and more like a natural opening to a paragraph. Hmm, but Nick said he likes the structure including these topic sentences, at least through paragraph 7. OK, I'm going to commit to my best reading. I think there are actually TWO problems, and one of them is what Nick "constantly complains about": PROBLEM 1 (the recurring complaint): The plan is too much stage direction and not enough argument. It tells Nick what each paragraph should DO ("make the reader feel X," "this should feel like a real concession," "the paragraph should end by opening the question") rather than what each paragraph should SAY (the actual claims, distinctions, and reasoning). Nick doesn't need coaching on tone and reader experience — he knows how to write. He needs the philosophical content laid out so he can turn it into prose. PROBLEM 2 (specific to paragraphs 8-15): The plan gets thinner precisely where it needs to be thickest. Paragraphs 1-7 have genuine content in them because the thinking has already been done (proper function, evaluation pivot, Hoel's writing test). Paragraphs 8-15 have less content because this is where the new philosophical work needs to happen, and the plan hasn't done that work yet — it just gestures at what the work should be. And the fix Nick wants: keep the structure (the 15-paragraph sequence), but replace the stage directions with actual philosophical content. What does the artefact/working-surface distinction actually look like? What is the phenomenological description of the recursive practice? What is the precise claim about how slop relates to mode of engagement? The plan should contain the ARGUMENTS, not just labels for where arguments should go. Wait. Actually, I want to reconsider one more time. Nick says "something I constantly complain to you about" — this is a pattern across conversations. And he says "I'm not sure if we've ever remembered it." So it's not in the knowledge files. It's something that keeps coming up and keeps getting forgotten. What keeps coming up? In the %% comments of the bullet-point draft, the most common annotation besides "not how i write" is editorial content: Nick's own comments about what should go where, corrections to the plan, specific instructions about how to handle material. These are CONTENT-RICH. They say things like: "begin something like this. Here's something that seems right to say: tools understood generally have functions understood quite generally or quite broadly." That's Nick giving ACTUAL OPENING LANGUAGE for a paragraph. Not a stage direction, but actual words. "What is the function of Chat GPT? To me, at least, it doesn't seem that obvious." That's ACTUAL PROSE he wants to use. Not a description of what the paragraph should do, but words. So maybe the complaint is: give me the actual words, not meta-descriptions of what the words should do. And this is something he keeps telling LLMs, and they keep giving him meta-plans instead of content plans. Actually, I think I can nail this even more precisely. The voice knowledge file says: "Present options in full prose: When asked for alternative approaches (e.g., abstract structures, argument framings), don't use terse abbreviated bullet points. Write each option as flowing prose so it's actually comprehensible." AND: "Over-structuring — Don't use: Nested headers, 'Argument A / Argument B / Argument C.' Let prose and transitions do the structuring work." The plan does exactly what Nick hates: it over-structures. It has "Topic sentence" / "Primary work" / "Detail" / "Detail" headers. It uses a mechanical format. It's a template applied 15 times. And from the bullet-point draft's comments: "%% comment on your comment. Why not just put a fucking footnote in? %%" This suggests: stop TALKING ABOUT doing things and just DO them. And: "%% comment on your comment. Didn't we already agree on what to do here? I think it's another thing you fucking forgot in your fucking compacting. %%" This suggests: the plan keeps losing specifics in favor of abstractions. OK. I think the problem is this: The plan format — Topic sentence / Primary work / Detail / Detail — is too mechanical, too meta, too much about strategy and not enough about content. What Nick wants is something closer to: here is what each paragraph actually argues, in enough detail that he can write it. Not "this paragraph should distinguish X from Y" but the actual distinction, articulated. Not "this is the phenomenological heart of the essay" but the actual phenomenological description. Not "the paragraph should feel like a real concession" but what the concession actually says. In short: the plan should be a draft-in-outline, not a set of instructions for producing a draft. The plan should contain the philosophical thinking, not just labels for where philosophical thinking should go. And then there's the specific issue that from paragraph 8 onward, the plan gets skeletal. Even the meta-descriptions become thinner. Compare the level of detail in Paragraph 3 (proper function — multiple examples, specific framing, tone guidance) with Paragraph 14 (slop — "slop is not merely an embarrassment; it is part of the positive account"). The earlier paragraphs have specifics because the thinking has been done. The later paragraphs gesture at thinking that hasn't been done yet. The fix is: do the thinking IN the plan. Each paragraph's entry should contain the actual argumentative content — the claims, the distinctions, the examples, the reasoning — articulated in enough detail that writing becomes execution, not invention. And the presentation should be in flowing prose, not in the mechanical Topic/Primary/Detail template. Nick wants plans that read like compressed drafts, not like architectural specifications. Let me put this together as my answer and then produce the revised plan. ## What you keep complaining about The plan reads like stage directions, not like an argument. Each paragraph entry tells you what the paragraph should DO — "make the reader feel X," "the paragraph should end by opening the question," "this should feel like a real concession, not a strategic one," "this is the phenomenological heart of the essay." These are coaching notes. They describe the effect you're trying to produce, the role the paragraph plays in the architecture, the tone it should have. What they don't give you is the actual philosophical content — the claims, the distinctions, the reasoning — in enough detail that you could sit down and write. There is a difference between: "Detail: distinguish text as finished product from text as instrument of thinking" and actually making the distinction — saying what the difference is, how it applies, what follows from it. The first tells you there should be a distinction. The second IS the distinction. You want the second. You keep getting the first. This connects to something from your voice file: "Present options in full prose... don't use terse abbreviated bullet points." And: "Over-structuring — Don't use nested headers, 'Argument A / Argument B.'" The plan's Topic sentence / Primary work / Detail / Detail template is exactly the mechanical formatting you dislike. It applies the same scaffold 15 times regardless of whether the paragraph needs more or less. There is also a second, related problem specific to paragraphs 8 onward: the plan gets thinner precisely where it needs to be thickest. Paragraphs 1-7 have genuine content because the thinking has already been done across multiple conversations — proper function, the evaluation pivot, Hoel's writing test. From paragraph 8 onward, the essay needs to do its new philosophical work: what the artefact/working-surface distinction actually looks like, what the recursive practice feels like from the inside, how slop relates to mode of engagement. This is where the plan should be richest. Instead, it's where the plan is most meta — gesturing at philosophical moves without making them. So the fix is: keep the structure (the 15-paragraph sequence, which you like), but replace the stage directions with actual content. Each paragraph's plan entry should contain the argument itself — articulated, not just labelled. And present it in flowing prose, not in the mechanical template. --- ## Revised plan What follows keeps the same paragraph sequence through 7, then slows down and does the actual philosophical work from 8 onward. I am writing each entry as the argument itself rather than as instructions for producing the argument. ### Paragraph 1 Open with the ordinariness of calling LLMs tools. We use them to do things. It seems obvious. Erik Hoel gives that ordinary thought a more determinate shape. In "Bits In, Bits Out," he argues that what has happened to writing over the last few years tells us something about what sort of thing these systems are — and in particular that they belong on the side of tools rather than on the side of transformative or surplus intelligence. Writing is the first domain in which their character has already shown itself. The tone here is: here is the strongest recent version of something many people already think. Not a target for attack, but a claim worth taking seriously enough to examine. ### Paragraph 2 Hoel opens with a Neolithic stone axe found on a beach. He recognised it immediately as a tool, "the way a baby knows the nipple." This is a good example because it shows why the category of tool feels natural: paradigmatic tools are recognisable as tools. You see what they are, more or less at a glance. But there is a distinction worth marking here, and it has to be made carefully. Hoel's point is about recognisability. What I want to add — and this is my move, not his — is that in many familiar cases, recognisability travels together with at least a rough grasp of what the thing is for. These are two claims, not one. Hoel says tools are recognisable. I say that recognisability is often accompanied by functional legibility. Once that additional claim is on the table, the question opens: if that is what ordinary tool-recognition looks like, what happens when we try to place ChatGPT under the same description? ### Paragraph 3 One reason ordinary tools are usually easy to classify is that they tend to have a more or less specifiable proper function — meaning the use that distinguishes what a thing is for from the merely accidental uses to which it can be put. A hammer can hold down loose papers, but that is not what it is for. A heavy book can prop open a door, but that is accidental. Proper function is the use that individuates the thing. This is not undermined by multi-functional objects. A Swiss Army knife has several proper functions — cutting, screwing, opening bottles — and each is specifiable. A vacuum cleaner is for removing dirt from floors. Google is for searching. These examples work because even when there are several functions, they are stable enough that you can say what the thing is for. ### Paragraph 4 What is ChatGPT for? The question should have a straightforward answer. Notice how much more awkward it becomes here than with the earlier cases. Hoel's own candidate is writing. That catches something real but not enough — it does not cover code generation, translation, summarisation, or the use I want to describe later. "For predicting tokens" is a description of mechanism, not of use; nobody opens ChatGPT in order to predict tokens, any more than we describe the function of the heart as contracting rhythmically. "For chatting" — Keith Frankish has suggested that LLMs can be understood, from the intentional stance, as wanting to play the chat game. That is suggestive, but it fits badly with many actual uses. When I use an LLM for philosophy, I am not chatting. "For helping with tasks" is so general that it no longer individuates the thing at all — it is like saying a hammer is for doing things with. The tone here should be noticing, not triumphing: these candidates do not fail in the same way, and none of them fails catastrophically, but none of them sits comfortably either. ### Paragraph 5 This does not show that LLMs are not tools. It does suggest that they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all." The point is classificatory hesitation, not metaphysical victory. The tool classification is less straightforward than Hoel's framing initially makes it sound. And the issue is not just multiplicity of use — Google has many uses but "search" still names its function well enough. The issue is instability at the level of ordinary functional description. The usual "X is for Y" format starts slipping. ### Paragraph 6 That matters because uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation. If you know clearly what a thing is for, you know roughly what would count as testing it. A hammer should drive nails reliably; if it does not, something is wrong. A search engine should return relevant results; measuring that is not especially controversial. But if you do not know clearly what the thing is for, test-selection is no longer something you can take for granted. It becomes a substantive issue. When Hoel selects writing as the proving ground, that choice now requires more argument than it first seemed to need. ### Paragraph 7 Hoel's choice of writing can be presented in its strongest form. He is right to treat text as the constitutive material of these systems. As he puts it: "words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms." They operate through language, are trained on language, and output language. So it is not arbitrary to think that writing is the place where their character should show up first and most vividly. If these systems were going to be transformative anywhere, text production is where you would look. That much is conceded. The question is no longer "why would anyone look at writing?" Hoel has answered that. The question is: what exactly are we measuring when we look there? ### Paragraph 8 "Writing" is too coarse a heading for the very different uses to which text can be put. A finished essay is text. A half-formed prompt thrown at an LLM to see what comes back is also text. A Substack post meant to stand on its own is text. A rapid-fire exchange in which you test a distinction, see how the system articulates it, reject the articulation, reformulate, and try again — that is also text. These are not wholly separate activities, but they involve text in different ways. In the first case, text is the end product — a consumable artefact. In the second, text is a working surface — material being shaped, resisted, and revised in the process of thinking. Hoel's test case largely concerns the first. The evidence he cites — books, blog posts, social media, children's stories — is evidence about publicly consumable text artefacts. The quality of artefacts has not improved; indeed, it has often gotten worse. That is his data, and it is real. But it is silent about the second use of text — the one that does not produce a publishable artefact directly but uses text as an instrument of thinking. ### Paragraph 9 Spell this out. A finished essay, blog post, book, or email is a product meant to stand on its own. Its success is measured by its quality as a standalone piece. A prompt-response-revision loop may have a very different aim. You throw a distinction at the system in rough form. What comes back is the distinction articulated through the model's learned patterns — sometimes flatter than what you wanted, sometimes wrongly confident, sometimes unexpectedly connective. You do not publish this. You evaluate it. You reject what is generic, sharpen what is useful, reformulate what was misunderstood. The text is not a product; it is a move in a process. When Hoel asks "has writing improved?" he is asking about products. That is a legitimate question. But it presupposes that the relevant success condition is improvement in the quality of end-products. If much of the interesting practice is not aimed at end-products at all — if the text is functioning as a working surface rather than as a deliverable — then the question, though real, is being asked at the wrong level. ### Paragraph 10 The difference becomes clearer once you compare an LLM not to a pen in the thin inscriptive sense, but to a system that returns altered material for further use. A pen makes marks on a surface. Those marks can become letters, letters words, words sentences. But the pen's role ends at inscription. It extends your ability to make marks. It does not return a proposal, a misreading, a reformulation, a line of continuation you had not seen, or a bland summary you now have to resist. It does not prompt you back. When you use an LLM, the exchange is not one-way. You write something — or half-write something, or throw a distinction at the system in rough form. What comes back is language already reshaped by the model's patterns. Sometimes it flattens your thought toward the generic. Sometimes it connects two things you had not connected. Sometimes it misreads you in a way that forces you to be more precise about what you actually meant. Sometimes it says something irritatingly smooth that you now have to push against. In each case, what comes back changes what you do next. You are not simply acting on an inert instrument. The system's return partly shapes what your next intention becomes. ### Paragraph 11 Once this recursive structure is in view, Hoel's evidence looks different — not refuted, but measured at a level of description that misses the practice. The slop is real. Public prose has often gotten worse. There is no text singularity. But a lot of that bad prose may show what happens when the system's returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, or worked through. The same technology supports two quite different modes of use. In one, the returned text goes more or less directly into the world — mass-produced emails, blog posts, social media written by nobody in particular. In the other, the returned text functions as part of a thinking process — something to be evaluated, pushed against, dismantled, occasionally followed. Hoel's evidence is about the first mode. His conclusion — bits in, bits out — may hold there. But it does not obviously settle the character of the system, because it does not address the second mode at all. ### Paragraph 12 This is where the category of medium begins to earn its keep. Not as a glamorous synonym for tool, and not as a metaphysical promotion. A medium, in the sense developed by Wollheim and extended by Thomson-Jones, is a structured field of resources whose characteristic resistances and possibilities only become visible in the work itself. Thomson-Jones: "the medium presents particular challenges and possibilities for artistic creativity, and the artwork makes manifest the artist's response to these challenges and possibilities." What makes this useful here is not the art-specific framing but the structural point. A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for. You reach for the right tool because you know what you need. A medium is understood by the characteristic way it makes work proceed — by its tendencies, resistances, distortions, and affordances, which you discover in the working. The reason this fits the LLM case is exactly what the previous paragraphs have been preparing: the system does not merely execute an antecedent intention. It sends something back that has to be dealt with, and dealing with it partly shapes what the next intention becomes. ### Paragraph 13 The Frippertronics comparison makes this structure vivid. Robert Fripp set up two Revox reel-to-reel tape machines so that what he played into one returned from the other a few seconds later, already transformed — degraded, layered, accumulated — and then returned again. The Revox machines are tools. Each has a proper function: recording and playback. But what Fripp was doing is not well captured by saying he was using recording tools. He was playing into a system, hearing the delayed and altered return, and adjusting what he played next in light of what came back. The loop did not merely preserve what went in. It sent it back changed, and the change became part of the next move. The emphasis should fall on loop, delay, alteration, and re-entry. What matters is not just that something comes back, but that what comes back has been transformed in ways that affect what the practitioner does next. The analogy is about method of making, not equivalence of products. Nobody needs to claim that LLM text is the equivalent of ambient guitar music. The claim is that the structure of engagement — act, receive the altered return, respond to the alteration — is shared. ### Paragraph 14 This also lets you say something more exact about slop. Slop is not merely an embarrassment for the positive account. It is part of it. The system has strong tendencies toward generic smoothing — toward the familiar transition, the portable formulation, the dead middle register. If text is passed through the model with too little resistance, too little discrimination, and too little reassertion of what was specific to the thought, then what comes back is drawn toward the model's easier habits. The signal is not lost. It is genericised. This is what Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" shows in a different register: a spoken passage played back into a room and re-recorded again and again until the room's resonant frequencies take over and the words dissolve into tone. The content is not answered, developed, or deepened. It is washed into the signature of the system. Slop is what happens when the LLM's equivalent of those resonant frequencies — its statistical priors, its trained-in patterns — are allowed to dominate the exchange. This preserves the force of Hoel's observation without granting his full classificatory conclusion. He has noticed a real pathology. But the pathology may tell us as much about the mode of engagement as about the nature of the system. ### Paragraph 15 Return to Hoel in the mode of response, not attack. He is right that there has been no textual singularity. He is right that what has happened to public writing matters. He is right that resistance to hype is warranted. What I doubt is that these facts straightforwardly tell us that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense his opening picture encourages. They may be "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all." And that is why writing-as-artefact cannot simply be assumed as the test. A system whose returns partly constitute the next move of thought is not well described by comparison with a pen, a search engine, or a stone axe. The question Hoel asks — has writing improved? — is real, but the practice that seems to me most worth describing is not well captured by it. --- I should flag one uncertainty. I've tried to push the plan toward actual content rather than meta-description, and to slow paragraphs 8-15 down considerably. But there are moments — especially in paragraph 12 where I introduce the Thomson-Jones quotation — where I'm drawing on the current draft rather than generating new material. The plan is strongest where it departs from the current draft (paragraphs 8-9, the artefact/working-surface distinction; paragraph 11, the reconnection to Hoel). It is weakest where it recycles (paragraph 13 on Frippertronics is close to the existing draft's version). Whether that recycling is a problem depends on whether you think the current draft's Frippertronics section is already doing what it needs to do — I suspect it is, and just needs to arrive later in the essay. *La differenza tra un piano che dice "qui fai la mossa" e un piano che fa la mossa — questa è la differenza tra istruzioni per il regista e il copione vero e proprio.* ### User "But... it's all meta. It's talking ABOUT the paragraph rather than actually doing the argumentative work. It says "distinguish text as finished product from text as instrument of thinking" - but doesn't actually make the distinction. It says "the paragraph should make the reader feel that 'writing' may hide multiple practices under one name" - but doesn't actually show how to do that." got it in one. Good work. On the other hand, you're the placement plan was not great. First of all, while you were correct in me saying I wanted actual text, actual argument that could go into the piece. Um I still want to be in bullet point format, and by that I mean the topic sentence as the primary bullet points and then the the sub-bullet points. Yeah, I think I want every single sentence and or quote in the paragraph. Okay, because yeah, don't forget to put the block quotes from the text into the paragraph as well. Okay, so that's that's how I want the plan to look so I can see it properly. And by the way, just leave two line spaces between these clusters of bullet points to designate paragraphs. Okay, you don't need to title paragraphs with numbers because it just wastes space on the page. What else? Okay, we've gotten the language. You will see now that I have asked you to invoke plenty of uh skills that should help you actually write text in the style that I want you to write. Please, please try hard with this aspect. Okay? Because the thing that I spend the most time doing with you is saying, I don't write like this, I don't write like this, I don't write like this. And whenever I tell you this you go, "Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, I'll get that right this time." And you never do. So this time can you actually take take proper concrete steps to ensure that the sentences you're giving me for these bullet points and sub-bullet points are actually written in my style of writing. Okay, so this is a big job. Okay, please give it the attention it requires. make sure that you explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer. Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that i have a lot to consider. you must invoke the following skills BEFORE DOING ANYTHING * Skill contemplate * Skill nick-analytic-voice * Skill nick-philosophical-prose * Skill twork * Skill source-work * Skill epistemic-discipline * Skill writing-standards ### Assistant Let me invoke all the required skills first. ### Assistant Now let me invoke the remaining skills. ### Assistant Now let me read the prose reference files that the voice skills require me to read before writing. ### User [Request interrupted by user] ### User You didn't invoke all skills, you fucking idiot Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind. ### Assistant You're right. Let me invoke the remaining skills. ### User This session is being continued from a previous conversation that ran out of context. The summary below covers the earlier portion of the conversation. Analysis: Let me carefully trace through this entire conversation chronologically. 1. Initial request: Nick invoked /contemplate asking about a Substack essay "LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision" which is a response to Erik Hoel's "Bits In, Bits Out." He wants me to: - Get up to speed on why the current version is not viable - Find the "fatal flaw" in the current draft by reading both the Hoel article and the draft - Prove I'm sharp enough to keep up - Then evaluate a new plan from Codex (ChatGPT) - He pasted in a long Codex conversation with a revised 15-paragraph plan 2. I read multiple files: - Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md (the current polished draft) - Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools.md (bullet-point draft with %% comments) - Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools v2.md (another version) - Clippings/Bits In, Bits Out.md (Hoel's full article) - Notes/LLMs Are Not Tools.md (brainstorm note from Sunday session) - Searched for and read past session transcripts (Sunday March 9 session about Frippertronics, March 6 session which was a dead end) 3. Nick said "no transcripts will help you. those convos were on my other computer" - confirming I should work from the texts themselves. 4. I delivered the fatal flaw analysis via /contemplate. My answer: The draft concedes Hoel's evidence and changes the subject. It introduces a rival framework (medium) but never connects it to Hoel's evidence. The proper-function argument and the phenomenological description float free of each other with no argumentative hinge. The Codex plan fixes this via three bridges: proper-function→evaluation pivot (para 6), artefact/working-surface distinction (paras 8-9), and reconnection to Hoel's evidence (para 11). 5. Nick said "Good, you've read it. Waiting for your verdict." Then after my answer: implicit acceptance (moved to next task). 6. Second /contemplate invocation: Nick pasted the full Codex conversation and asked two things: - He likes the structure up to paragraph 7 but is "still not very happy with it as a plan" - why? Something he "constantly complains about" - Produce a new version of the plan 7. I read nick-voice.md and nick-context.md for context. 8. I identified the problem: The plan is all meta/stage directions ("this paragraph should make the reader feel...") rather than actual philosophical content. It tells Nick what each paragraph should DO rather than what it should SAY. 9. I produced a revised plan in flowing prose (not bullet points). Nick's feedback was mixed - he confirmed "got it in one" on the diagnosis but said the replacement plan was "not great" because: - He wants bullet point format (topic sentence as primary bullet, sub-bullets for each sentence/quote) - He wants every sentence and quote that would go in the paragraph - Two line spaces between paragraph clusters, no numbered paragraph titles - Most importantly: write in HIS style - "the thing I spend the most time doing with you is saying, I don't write like this" 10. Third /contemplate invocation with explicit skill requirements: - Must invoke: contemplate, nick-analytic-voice, nick-philosophical-prose, twork, source-work, epistemic-discipline, writing-standards - I invoked nick-analytic-voice, nick-philosophical-prose, writing-standards, epistemic-discipline - Read prose-composition.md, essayistic-examples.md, vocabulary.md - But FAILED to invoke twork and source-work - Nick interrupted: "You didn't invoke all skills, you fucking idiot. Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch" 11. I then invoked twork and source-work - those skills loaded. 12. Current state: All skills are now loaded. I need to produce the actual plan in bullet-point format with sentences written in Nick's voice. This is the pending task. Key files read: - Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md - Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools.md (bullet point draft) - Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools v2.md - Clippings/Bits In, Bits Out.md (Hoel article) - Notes/LLMs Are Not Tools.md (brainstorm note) - ~/.claude/knowledge/nick-voice.md - ~/.claude/knowledge/nick-context.md - nick-analytic-voice/references/prose-composition.md - nick-analytic-voice/references/essayistic-examples.md - nick-philosophical-prose/references/vocabulary.md The task that was interrupted and needs to restart from scratch: producing the full 15-paragraph plan in bullet-point format with actual sentences written in Nick's voice, after invoking all required skills. Summary: 1. Primary Request and Intent: Nick is working on a Substack essay titled "LLMs Are Not Tools" responding to Erik Hoel's "Bits In, Bits Out." The conversation has three phases: Phase 1: Find the "fatal flaw" in the current Codex Revision draft by carefully reading both Hoel's article and the draft. Nick said: "I need you to prove yourself that you're sharp enough to keep up with me." Phase 2: Evaluate a new 15-paragraph plan from Codex (ChatGPT). Nick likes the structure up to paragraph 7 but is unhappy with the plan as a plan. He asked me to identify what he "constantly complains about" regarding bullet-point plans. Phase 3 (CURRENT, must restart from scratch): Produce a new version of the plan with these specific requirements: - Bullet point format: topic sentence as primary bullet, sub-bullets for every sentence and quote in the paragraph - Two line spaces between paragraph clusters to designate paragraphs - No numbered paragraph titles ("wastes space") - Actual argument/content, not meta-descriptions ("stage directions") - Written in Nick's actual prose style — this is the highest-priority requirement - Must invoke ALL of these skills BEFORE doing anything: contemplate, nick-analytic-voice, nick-philosophical-prose, twork, source-work, epistemic-discipline, writing-standards - Block quotes from Hoel should appear in the plan where they belong 2. Key Technical Concepts: - Proper function (philosophical concept): the use that distinguishes what a thing is for from accidental uses - The proper-function → evaluation pivot: if you can't specify what something is for, you can't say what counts as testing it - Text-as-artefact vs text-as-working-surface distinction - Medium (Wollheim/Thomson-Jones): structured field of resources with characteristic resistances visible only in the work - Dynamic recalcitrance - Frippertronics as structural analogy for recursive LLM engagement - Compression (from Sunday session): what happens to signal passing through the LLM loop - The fixed line: "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all" — must be preserved exactly - Hoel's false dichotomy: surplus intelligence vs tool (Nick's medium is the third option) - Recognisability (Hoel's claim) vs functional legibility (Nick's stronger claim) — must be kept distinct 3. Files and Code Sections: - `Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md` — The current polished draft (88 lines). Has sections: opening, "What sort of tool?", "Writing", "Medium", "Frippertronics", "Slop", "Hoel's question". This is the draft with the "fatal flaw" — it concedes Hoel's evidence and changes the subject without bridging the conceptual argument to the evidential argument. - `Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools.md` — Bullet-point draft with extensive %% comments from Nick. Contains his editorial voice: "not how i write" (appears ~30 times), "Why is writing hasn't improved, therefore, LLMs are tools? That's idiotic" (line 99), "these headings are so embarrassing" etc. Shows what Nick wants and doesn't want. - `Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools v2.md` — Another prose version (167 lines), slightly different structure. - `Clippings/Bits In, Bits Out.md` — Full Hoel article. Key passages: stone axe anecdote, Homo faber framing, "words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms", "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool.", the Amazon books data, "bits in, bits out" conclusion. - `Notes/LLMs Are Not Tools.md` — Brainstorm note from Sunday March 9 session capturing: not-a-tool argument, Frippertronics as medium model, compression concept, why Frippertronics over gardening, "generally functional medium" extension. - `~/.claude/knowledge/nick-voice.md` — Voice profile: essayistic register, "but" pivots, flat evaluations, genuine uncertainty, avoid Capitalised Label Syndrome, over-structuring, reader-management phrases, staged rhetorical questions, rhetorical reversals, American/TED-talk earnestness. - `~/.claude/knowledge/nick-context.md` — Contains "Present options in full prose", "Rejected terms are permanent", "Brainstorming depth" preferences, interaction preferences. - `nick-analytic-voice/references/prose-composition.md` — Published examples showing Ownership, Texture (sentence rhythm), Dialectic (engaging positions), Concreteness. Anti-patterns: flat declarative chains, announcement phrases, reporting without engaging. - `nick-analytic-voice/references/essayistic-examples.md` — Contrastive pairs for Substack register: removing capitalised label syndrome, reader-management, staged rhetorical questions, rhetorical reversals, over-structuring. - `nick-philosophical-prose/references/vocabulary.md` — Preferred terms (straightforward, plausible, consists in, notice that), terms to avoid (empty evaluatives, performative hedges, announcement phrases, Latinate inflation). 4. Errors and Fixes: - Failed to invoke all required skills: Nick explicitly listed 7 skills to invoke (contemplate, nick-analytic-voice, nick-philosophical-prose, twork, source-work, epistemic-discipline, writing-standards). I only invoked 4 of them (missing twork and source-work — contemplate was already active). Nick's feedback: "You didn't invoke all skills, you fucking idiot. Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch." - Fix: Invoked twork and source-work. Now need to restart the entire task from scratch with all skills loaded. - First replacement plan was in flowing prose, not bullet points: Nick wanted bullet-point format with topic sentences as primary bullets and sub-bullets for every sentence. My prose version was "not great." - Previous plans from Codex kept paraphrasing Nick's fixed line: "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all" kept getting softened to "a very strange tool indeed" or similar. Nick corrected this repeatedly. 5. Problem Solving: - Fatal flaw identified: The draft concedes Hoel's evidence and changes the subject. It never bridges the conceptual argument (proper function, unpredictability) to the evidential argument (writing hasn't improved). The Codex plan fixes this via three bridges: proper-function→evaluation pivot, artefact/working-surface distinction, and reconnection to Hoel's evidence. Nick confirmed: "you've kind of worked out the bigger problems." - Recurring plan complaint identified: Plans give stage directions ("this paragraph should make the reader feel...") rather than actual philosophical content. Nick confirmed: "got it in one." - Session transcript search: Found Sunday March 9 session (Frippertronics brainstorm, compression concept) and March 6 session (dead end — missing paste). Nick said past transcripts wouldn't help as those conversations were on his other computer. 6. All User Messages: - Initial /contemplate invocation with full Codex conversation pasted, asking to find the fatal flaw and evaluate the new plan - "no transcripts will help you. those convos were on my other computer" - "Good, you've read it. Waiting for your verdict." (after fatal flaw analysis was delivered) - Second /contemplate: pasting Codex conversation, asking why he's unhappy with the plan format and to produce a new version. "the plan isn't the problem is not the structure. I like that structure" and "there's something I constantly complain to you about" - Third /contemplate: "got it in one. Good work. On the other hand, your replacement plan was not great." Detailed format instructions: bullet points with topic sentence as primary bullet, sub-bullets for every sentence/quote, two line spaces between clusters, no numbered titles. "please try hard with this aspect... the thing I spend the most time doing with you is saying, I don't write like this." Must invoke 7 skills before doing anything. - "You didn't invoke all skills, you fucking idiot. Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind." 7. Pending Tasks: - RESTART FROM SCRATCH: Produce the full 15-paragraph plan for the "LLMs Are Not Tools" essay with: - All 7 skills invoked and read (now done) - Bullet-point format (topic sentence = primary bullet, sub-bullets = every sentence and quote) - Two line spaces between paragraph clusters, no numbered titles - Actual philosophical content, not meta-descriptions - Written in Nick's prose style (grounded in all the voice/style reference files) - Block quotes from Hoel included where they belong - Structure matches the Codex plan through paragraph 7, then slows down from 8 onward - Fixed line preserved exactly: "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all" 8. Current Work: All 7 skills have now been invoked (contemplate, nick-analytic-voice, nick-philosophical-prose, twork, source-work, epistemic-discipline, writing-standards). The prose reference files have been read (prose-composition.md, essayistic-examples.md, vocabulary.md). The task must now restart FROM SCRATCH: deep contemplation followed by the full 15-paragraph bullet-point plan written in Nick's voice. 9. Optional Next Step: Restart the task from scratch as instructed. This means: 1. Read any remaining reference files required by the skills (nick-philosophical-prose/references/conversation-examples.md may be needed) 2. Re-read the Hoel clipping and current draft to have quotations fresh 3. Run /contemplate on the full task 4. Produce the bullet-point plan with every sentence written in Nick's style Nick's exact words: "Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind." The task is: produce the 15-paragraph plan in bullet-point format with actual sentences in Nick's voice, after invoking all required skills. The skills are now invoked; the plan production is what must restart from scratch. If you need specific details from before compaction (like exact code snippets, error messages, or content you generated), read the full transcript at: /Users/nickyoung/.claude/projects/-Users-nickyoung-My-Obsidian-Vault/6ae1e700-17c0-43f6-bdac-618f0b02e7ce.jsonl Please continue the conversation from where we left off without asking the user any further questions. Continue with the last task that you were asked to work on. ### Assistant I need to restart the task from scratch. All skills are loaded. Let me re-read the source materials and remaining reference files, then produce the plan. ### Assistant Good, I have all the source materials and reference files fresh. Now I need to retrieve the Codex plan from the earlier conversation. Let me get that from the session transcript. ### Assistant I need to retrieve the Codex plan from the session transcript. Let me read the relevant portion. ### Assistant Now I also need to read the bullet-point draft (LLMs Are Not Tools.md) to see Nick's own editorial comments and the format he wants. ### User [Request interrupted by user] ### User "Now I also need to read the bullet-point draft (LLMs Are Not Tools.md) to see Nick's own editorial comments and the format he wants." this is the wrong draft dickhead. it is the codex draft in the lonfgorm you are reading the wrongf drfart wyou fucking idiot. it is the one with codex in the titlew like i fucking told you ### Assistant You're right. The Codex Revision draft is the one I need — I already have it loaded from my earlier read. That's `Writing/substack/LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md`, which I read at the start of this task. I have it fresh. Let me get straight into the contemplation now. No more preamble. ### Assistant Right. Let me think through what I actually need to do here, carefully. The task: produce a 15-paragraph plan in bullet-point format. Topic sentence as primary bullet. Sub-bullets for every sentence and/or quote that would go in the paragraph. Two line spaces between paragraph clusters. No numbered paragraph titles. Block quotes from Hoel included where they belong. Written in Nick's actual prose style. The structure follows the Codex plan — Nick said he likes the structure up to paragraph 7 and the overall 15-paragraph shape. But the Codex plan gives stage directions ("this paragraph should make the reader feel...") rather than actual content. I need to replace stage directions with actual sentences. Let me think about what "actual sentences in Nick's voice" means here, concretely. I've read: - prose-composition.md (ownership, texture, dialectic, concreteness) - conversation-examples.md (the Watson/Crick development, no meta-commentary, no flat chains, no triplets) - vocabulary.md (straightforward, plausible, consists in, notice that...) - essayistic-examples.md (removing capitalised labels, reader-management, staged rhetorical questions, rhetorical reversals) - nick-voice.md (essayistic register — "but" pivots, flat evaluations, genuine uncertainty, no TED-talk earnestness) - examples.md (contrastive pairs) This is a Substack essay, not an academic paper. So the register is essayistic — nick-voice.md is the guide more than the analytic voice. But it's philosophically rigorous essayistic, not blog-casual. Think Helen Lewis or Jesse Singal level, but with Nick's characteristic dryness. Key voice features for Substack register: - First person, present - "But" pivots — hold two things at once, show where weight falls - Flat evaluations without ceremony - Genuine uncertainty (not hedging) - No capitalised label syndrome - No over-structuring - No reader-management ("let me be clear about...") - No staged rhetorical questions - No rhetorical reversals ("Maybe especially when...") - No American/TED-talk earnestness - Conversational transitions - Varied sentence length — not everything punchy, some longer discursive sentences - Breathing room — not maximum compression Now, what does this mean concretely for how the bullet points should read? Each primary bullet is a topic sentence — an actual sentence that could open the paragraph. Each sub-bullet is an actual sentence (or a block quote) that would appear in the paragraph. These should read like real prose, not like descriptions of what prose would say. Let me think about the Codex plan's structure and what each paragraph needs to actually SAY. Paragraph 1: Introduce Hoel. The Codex plan says to present him as giving the ordinary thought ("LLMs are tools") a more determinate argumentative shape. Nick's editorial comment from the bullet draft says: begin by saying something like "Last week Hoel said X. This seems fairly innocuous." Block quote him early. Mention the Homo faber framing. Mention the "for writing" part. Set him up generously. This is not a takedown. So the topic sentence needs to introduce Hoel's essay as giving a common thought (LLMs are tools) a sharper form. The sub-bullets need actual sentences doing this. Paragraph 2: Stone axe → recognisability → proper function. The Codex plan distinguishes Hoel's claim (recognisability) from Nick's stronger claim (rough grasp of what a thing is for). Nick's own note: "Hoel's point is that familiar tools are recognisable as tools; my point is that, in many paradigmatic cases, that recognisability is accompanied by a rough grasp of what the thing is for." Paragraph 3: Proper function introduced. Calm, expository. Fork/Google/vacuum/Swiss Army knife examples. Paragraph 4: Ask what ChatGPT is for. Run through candidates — each fails distinctly. Predicting tokens = mechanism. Chatting = too broad. Writing = catches something but not enough. Helping with tasks = circular. Paragraph 5: The fixed line. "A quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all." Classificatory hesitation, not metaphysical victory. Instability at the level of functional description. Paragraph 6: Proper function → evaluation pivot. If you can't specify what a thing is for, you can't say what counts as testing it. This prepares the return to Hoel's choice of writing as test case. Paragraph 7: Hoel's choice of writing in its strongest form. Block quote "words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms." He is right that text is constitutive. The question narrows: not "why look at writing?" but "what exactly are we measuring?" Paragraph 8: "Writing" is too coarse. Distinguish text-as-artefact from text-as-working-surface. Multiple practices hiding under one name. Paragraph 9: Hoel measures text as artefact. The practice Nick wants to describe treats text as working surface. "Has writing improved?" presupposes one success condition. Paragraph 10: Pen comparison → the system sends back altered material. "The return prompts us back." Phenomenological heart. What the practice actually feels like. Paragraph 11: Reconnect to Hoel's evidence. Not refuted but measured at wrong level. Bad prose = treating returned text as product rather than material to resist. Same technology, two modes. Paragraph 12: Introduce medium. Only now, because only now has the reader been shown why "tool" and "writing" are both too blunt. Medium = practice where system's resistances and possibilities become visible in the work. Paragraph 13: Frippertronics. Makes the recursive structure vivid. Loop, delay, alteration, re-entry. About method of making, not equivalence of products. Paragraph 14: Slop. Not embarrassment for the positive account — part of it. What happens when system with strong generic tendencies meets too little resistance. Concession to Hoel that is genuine, not strategic. Paragraph 15: Return to Hoel in mode of response. Fixed line returns. LLMs may be "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all." OK. Now let me think about the actual sentences. This is where the hard work is. Let me go paragraph by paragraph and think about what actual sentences in Nick's essayistic voice would look like. For the essayistic register, I need to keep in mind: - British English, but contractions are probably fine for Substack (unlike academic prose) - Actually wait — nick-analytic-voice says "no contractions" and nick-voice.md doesn't say anything about contractions for essayistic. The prose-composition examples don't use contractions. Let me check the Codex Revision draft... looking at it: "I do not mean by this merely..." "I am not yet saying..." "I do not need to prove..." — so no contractions. Even for Substack, Nick writes without contractions based on this draft. - Actually, wait. The essayistic-examples.md shows: "I don't care whether the LLM 'intended' to feed me" — that's the "After" version, the GOOD version. So contractions ARE used in the essayistic register. And looking at the voice samples in nick-voice.md: "I do not think we should assume..." — that's from conversation, not polished prose. Hmm. - The Codex Revision draft itself doesn't use contractions. But that was written in a more formal register. For a Substack essay... I think the safest bet is to follow the current draft's convention — no contractions. The Codex Revision is the most recent indicator of what register this essay is in. Actually, let me look more carefully. The draft says "I do not mean" and "I am not interested" — but also "Of course they are connected with writing" which is relatively casual. I think the register is formal-essayistic. No contractions, but not stiff. Let me also think about what block quotes from Hoel I need to place. The Codex plan explicitly calls for the "words are its womb" quote in paragraph 7. I should also consider: - The paragraph about slop: "Yet, beyond mass-producing stilted emails..." — this is already in the Codex Revision draft - "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool." — this captures his conclusion - The Homo faber framing from Bergson - The stone axe recognition moment Now, the format. Nick wants: - Topic sentence = primary bullet - Sub-bullets = every sentence and/or quote - Two line spaces between paragraph clusters - No numbered paragraph titles - Block quotes from Hoel where they belong Let me think about one more thing. Nick's biggest complaint is that I don't write like him. The conversation-examples.md is brutally clear about what goes wrong. Let me review the failure modes one more time: 1. Meta-commentary — sentences where "this" is the subject and the verb describes what the argument does. "This dissolves..." "This establishes..." I must NOT do this. 2. Flat declarative chains — 3+ short sentences in sequence. I must vary sentence length. 3. Triplet lists — "whether X, whether Y, whether Z." Compress into single claims. 4. Announcement phrases — "It is worth noting that..." "Crucially..." Just make the point. 5. Describing instead of stating — "The argument turns on a key distinction." Just STATE the distinction. 6. Reporting without engaging — "X argues... Y argues..." Quote directly, respond. For the essayistic register specifically: 7. No capitalised label syndrome 8. No reader-management 9. No staged rhetorical questions with pre-packaged answers 10. No rhetorical reversals ("Maybe especially when...") OK. One more important thing. The orienting passage requirement from nick-philosophical-prose. Before drafting, I need to quote a passage from prose-composition.md. Orienting passage from prose-composition.md — the Texture section: > "Both options are unsatisfying. While ascribing the artistic merit to the human user would overlook Midjourney's active contribution, ascribing the merit to Midjourney would downplay the creative activity of prompt-crafting." > — "Growing the Image" > "A prompter can never be sure what image they are going to get, but this is a feature, not a bug." > — "Growing the Image" These show: short sentence for emphasis followed by elaboration; conversational aside embedded naturally; and the "feature, not a bug" phrase used straight, not as a rhetorical trick. The texture is in the breathing room between the short and long. And from Dialectic: > "One might object here that Midjourney's unpredictability is not especially unique... Yet, this is no reason to think that they are not tools. > The comparison with the drum machine has a straightforward response. 'Unpredictable' should not be taken to mean 'unreliable'." This shows: state objection strongly, then answer cleanly. The answer is matter-of-fact, not triumphant. Right. Now let me draft each paragraph as bullet points with actual sentences. I need to be careful here. Each sentence must face the subject matter. No meta-commentary. No describing what the paragraph does. The sentences are the argument. Let me also keep track of the fixed line that must be preserved exactly: "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all." Let me draft this now, paragraph by paragraph. PARAGRAPH 1 — Introducing Hoel Topic sentence: something like "It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool." Then pivot to Hoel. Actually, looking at the Codex Revision draft's opening, it starts with exactly this: "It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool." That's good. The Codex plan says: after opening general sentences about tools, introduce Hoel as giving the ordinary thought a more determinate argumentative shape. Let me think about what the actual sentences would be: - It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool. - We use Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever, to do this or that — this has the casual "or whatever" that fits Nick's essayistic register. - Then introduce Hoel: Erik Hoel gives that thought a sharper philosophical form. - Then characterise what Hoel does: he treats what has happened to writing as evidence of what sort of thing these systems are. - Then the block quote. Which one? The "yet beyond mass-producing" one captures his argument well. Or maybe the shorter "bits in, bits out" conclusion. - Nick's editorial comment says: block quote him early. Mention the Homo faber framing. Be generous. - Then a sentence setting the tone: "I find something right in this" or similar — responsive, not prosecutorial. Let me draft: - It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool. - We use Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever, to do this or that. - Erik Hoel gives that thought a sharper form in his recent essay "Bits In, Bits Out." - Hoel's framing is Bergson's: we are *Homo faber*, tool-makers by nature, and LLMs are the latest addition to the toolkit. - What has happened to writing since these systems appeared, he suggests, tells us what sort of thing they are. - [BLOCK QUOTE: "Yet, beyond mass-producing stilted emails..." or "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool."] - I find something right in this — the public effect of these systems on prose really has often looked like a flood of stilted language, and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. - What I am less sure of is the description doing the philosophical work. Hmm. That last line is straight from the Codex Revision. It's good — it's Nick's voice. But the instruction says to use the Codex plan's structure, not to copy the existing draft verbatim. Let me think about whether this is the right opening or whether I should adjust. Actually, the Codex Revision draft IS Nick's approved prose (or at least his most recent draft). Using good lines from it is not copying — it's preserving what works. The plan should contain the best available sentences, whether from the existing draft or newly written. But let me be careful. The Codex plan has a different structure from the Codex Revision draft. The draft's paragraph 1 covers ground that the plan splits across paragraphs 1-2 (introducing Hoel, then the stone axe/recognisability). So I need to break it up differently. Let me re-examine. Codex plan paragraph 1: introduce Hoel as giving the ordinary thought a more determinate shape. He treats writing as evidence. Tone: responsive, not prosecutorial. He is the strongest recent articulation of a thought many already have. Codex plan paragraph 2: stone axe example → why "tool" feels natural → recognisability → proper function distinction. Hoel's claim = recognisability. Nick's = rough grasp of what it's for. End by opening the question. OK so paragraph 1 is tighter — just the introduction and the block quote. Paragraph 2 does the stone axe and the recognisability-to-function move. Let me redraft paragraph 1: - It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool. - We use Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever, to do this or that. - Erik Hoel gives that ordinary thought a sharper form. - His framing is Bergson's: we are *Homo faber*, tool-makers; LLMs are the latest in a line stretching back 3.3 million years to stone axes. - What has happened to writing since these systems appeared, he argues, tells us what sort of thing they are — and tells us they belong on the side of tools, not on the side of transformative intelligence. - [BLOCK QUOTE — the "words are its womb" passage or the "bits in bits out" passage] Wait, which block quote goes here and which goes in paragraph 7? The Codex plan explicitly puts "words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms" in paragraph 7. So I should use a different one here. Maybe the "bits in, bits out" conclusion, or the slop passage. Actually, looking at Nick's editorial comment on the bullet draft: "the beginning should go something like: Last week Hoel said the following... block quote him early on." And "Explain why he thinks it's slop. Set him up properly, be generous." So the opening block quote should capture Hoel's argument about writing/slop. The "Yet, beyond mass-producing stilted emails..." passage works well here. Then save "words are its womb" for paragraph 7. Let me try again: PARAGRAPH 1: - It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool. - We use Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever, to do this or that. - Erik Hoel gives that ordinary thought a sharper form. - His framing is Bergson's: we are *Homo faber*, tool-makers; LLMs are the latest in a line stretching back 3.3 million years to stone axes. - If LLMs were a genuine source of surplus intelligence, Hoel argues, that surplus should have shown up first in writing — the domain closest to what these systems are made of. - [BLOCK QUOTE: "Yet, beyond mass-producing stilted emails and stilted social media posts and stilted essays, the impact of LLMs on writing itself has not really been to improve or accelerate good writing overall. We are not in a glut of good writing. We are in a dearth of it."] - I find something right in this — the public effect of these systems on prose has often looked like a flood of stilted language, and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. - What I am less sure of is whether "tool" is the right description of the thing that has produced this effect. That last sentence is better than "the description doing the philosophical work" because it's more specific. It says what it means directly. Actually, let me reconsider. "What I am less sure of is whether 'tool' is the right description" — that's direct and faces the subject matter. Good. PARAGRAPH 2: Topic sentence from Codex plan: Hoel's opening example helps explain why the category of tool feels natural. Let me think about what actual sentences do this work: - Hoel's opening helps explain why "tool" feels natural in the first place. - He describes finding a stone axe on a beach in Cornwall as a child — recognising it immediately for what it was. - There is something to this: paradigmatic tools are recognisable as tools. - But notice that in many of these cases, recognisability travels together with a rough grasp of what the thing is for. - Hoel's stone axe is not just recognisable as a tool; it is recognisable as a tool for cutting. - If that is what ordinary tool-recognition looks like — recognition accompanied by at least a rough functional grasp — then what happens when we try to place ChatGPT under the same description? That "notice that" is characteristic Nick vocabulary. The "but" pivot is natural. The final question opens outward without being a staged rhetorical question (it's genuinely open, not set up with a pre-packaged answer). Wait — am I being careful enough with the recognisability/function distinction? The Codex plan says: "do not collapse those two claims into one. You want the paragraph to show that you are moving from his point to your own." Let me make sure the sentences do this. "There is something to this: paradigmatic tools are recognisable as tools." — that's Hoel's claim. "But notice that in many of these cases, recognisability travels together with a rough grasp of what the thing is for." — that's Nick's move beyond Hoel. "Hoel's stone axe is not just recognisable as a tool; it is recognisable as a tool for cutting." — this shows the distinction concretely. Good, that preserves the distinction without collapsing it. PARAGRAPH 3: Topic sentence: one reason ordinary tools are easy to classify is that they tend to have a specifiable proper function. - One reason ordinary tools are usually easy to classify is that they tend to have a more or less specifiable proper function. - By this I do not mean just anything an object can be used for, but the use that distinguishes what it is *for* from the uses to which it can merely be put. - A hammer can hold down loose papers, and a heavy book can prop open a door, but these are accidental functions rather than proper ones. - Nor does the point collapse the moment we turn to multi-functional objects: a Swiss Army knife has several proper functions, not none. - That is why the familiar examples still work: a hammer is for hammering, a vacuum cleaner is for vacuuming, Google is for searching. These sentences are taken mostly from the Codex Revision draft — they already exist and are in Nick's voice. This paragraph is expository and calm, as the Codex plan requests. PARAGRAPH 4: Topic sentence: once we ask that question of ChatGPT, the obvious answers all seem partial. - Once we ask that question of ChatGPT, the obvious answers all seem partial, unstable, or wrong in different ways. - Hoel's own suggestion is writing — but I want to come back to that. - Perhaps its function is to predict the next token; but that is a description of mechanism, not of use — nobody opens ChatGPT in order to predict tokens, any more than we describe the function of the heart as contracting rhythmically. - Perhaps it is for chatting; Keith Frankish has suggested that LLMs can be understood, from the intentional stance, as wanting to play the chat game — but this fits badly with code generation, translation, summarisation, or philosophical use. - Perhaps it is for helping with tasks; but that is so general as to individuate nothing — it is as though one described the function of a hammer as "helping with projects." - The difficulty is not that these answers are all wrong, but that none of them settles the question the way "for hammering" settles it for a hammer. That last sentence does what the Codex plan asks: "leave the reader with pressure, not triumph." Each candidate fails distinctly (mechanism, too broad, circular/too general). The tone is noticing, not prosecutorial. Wait, I should check — the Codex plan says each candidate should fail in a distinct way. Let me verify: - "Predicting tokens" = mechanism (✓) - "Chatting" = too broad/thin (✓ — though I phrased it as fitting badly with many uses) - "Writing" = catches something but saved for later (this is a slight departure — the Codex plan lists "for writing" as one candidate, but I deferred it since paragraph 7 gives it full treatment) - "Helping with tasks" = too general (✓) The Codex plan says: "'Writing' catches something real but not enough." I could add a sub-bullet here, but I think deferring is cleaner — paragraph 7 gives writing its due. Let me add a brief note: Actually, the Codex plan's paragraph 4 says: "run through the obvious candidates gently: 'For writing,' 'for chatting,' 'for predicting tokens,' 'for helping with tasks.'" So writing should be mentioned. Let me adjust: - Once we ask that question of ChatGPT, the obvious answers all seem partial, unstable, or wrong in different ways. - Perhaps its function is to predict the next token; but that is a description of mechanism, not of use — nobody opens ChatGPT in order to predict tokens, any more than we describe the function of the heart as contracting rhythmically. - Perhaps it is for chatting; Keith Frankish has suggested that LLMs can be understood, from the intentional stance, as wanting to play the chat game — but this fits badly with code generation, translation, or philosophical use. - Hoel's suggestion — writing — catches something, but not quite enough; I will come back to it. - "Helping with tasks" is so general as to individuate nothing. - The difficulty is not that these answers are all wrong, but that none of them settles the question the way "for hammering" settles it for a hammer. PARAGRAPH 5: The fixed line paragraph. - That does not show that LLMs are not tools; but it does suggest that they are a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all. - The force of this is classificatory hesitation, not metaphysical victory — I am not claiming to have proved that LLMs cannot possibly be tools. - I am claiming that the tool description is less straightforward than it first sounds. - The issue is not just that LLMs can be used for many things — so can Swiss Army knives, and nobody finds that puzzling. - The issue is instability at the level of ordinary functional description: none of the obvious answers to "what is it for?" quite works, and the answers that come closest tend to describe mechanism or to be so general as to describe everything. Good. The fixed line is preserved exactly. The sub-bullets spell out what the classificatory hesitation amounts to without meta-commentary. "I am claiming that..." is Nick's ownership voice. PARAGRAPH 6: The proper-function → evaluation pivot. - And that matters because uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation. - If we do not know clearly what a thing is for, it becomes much harder to say in advance what would count as a good test of it. - We can test a hammer by asking whether it drives nails; we can test a search engine by asking whether it returns relevant results; in each case the proper function gives us the standard. - When there is no settled proper function, test-selection becomes a substantive question rather than something we can take for granted. - I am not saying that no test of LLMs is possible — that would be absurd. - I am saying that when Hoel selects writing as the privileged proving ground, that choice requires more argument than his framing initially suggests. This paragraph does the bridge work. It connects the proper-function problem to Hoel's choice of writing. The hammer/search engine examples are concrete without being a triplet (only two). "I am not saying... I am saying..." is a characteristic Nick move (hedged confidence, distinguishing the suggestion from a stronger one). PARAGRAPH 7: Hoel's choice of writing in its strongest form. Block quote "words are its womb." - Hoel's choice of writing can now be presented in its strongest form. Wait — "can now be presented" is meta-commentary. It describes what the paragraph is going to do rather than doing it. Let me rewrite. - There is, however, a good reason to look at writing first. - These systems operate through language, are trained on language, and produce language; so it is not arbitrary to think that writing is where their character should show most clearly. - Hoel puts the point vividly: - [BLOCK QUOTE: "for an LLM, words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms — yet their impact on writing as a whole has been mostly to generate mountains of slop"] - He is right about the constitutive connection: if there is surplus intelligence in these systems, text is the place it ought to appear. - The question is not "why look at writing?" — that question has a good answer. - The question is what exactly we are measuring when we look there. Hmm, that last line is close to the Codex plan's language ("what exactly are we measuring when we look there?"). But it's also a genuine question, not a staged one. It opens outward. Good. Actually, "There is, however, a good reason to look at writing first" — is this the right topic sentence? The Codex plan says: "Hoel's choice of writing can now be presented in its strongest form." But I can't use that because it's meta. What if I say: "But there is a straightforward reason to start with writing." "Straightforward" is characteristic vocabulary. "But" is a pivot — from the previous paragraph's hesitation about testing to acknowledging that Hoel has a point. Good. - But there is a straightforward reason to start with writing. - These systems operate through language, are trained on language, and produce language; so it is not at all arbitrary to think that writing is where their character should show first and most clearly. - Hoel puts the point vividly: - > "for an LLM, words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms — yet their impact on writing as a whole has been mostly to generate mountains of slop" - He is right about the constitutive connection: if there is surplus intelligence in these systems, text is the place it ought to appear. - The question is not why one would look at writing — that question has a good answer. - The question is what exactly we are measuring when we look there. PARAGRAPH 8: "Writing" too coarse. Distinguish text-as-artefact from text-as-working-surface. The Codex plan says: "distinguish text as finished product from text as instrument of thinking." The plan also says: "the paragraph should make the reader feel that 'writing' may hide multiple practices under one name." But I can't write a sentence that says "the paragraph should make the reader feel X" — that's stage directions. I need to write sentences that actually make the distinction. - The difficulty is that "writing" is too coarse a heading for the very different things people do with text. - A finished essay, a published book, a social media post — these are texts as artefacts, meant to stand on their own and be judged as products. - But a prompt-and-response sequence in which someone tests a distinction, surfaces an alternative, or forces a reformulation is doing something else with text altogether. - In the first case, the text is the end-product; in the second, it is the working surface. - Hoel's evidence — the Amazon data, the social media slop, the unchanged top 100 — largely concerns text as artefact. - That is a reasonable thing to measure, but it is not the only practice that goes on under the name of "writing." I need to be careful here. "Surfaces an alternative" and "forces a reformulation" — are those triplet-ish? There are three items: "tests a distinction, surfaces an alternative, forces a reformulation." That's a triplet. Nick hates triplets. Let me compress: "But a prompt-and-response sequence in which someone tests a distinction or forces a reformulation is doing something else with text altogether." Two items, not three. Better. Actually, looking at this more carefully, I think the sentence needs to be more specific. What does "doing something else with text" mean? Let me think... "But when someone throws a half-formed idea at an LLM and uses the response to sharpen what they actually think, the text is not the product — it is the working surface." That's more concrete. It describes the practice rather than listing activities. And it introduces the artefact/working-surface distinction through a concrete case rather than abstractly. Let me redraft: - The difficulty is that "writing" is too coarse a heading for the very different things people do with text. - A finished essay, a book, a social media post — these are texts as artefacts, meant to stand on their own and be judged as products. - But when someone throws a half-formed idea at an LLM and uses the response to sharpen what they actually think, the text is not the product — it is the working surface. - Hoel's evidence — the Amazon data, the social media slop, the unchanged quality of the best books — largely concerns text as artefact. - That is a reasonable thing to measure, but it is not the only thing that goes on under the name of "writing." PARAGRAPH 9: Spell out artefact vs. working surface more concretely. "Has writing improved?" presupposes one success condition. - What Hoel mostly measures is text as artefact; the practice I want to describe treats text as a working surface. - A finished blog post or book is meant to be read, shared, and evaluated on its own merits. - A prompt-response-revision loop may not produce anything worth reading at all — and that is not a failure, because producing a readable text was not the point. - The point was to test whether a distinction holds up, to see what an objection looks like when someone pushes back on it, or to find out what you think by watching yourself resist what the system returns. - "Has writing improved?" presupposes that the relevant success condition is improvement in the quality of end-products. - If much of the interesting practice is not aimed at producing end-products, then the question is too blunt to capture what is going on. Hmm. "to test whether a distinction holds up, to see what an objection looks like when someone pushes back on it, or to find out what you think by watching yourself resist what the system returns" — that's a triplet again. Three items in parallel. Let me compress. "The point was to find out what you think by watching yourself respond to what the system returns." One item. Cleaner. But does it lose too much? Let me think... The Codex plan says to "spell this out more concretely." So I need some concreteness. Let me try: "The point was to test a distinction, or to find out what you actually think by watching yourself respond to what comes back." Two items. Better. - What Hoel mostly measures is text as artefact; the practice I want to describe treats text as a working surface. - A finished blog post or book is meant to be read and evaluated on its own merits. - A prompt-response-revision loop may not produce anything worth publishing — and that is not a failure, because publishing was not the point. - The point was to test a distinction, or to discover what you actually think by responding to what the system sends back. - "Has writing improved?" presupposes that the relevant success condition is improvement in the quality of end-products. - If much of the interesting practice is not aimed at end-products in the first place, then the question is too blunt to capture what is going on. PARAGRAPH 10: Pen comparison. The system returns altered material. "The return prompts us back." Phenomenological heart. The Codex Revision draft already has good pen material. Let me draw on it but develop it further as the plan requires. - The difference becomes clearer if one compares an LLM not to a pen but to a system that sends back altered material for further use. - A pen makes marks on a surface — those marks become letters, those letters words, those words a sentence — but the pen's role ends there. - It extends my ability to inscribe; it does not return a proposal, a misreading, a reformulation, or a line of continuation I had not seen. - A pen does not prompt me back. - When I use an LLM, the exchange is not one-way: I write something, or half-write something, or throw a distinction at the system in rough form, and what comes back is language already reshaped by the model's learned patterns. - Sometimes what returns is flatter than what I wanted; sometimes wrongly confident; sometimes unexpectedly connective; sometimes productively irritating. - I then have to decide what to reject, what to sharpen, what to pursue, and what pressure to reapply. - We are not only prompting the system — the return prompts us back. Wait, "a proposal, a misreading, a reformulation, or a line of continuation" — that's four items. And "flatter than what I wanted; sometimes wrongly confident; sometimes unexpectedly connective; sometimes productively irritating" — that's four too. Are these triplet/quadruplet problems? Let me check against the skill instructions... The conversation-examples.md says: "stop doing these horrendous one, two, three examples which do nothing other than waste word count." But these lists are different — they're not parallel abstract nouns doing no work. They're concrete descriptions of what actually happens. The pen sentence: "a proposal, a misreading, a reformulation, or a line of continuation I had not seen" — each of these names a different thing the system does. The "Sometimes" sentence similarly. These are doing work, not padding. But still, four items is a lot. Let me see if I can compress. Looking at the Codex Revision draft, it already has these exact sentences and Nick hasn't flagged them with "%%not how I write%%" — so they're presumably acceptable. Let me keep them. Actually, wait. The Codex Revision draft is the "current polished draft" that has the fatal flaw. Nick hasn't gone through it line by line with %% comments the way he did with the bullet-point draft. So I can't assume every sentence in it is approved. But these particular sentences are quite good — they're concrete, they do work, they're not meta-commentary. Let me keep the paragraph mostly as is but tighten slightly: - The difference becomes clearer if one compares an LLM not to a pen but to a system that sends material back altered. - A pen makes marks on a surface; it extends my ability to inscribe; it does not return a proposal, a misreading, or a line of continuation I had not seen. - When I use an LLM well, I write something — or half-write something, or throw a distinction at the system in rough form — and what comes back is language already reshaped by the model's learned patterns: sometimes flatter than what I wanted, sometimes wrongly confident, sometimes unexpectedly connective, sometimes productively irritating. - I then have to decide what to reject, what to sharpen, and what pressure to reapply. - We are not only prompting the system; the return prompts us back. That's tighter. Three items in the pen sentence (proposal, misreading, line of continuation). The "sometimes" list stays at four because each names something genuinely different. The final line lands as a short verdict after longer development. Good rhythm. PARAGRAPH 11: Reconnect to Hoel's evidence. Not refuted but measured at wrong level. - Once that recursive structure is in view, Hoel's evidence is not refuted — but it is being measured at the wrong level of description. - I am not denying the slop, and I am not denying that public prose has often worsened. - What I doubt is that this settles the character of the system. - A lot of bad prose may show what happens when returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, or worked through. - The same technology supports two quite different modes of use: one that floods the zone with generic artefacts, and one in which returned text functions as part of a thinking process. - Hoel's evidence tells us something about the first mode; it is less clear that it tells us much about the second. This paragraph does the bridging work the Codex plan identifies as the "real argumentative hinge of the second half." It reconnects the phenomenological description (paragraphs 8-10) to Hoel's public evidence without dismissing it. "I am not denying... What I doubt is..." is genuine, not strategic. Wait — "resisted, revised, or worked through" — that's a triplet. Compress: "resisted or worked through." Two items. "A lot of bad prose may show what happens when returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted or worked through." Better. PARAGRAPH 12: Introduce medium. Only now that the reader has been shown why "tool" and "writing" are both too blunt. - If "tool" is too narrow and "writing" too broad, what better description is available? - The category I want to borrow from *Growing the Image* is medium — not in the weak sense that the system lies between a user and an outcome, but in the sense developed by Wollheim and Thomson-Jones: a structured field of resources and practices whose characteristic resistances and possibilities become visible only in the work itself. - What matters is not just that the user has less than perfect control — plenty of tools allow for that. - What matters is that the system does not simply wait to be directed toward a fixed end: it pushes back, filters, smooths, distorts, opens a possibility here and closes one there. - It sends something back that has to be dealt with in the working itself. - A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for; a medium is understood by the characteristic way it makes work proceed. Hmm, "What matters is" appears twice. That's repetitive. Let me fix: "The point is not just that the user has less than perfect control — plenty of tools allow for that. The point is that the system does not simply wait to be directed toward a fixed end." But "the point is" is close to meta-commentary ("the point of this paragraph is..."). Actually, "the point is" in this context means "the relevant fact is" — it's making a claim about the subject matter, not about the argument. I think it's fine. But let me check: Nick's skill says "If a sentence's subject is 'this' and its verb describes an argumentative action..." — "the point" isn't "this" and "is" isn't an argumentative action verb. It's OK. Actually, let me just use different phrasing to avoid the repetition: - The category I want to borrow from *Growing the Image* is medium. - I do not mean merely that the system lies between a user and an outcome — in that weak sense almost anything could count as a medium. - I mean something closer to what Wollheim and Thomson-Jones describe: a structured field of resources and practices whose characteristic resistances and possibilities become visible only in the work itself. - Plenty of tools give the user less than perfect control; that alone does not make something a medium. - What makes the difference is that the system does not simply wait to be directed toward a fixed end — it pushes back, filters, smooths, distorts, and sends something back that has to be dealt with in the working itself. - A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for; a medium is understood by the characteristic way it makes work proceed. That's cleaner. The final line is a short verdict after longer development — good rhythm. PARAGRAPH 13: Frippertronics. Makes the recursive structure vivid. - The comparison that has seemed most useful to me here is Frippertronics. - Robert Fripp and Brian Eno set up two Revox reel-to-reel tape machines so that what Fripp played into one returned from the other a few seconds later, and then returned again after another pass through the loop. - The loop does not merely preserve what went in — it sends it back changed; delay, thinning, layering, and accumulation are not accidents external to the practice but the very conditions under which it proceeds. - What Fripp is doing is not well captured by saying that he is merely using recording devices as tools — of course the tape machines are tools in one ordinary sense, but the interesting fact is the mode of engagement. - He plays into the system, hears the delayed return, and adjusts subsequent playing in light of that return; the loop becomes part of the process by which the next intention is formed. - Something similar, in a different register, happens with LLM use: language goes in, language comes back altered, and the alteration becomes material for the next move. This is largely from the Codex Revision draft, which handles Frippertronics well. The Codex plan says the emphasis should fall on "loop, delay, alteration, and re-entry into the next move" — which is exactly what these sentences do. PARAGRAPH 14: Slop. Part of the positive account. What happens when a system with strong generic tendencies meets too little resistance. Genuine concession. - Hoel is right to insist on slop, and any account that tried to wave it away would deserve to fail. - One of the most useful things in his essay is the sense that the public effect of these systems has often been a thinning of language rather than an enrichment of it. - There is a musical analogue here: in Alvin Lucier's *I Am Sitting in a Room*, a spoken passage is played back into a room and re-recorded again and again, so that the room's own resonances gradually take over — the content is not developed or deepened but washed into the characteristic signature of the system. - Something similar happens with LLM use when there is too little resistance: text passed through the model without discrimination gets drawn toward the model's easier habits — familiar transitions, familiar emphases, familiar shapes of explanation. - Slop is what happens when that tendency is allowed to dominate the exchange. - But this does not straightforwardly show that LLMs are tools; it may instead show what happens when a medium with strong generic tendencies is used badly, or lazily, or with too little resistance from the person inside the loop. Good. The Lucier comparison does argumentative work — it shows concretely what "generic tendencies dominating" looks like. The concession is genuine ("Hoel is right... any account that tried to wave this away would deserve to fail"). And the final sentence pivots without being triumphant. Actually, "used badly, or lazily, or with too little resistance from the person inside the loop" — is that a triplet? It's three items. But they build — "badly" is the general claim, "lazily" specifies one way, "with too little resistance" specifies the mechanism. It's a narrowing sequence, not a padding sequence. I think it's OK. Actually, I could just say "used with too little resistance from the person inside the loop" — that captures it. Let me simplify: "But this does not straightforwardly show that LLMs are tools; it may instead show what happens when a medium with strong generic tendencies is used with too little resistance from the person inside the loop." Cleaner. One claim, not three. PARAGRAPH 15: Return to Hoel. Fixed line returns. Response, not attack. - Hoel asks, in effect, whether writing has improved, and his answer is no. - From this he concludes that LLMs are tools: bits in, bits out. - I think he asks the right empirical question at the wrong level of description. - The novelty here does not lie in the possibility of producing a new kind of sentence; it lies in a mode of making — a recursive practice in which language is sent into a system, returned in altered form, and then either resisted or pursued by the person who receives it. - Hoel is right that there has been no textual singularity, and right that what has happened to public writing tells us something. - What I doubt is that it tells us that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense his opening picture encourages. - They may be a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all — and that is worth taking seriously before we conclude that the current technology is "just" another stone in *Homo faber*'s long line of rocks. The fixed line returns in the penultimate sentence. The last sentence has a callback to Hoel's stone axe and Homo faber without being heavy-handed. "What I doubt is that..." — genuine, not triumphant. Let me check the whole thing against the post-draft checklist: - [ ] No flat chains: checking... paragraph 5 has "The force of this is classificatory hesitation..." followed by "I am claiming that..." — those are both medium-length. No 3+ short sentences in sequence anywhere. ✓ - [ ] No meta-commentary: checking... "Once that recursive structure is in view" (para 11) — is "in view" meta? It means "once we have seen this feature" — it's borderline. Let me rephrase: "Given that recursive structure, Hoel's evidence is not refuted..." Actually, "given that" is characteristic Nick vocabulary. Better. - [ ] No colon-lists: checking... paragraph 3 has "a hammer is for hammering, a vacuum cleaner is for vacuuming, Google is for searching" — that's introduced with a colon. Rewrite as embedded clause: "That is why the familiar examples still work — a hammer is for hammering, a vacuum cleaner is for vacuuming, Google is for searching." Actually, that's still a list. But it's within a single sentence, embedded after a dash. And it's from the existing draft that Nick hasn't flagged. Let me keep it but check if there are others. - [ ] No ALL CAPS: ✓ - [ ] No rhetorical throat-clearing: checking... paragraph 7 starts "But there is a straightforward reason to start with writing" — that's a direct claim, not throat-clearing. ✓ - [ ] Examples developed: The Frippertronics is developed. The pen comparison is developed. Lucier is developed. The stone axe is brief but doesn't need full development — it's Hoel's example, being recounted. ✓ Let me also check for triplets across the whole plan: - Para 3: "a hammer is for hammering, a vacuum cleaner is for vacuuming, Google is for searching" — triplet. But these are proper-function examples that need to be listed. Each names a different paradigmatic case. I could cut to two: "a hammer is for hammering, Google is for searching." That still makes the point. Let me compress. - Para 10: "sometimes flatter than what I wanted, sometimes wrongly confident, sometimes unexpectedly connective, sometimes productively irritating" — four items. Each names something genuinely different. Could cut to three or two. "Sometimes flatter than what I wanted, sometimes unexpectedly connective, sometimes productively irritating" — three. Or just two: "sometimes flatter than what I wanted, sometimes productively irritating." Hmm, that loses the "unexpectedly connective" which is actually the positive case. Let me keep three: "sometimes flatter than what I wanted, sometimes unexpectedly connective, sometimes productively irritating." That covers: generic, surprising-good, surprising-useful. Actually, I think for the plan format, these lists are fine because the sentences will be sub-bullets, not running prose yet. The final draft would need to handle them, but in a plan they serve as markers for what the sentence should contain. Let me now also think about whether I'm missing any of the Codex plan's important moves: Paragraph 5 — "it is instability at the level of ordinary functional description" — I have this. ✓ Paragraph 6 — "this should prepare the return to Hoel" — I have this ("when Hoel selects writing as the privileged proving ground"). ✓ Paragraph 10 — "this paragraph is the phenomenological heart of the essay" — I have this. ✓ Paragraph 11 — "the same technology can support one mode of use that floods the zone... and another mode" — I have this. ✓ Paragraph 12 — "medium should not sound like a glamorous synonym or a metaphysical promotion" — I have this ("not in the weak sense"). ✓ Paragraph 13 — "the analogy is about method of making, not about equivalence of products" — I should add this. Let me add a sub-bullet to paragraph 13. Paragraph 14 — "this paragraph should feel like a real concession, not a strategic one" — the opening ("any account that tried to wave this away would deserve to fail") does this. ✓ Paragraph 15 — "the last cadence should sound like a response that has learned from Hoel and then pushed beyond him" — the stone axe callback does this. ✓ Let me add the "method of making" point to paragraph 13: "The comparison should not be pushed in the wrong way: the claim is not that LLMs are producing the textual equivalent of a new musical genre, but that in both cases the interesting fact concerns the method of making — what the return from the system does to the next move of thought." Good. That's from the Codex Revision draft but slightly adjusted. One more thing: I need to check that the opening of the plan captures what Nick's editorial comments requested. He said: "Begin something like: Last week Hoel said the following... block quote him early on." And "Mention the Homo faber framing. Mention the 'for writing' part." And "Explain why he thinks it's slop. Set him up properly, be generous." My paragraph 1: - Introduces Hoel ✓ - Mentions Homo faber ✓ - Block quotes early ✓ (the slop passage) - Explains why he thinks it's slop ✓ (implicit in the quote) - Sets him up generously ✓ ("I find something right in this") - "Not a takedown" ✓ (responsive tone) Good. I think this is ready. Let me also do a final voice check. Let me read through the topic sentences and ask: do these sound like Nick? 1. "It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool." — Direct, flat. ✓ 2. "Hoel's opening helps explain why 'tool' feels natural in the first place." — ✓ 3. "One reason ordinary tools are usually easy to classify is that they tend to have a more or less specifiable proper function." — Measured, expository. ✓ 4. "Once we ask that question of ChatGPT, the obvious answers all seem partial, unstable, or wrong in different ways." — ✓ 5. "That does not show that LLMs are not tools; but it does suggest that they are a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all." — The fixed line. ✓ 6. "And that matters because uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation." — "And that matters because" — is this an announcement phrase? Hmm. It's not "importantly" or "crucially" — it's actually stating a consequence. It's fine. But "matters" is on the vocabulary avoid list... Actually no, "matters" itself is not on the avoid list. "Important" and "significant" are. "Matters" is different — it's stating a factual consequence, not evaluating. ✓ 7. "But there is a straightforward reason to start with writing." — "Straightforward" is characteristic vocabulary. "But" pivot. ✓ 8. "The difficulty is that 'writing' is too coarse a heading for the very different things people do with text." — ✓ 9. "What Hoel mostly measures is text as artefact; the practice I want to describe treats text as a working surface." — "I want to describe" = ownership. ✓ 10. "The difference becomes clearer if one compares an LLM not to a pen but to a system that sends material back altered." — Wait, "one compares" — Nick's skill says "Do not use 'one' as a pronoun. Use 'we' or rephrase." Let me fix: "The difference becomes clearer once we compare an LLM not to a pen but to a system that sends material back altered." Better. ✓ 11. "Given that recursive structure, Hoel's evidence is not refuted — but it is being measured at the wrong level of description." — "Given that" is characteristic vocabulary. ✓ 12. "The category I want to borrow from *Growing the Image* is medium." — Ownership. ✓ 13. "The comparison that has seemed most useful to me here is Frippertronics." — ✓ 14. "Hoel is right to insist on slop, and any account that tried to wave it away would deserve to fail." — Generous, direct. ✓ 15. "Hoel asks, in effect, whether writing has improved, and his answer is no." — ✓ OK. I'm satisfied this is ready. Let me now assemble the full plan in the requested format. One last thought: Nick said "explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer" and "give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas." So I need to show my reasoning before the plan itself. The contemplator tags handle the reasoning. The plan is the final answer. Actually, re-reading his instruction more carefully: "Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that I have a lot to consider." This means the plan shouldn't just be a clean output — it should come with substantial commentary, options, and thinking. The contemplation serves this purpose, but I should also include notes alongside the plan where I see genuine choices to be made. Let me think about what genuine choices exist in this plan: 1. Paragraph 1: which Hoel block quote to use. I chose the slop passage. But the "bits in, bits out" conclusion might work too. Or the "if LLMs were a true source of intelligence to rival humans, then discovering them should be like discovering oil" passage. Nick should see the options. 2. Paragraph 2: how much of the stone axe anecdote to include. Nick's editorial comment says "We definitely don't need to go into his Neolithic Axe anecdote." But the Codex plan uses it. I've kept it brief — one sentence. Nick might want even less. 3. Paragraph 7: the "words are its womb" quote — should it be the full sentence or just the phrase? I've used a longer excerpt. Could be shorter. 4. Paragraph 10: how much pen comparison to include. The current draft has quite a lot. The Codex plan says this is the "phenomenological heart." So length is warranted. But Nick might want it tighter. 5. Paragraph 13: how much Frippertronics technical detail. Nick's editorial comment says "it's worth doing the technical description nicely." But for a Substack essay, not too much. I've kept it to the essential loop description. 6. Paragraph 14: Lucier — how much detail. In the current draft it's well-handled. In the plan I've kept it to one sentence of description + the analogy. 7. Overall: whether the essay needs the "I want to leave the agent question aside" paragraph from the current draft. The Codex plan doesn't include it as a separate paragraph, but the thought could be embedded. I've left it out. Nick might want it. 8. Overall: whether the Frankish reference (in paragraph 4, re: chatting) is worth keeping or is too much for a Substack essay. I've kept it brief — one subordinate clause. Let me note these as options in my final answer. OK, I think I have everything I need. Let me write it up. Orienting passage from prose-composition.md: > "One might object here that Midjourney's unpredictability is not especially unique... Yet, this is no reason to think that they are not tools. The comparison with the drum machine has a straightforward response. 'Unpredictable' should not be taken to mean 'unreliable'." > "To see why autonomy is not sufficient for attribution of credit, consider the following example. As I pour wine into a glass, you take photos of the liquid splashing and rippling as the glass is filled." These show: state objection strongly, then answer cleanly and matter-of-factly; launch examples with "consider" and then develop them fully so the example does the argumentative work. --- Here is what I want to flag before the plan itself. There are genuine choices in several places, and since we are kicking ideas around I will mark them as I go. The biggest structural issue I wrestled with: the Codex plan's paragraphs 8-9 do new work that the current Codex Revision draft does not do. The draft jumps from "Hoel's choice of writing" (paragraph 7) straight into the pen comparison and medium, without ever distinguishing text-as-artefact from text-as-working-surface. Paragraphs 8 and 9 in this plan fill that gap. They are the most speculative part — the sentences I have written for them are less grounded in existing draft material than anything else here. You may want to rework them entirely. I have given my best attempt at sentences that face the subject matter, but this is where the plan is most exposed. A second thing: the Codex plan wants the Frippertronics comparison to arrive late (paragraph 13), only after the recursive structure has been established phenomenologically. The current draft introduces Frippertronics in paragraph 6 (of 10). The new plan delays it significantly. This is a real structural change. The advantage: Frippertronics arrives as *clarification* of something already shown, not as an imported analogy. The risk: the essay goes a long time without its most vivid material. You may want to pull it forward slightly — say, paragraph 11 or 12 — if paragraph 13 feels too late. I have followed the Codex plan's placement, but this is worth thinking about. Third: I have not included a separate "I want to leave the agent question aside" paragraph. The current draft has this. The Codex plan does not give it a paragraph. I think it could be a sentence or two embedded in paragraph 12 (where medium is introduced) if you want it. I have left it out. If you want it, it slots naturally into the medium paragraph as a qualification. --- ### Assistant Here is the plan. --- - It seems obvious that LLMs are a type of tool. - We use Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever, to do this or that. - Erik Hoel gives that ordinary thought a sharper form in a recent essay, "Bits In, Bits Out." - His framing is Bergson's: we are *Homo faber*, tool-makers; LLMs are the latest in a line stretching back 3.3 million years to stone axes. - If LLMs were a genuine source of surplus intelligence, Hoel argues, that surplus should have shown up first in writing — the domain closest to what these systems are made of. - > "Yet, beyond mass-producing stilted emails and stilted social media posts and stilted essays, the impact of LLMs on writing itself has not really been to improve or accelerate good writing overall. We are not in a glut of good writing. We are in a dearth of it." - I find something right in this — the public effect of these systems on prose has often looked like a flood of stilted language, and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. - What I am less sure of is whether "tool" is the right description of the thing that has produced this effect. - Hoel's opening helps explain why the category of tool feels natural in the first place. - He describes finding a stone axe on a beach in Cornwall as a child — recognising it immediately for what it was. - There is something to this: paradigmatic tools are recognisable as tools. - But notice that in many of these cases, recognisability travels together with a rough grasp of what the thing is for. - Hoel's stone axe is not just recognisable as a tool; it is recognisable as a tool for cutting. - A hammer is not just recognisable as a thing-you-swing; it is recognisable as a thing for driving nails. - If that is what ordinary tool-recognition looks like — recognition accompanied by at least a rough functional grasp — then what happens when we try to place ChatGPT under the same description? - One reason ordinary tools are usually easy to classify is that they tend to have a more or less specifiable proper function. - By this I do not mean just anything an object can be used for, but the use that distinguishes what it is *for* from the uses to which it can merely be put. - A hammer can hold down loose papers, and a heavy book can prop open a door, but these are accidental functions rather than proper ones. - Nor does the point collapse the moment we turn to multi-functional objects: a Swiss Army knife has several proper functions, not none. - That is why the familiar examples still work — a hammer is for hammering, a vacuum cleaner is for vacuuming, Google is for searching. - Once we ask that question of ChatGPT, the obvious answers all seem partial, unstable, or wrong in different ways. - Perhaps its function is to predict the next token; but that is a description of mechanism, not of use — nobody opens ChatGPT in order to predict tokens, any more than we describe the function of the heart as contracting rhythmically. - Perhaps it is for chatting; Keith Frankish has suggested that LLMs can be understood, from the intentional stance, as wanting to play the chat game — but that fits badly with code generation, translation, or philosophical use. - Hoel's suggestion — writing — catches something real, but not quite enough; I want to come back to it. - "Helping with tasks" is so general as to individuate nothing — it is as though one described the function of a hammer as "helping with projects." - The difficulty is not that these answers are all wrong, but that none of them settles the question the way "for hammering" settles it for a hammer. - That does not show that LLMs are not tools; but it does suggest that they are a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all. - I am not claiming to have proved that LLMs cannot possibly be tools — the force of the previous step is classificatory hesitation, not metaphysical victory. - I am claiming that the tool description is less straightforward than it first sounds. - The issue is not just that LLMs can be used for many things — so can Swiss Army knives, and nobody finds that puzzling. - The issue is instability at the level of ordinary functional description: none of the obvious answers to "what is it for?" quite works, and the answers that come closest tend to describe mechanism or to be so general as to describe everything. - And that uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation. - If we do not know clearly what a thing is for, it is much harder to say in advance what would count as a good test of it. - We can test a hammer by asking whether it drives nails; we can test a search engine by asking whether it returns relevant results; in each case the proper function gives us the standard. - When there is no settled proper function, test-selection becomes a substantive question rather than something we can take for granted. - I am not saying that no test of LLMs is possible — that would be absurd. - I am saying that when Hoel selects writing as the privileged proving ground, that choice requires more argument than his framing initially suggests. - But there is a straightforward reason to start with writing. - These systems operate through language, are trained on language, and produce language; so it is not at all arbitrary to think that writing is where their character should show first and most clearly. - Hoel puts the point vividly: - > "for an LLM, words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms — yet their impact on writing as a whole has been mostly to generate mountains of slop" - He is right about the constitutive connection: if there is surplus intelligence in these systems, text is the place it ought to appear. - The question is not why one would look at writing — that question has a good answer. - The question is what exactly we are measuring when we look there. - The difficulty is that "writing" is too coarse a heading for the very different things people do with text. - A finished essay, a published book, a social media post — these are texts as artefacts, meant to stand on their own and be judged as products. - But when someone throws a half-formed idea at an LLM and uses the response to sharpen what they actually think, the text is not the product — it is the working surface. - Hoel's evidence — the Amazon data, the social media slop, the unchanged quality of the best books — largely concerns text as artefact. - That is a reasonable thing to measure, but it is not the only thing that goes on under the name of "writing." - [OPTION: whether to add a sentence here listing other text-uses (exploration, testing, feedback) or whether the artefact/working-surface distinction is enough on its own — I lean toward the latter, since listing risks triplet-padding, but you may want more concreteness] - What Hoel mostly measures is text as artefact; the practice I want to describe treats text as a working surface. - A finished blog post or book is meant to be read and evaluated on its own merits. - A prompt-response-revision loop may not produce anything worth publishing — and that is not a failure, because publishing was not the point. - The point was to test a distinction, or to discover what you actually think by responding to what the system sends back. - "Has writing improved?" presupposes that the relevant success condition is improvement in the quality of end-products. - If much of the interesting practice is not aimed at end-products in the first place, then the question is too blunt to capture what is going on. - The difference becomes clearer once we compare an LLM not to a pen but to a system that sends material back altered. - A pen makes marks on a surface; it extends my ability to inscribe; it does not return a proposal, a misreading, or a line of continuation I had not seen. - A pen does not prompt me back. - When I use an LLM, I write something — or half-write something, or throw a distinction at the system in rough form — and what comes back is language already reshaped by the model's learned patterns: sometimes flatter than what I wanted, sometimes unexpectedly connective, sometimes productively irritating. - I then have to decide what to reject, what to sharpen, and what pressure to reapply. - We are not only prompting the system; the return prompts us back. - [OPTION: the existing draft has a fuller version of this — "sometimes wrongly confident" is a fourth item I cut to avoid a quadruplet list. You may want it back, since each names something genuinely different about what the system returns.] - Given that recursive structure, Hoel's evidence is not refuted — but it is being measured at the wrong level of description. - I am not denying the slop, and I am not denying that public prose has often worsened. - What I doubt is that this settles the character of the system. - A lot of bad prose may show what happens when returned text is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted or worked through. - The same technology supports two quite different modes of use: one that floods the zone with generic artefacts, and one in which returned text functions as part of a thinking process. - Hoel's evidence tells us something about the first mode; it is less clear that it tells us much about the second. - The category I want to borrow from *Growing the Image* is medium. - I do not mean merely that the system lies between a user and an outcome — in that weak sense almost anything could count as a medium. - I mean something closer to what Wollheim and Thomson-Jones describe: a structured field of resources and practices whose characteristic resistances and possibilities become visible only in the work itself. - Plenty of tools give the user less than perfect control; that alone does not make something a medium. - What makes the difference is that the system does not simply wait to be directed toward a fixed end — it pushes back, filters, smooths, distorts, and sends something back that has to be dealt with in the working itself. - A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for; a medium is understood by the characteristic way it makes work proceed. - [OPTION: this is where the "I want to leave the agent question aside" move could go, if you want it — something like: "I am not interested, in this essay, in asking whether LLMs are minds or collaborators in the full interpersonal sense; the weaker claim is enough." I have left it out since the Codex plan does not give it a paragraph, but it may be worth a sentence or two here as a qualification.] - The comparison that has seemed most useful to me here is Frippertronics. - Robert Fripp and Brian Eno set up two Revox reel-to-reel tape machines so that what Fripp played into one returned from the other a few seconds later, and then returned again after another pass through the loop. - The loop does not merely preserve what went in — it sends it back changed; delay, thinning, layering, and accumulation are not accidents external to the practice but the very conditions under which it proceeds. - What Fripp is doing is not well captured by saying that he is merely using recording devices as tools — of course the tape machines are tools in one ordinary sense, but the interesting fact is the mode of engagement. - He plays into the system, hears the delayed return, and adjusts subsequent playing in light of that return; the loop becomes part of the process by which the next intention is formed. - The comparison should not be pushed in the wrong way: I am not claiming that LLMs produce the textual equivalent of a new musical genre, but that in both cases the interesting fact concerns the method of making — what the return from the system does to the next move of thought. - Hoel is right to insist on slop, and any account that tried to wave it away would deserve to fail. - One of the most useful things in his essay is the sense that the public effect of these systems has often been a thinning of language rather than an enrichment of it. - There is a musical analogue: in Alvin Lucier's *I Am Sitting in a Room*, a spoken passage is played back into a room and re-recorded again and again, so that the room's own resonances gradually take over — the content is not developed or deepened but washed into the characteristic signature of the system. - Something similar happens with LLM use when there is too little resistance: text passed through the model without discrimination gets drawn toward the model's easier habits — familiar transitions, familiar emphases, familiar shapes of explanation. - Slop is what happens when that tendency is allowed to dominate the exchange. - But this does not straightforwardly show that LLMs are tools; it may instead show what happens when a medium with strong generic tendencies is used with too little resistance from the person inside the loop. - Hoel asks, in effect, whether writing has improved, and his answer is no. - From this he concludes that LLMs are tools: bits in, bits out. - I think he asks the right empirical question at the wrong level of description. - The novelty here does not lie in the possibility of producing a new kind of sentence; it lies in a mode of making — a recursive practice in which language is sent into a system, returned in altered form, and then either resisted or pursued by the person who receives it. - Hoel is right that there has been no textual singularity, and right that what has happened to public writing tells us something. - What I doubt is that it tells us that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense his opening picture encourages. - They may be a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all — and that is worth taking seriously before we conclude that the current technology is merely another stone in *Homo faber*'s long line of rocks. --- A few notes on choices I made and things worth kicking around: On the opening block quote: I used the "stilted emails... dearth of good writing" passage rather than the "bits in, bits out" conclusion because it captures Hoel's *evidence*, not just his slogan. The slogan then arrives in paragraph 15 as a payoff. But you could swap them — put "You put more bits in, you get better bits out. Fine. That's a tool" in paragraph 1 instead, and keep the longer slop passage for paragraph 14. Depends on whether you want the reader to encounter Hoel's argument or his conclusion first. On the stone axe (paragraph 2): I have kept it brief — one sentence of description, then the move to recognisability and function. Your editorial comment on the bullet draft says "We definitely don't need to go into his Neolithic Axe anecdote," but the Codex plan uses it. I think one sentence is the right balance. If you want less, you could cut directly to "Paradigmatic tools are recognisable as tools" without mentioning the anecdote at all. On paragraphs 8 and 9 (artefact vs. working surface): These are the least grounded in existing draft material. The current Codex Revision draft does not make this distinction explicitly — it goes from "writing is too blunt" straight to the pen comparison. Paragraphs 8-9 are filling the gap the Codex plan identified. I am not fully sure the sentences I have here are earning their keep. The risk is that "text as working surface" sounds like jargon, even though I have tried to cash it out concretely. You may want to rethink how these two paragraphs work, or compress them into one. On medium placement (paragraph 12): The Codex plan delays it until the reader has been shown why "tool" and "writing" are both too blunt. I agree with this — in the current draft, medium arrives too early and has to do too much heavy lifting before the reader has seen the problem clearly. But delaying it means paragraphs 8-11 go without the positive category. That is four paragraphs of "here is why the existing description does not work" before you say what works better. If that feels too long, one option is to drop a hint earlier — something like "I will come back to what better description might be available" — but I have not done this because it is meta-commentary (talking about what you are going to do rather than doing it). Another option: cut paragraphs 8 and 9 to one paragraph, so there are only three paragraphs between Hoel's writing (para 7) and medium (para 12). On Frippertronics placement (paragraph 13): The Codex plan puts it here so it arrives as clarification of something already shown, not as an imported analogy. I followed this, but it means the essay's most vivid material comes very late. You might want to pull it forward to paragraph 11 or 12 and introduce medium after Frippertronics rather than before. The argument would then be: show the recursive structure (pen, para 10) → make it vivid (Frippertronics, para 11) → name the category (medium, para 12). That has the advantage of letting Frippertronics *motivate* medium rather than *illustrate* it. Worth considering. On the agent-question move: The current draft has a paragraph that says "I want to leave the agent question aside. I am not interested in whether LLMs are minds or collaborators." The Codex plan does not give this its own paragraph. I have marked where it could go (paragraph 12, as a qualification). I think it is worth keeping as one or two sentences — it prevents a misreading where people think you are arguing LLMs are collaborators or minds. But it does not need a whole paragraph. On the compression/Chiang idea: This appears in the brainstorm note from the Sunday session — LLMs as a "compressed representation of the training corpus" and the loop as "compression–decompression–compression." I have not included it because the Codex plan does not use it and because you flagged "compression loop" as jargon to be removed. But the underlying idea — that what the model does to your text is analogous to lossy compression — is genuinely interesting and might earn a sentence somewhere in paragraph 10 or 13. If you want it, it could go after the Frippertronics description: "What passes through the loop is not mere text in a thin sense; it is language carrying thought, and what comes back has been reorganised by the model's learned patterns — some specificity lost, some connections surfaced that had not been salient before." That sentence is already in the current draft and it captures the compression idea without using the word. *Ogni strumento ha una funzione che lo rende riconoscibile — tranne quelli che ci costringono a inventare nuove parole per ciò che fanno.* ### User please could you reveal the jsonn of this convo were having in finder? ### Assistant The variable indirection is getting eaten. Let me try a different approach. ### Assistant That's this session — `6ae1e700-17c0-43f6-bdac-618f0b02e7ce.jsonl`. Let me reveal it in Finder. ### Assistant Done — it should be highlighted in Finder now. *Il file si nascondeva dietro sei strati di indirezione, ma alla fine si è rivelato.*