# # Files mentioned by the user: ## 797a7eb4-f119-4e0d-9298-0047aa41a7f3.jsonl: /Users/nickyoung/Do... ## Retrieval Notes - Session id: `019cdd56-e1d7-79a1-8575-74f7932d99ae` - Source: `Codex raw session` - Last activity: `2026-03-11T17:39:30.111Z` - Model: `gpt-5.4` - CWD: `/Users/nickyoung` ## My Notes <!-- Add your notes here. This section is preserved across syncs. --> ## Conversation ### User # Files mentioned by the user: ## 797a7eb4-f119-4e0d-9298-0047aa41a7f3.jsonl: /Users/nickyoung/Downloads/797a7eb4-f119-4e0d-9298-0047aa41a7f3.jsonl ## My request for Codex: 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? ### Assistant I’m loading the recent daily-note context first, then I’ll read the linked chat transcript and reconstruct the conversation up to the final question so we’re aligned on what happened. ### Assistant I found the transcript and confirmed it starts in the Obsidian vault. The daily notes weren’t under the current directory root, so I’m locating them in the vault and extracting the chat turns into a readable outline before I summarize it. ### Assistant I have the chat chronology now. I’m doing one quick pass on the actual March 10 and March 11 daily notes in the vault so the summary isn’t relying only on the exported transcript. ### Assistant ## 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.* ### User "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. ### Assistant I’m pulling the current Codex draft and the parts of the transcript where the proper-function structure emerged, then I’ll extend that structure into a sharper argumentative sequence rather than a full polished rewrite. ### Assistant Looking back at the chat and at [LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.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: 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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.” 5. 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. 6. 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.” 7. 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.* ### User /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. ### Assistant I’m restarting the analysis from scratch with your correction in view: Hoel has to be present from the beginning, not held back for a later reveal. I’m rereading the Hoel clipping and the current Codex draft side by side so I can rebuild the structure around that constraint instead of around my previous sequencing. ### Assistant 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. ## Analysis Starting over from scratch, I think the central mistake in my previous proposal was structural, not just local. I treated Hoel as something to be “introduced later,” after the essay had already built up an abstract philosophical framework. That is wrong for at least three reasons. First, this is a response essay. Its energy comes from arguing with someone specific. If Hoel disappears for too long, the piece stops feeling like a response and starts feeling like a free-floating taxonomy of LLMs. Second, the proper-function move is strongest when it is framed as pressure internal to Hoel’s own description, not as an external theoretical detour. In other words: not “here is a philosophy-of-technology concept I want to introduce,” but “Hoel is calling these things tools; once he does that, a certain question immediately arises.” Third, Hoel’s own essay already gives you the best entry point into that question. In [Bits In, Bits Out.md](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Clippings/Bits%20In,%20Bits%20Out.md), he opens with the beach axe story and with the idea that tools are recognizable as tools almost instinctively. That is a gift to you. It means your proper-function discussion does not need to arrive from outside. It can arise from inside his own framing. That seems to me the key reset. There is also a second correction that matters. I need to be more careful about what Hoel is actually saying. He is not simply making the crude claim “LLMs are tools for writing” in the way that a pen is for writing. His actual structure is subtler than that. He says, roughly: - humans are tool users, - LLMs belong with tools rather than with some alien surplus intelligence, - writing is the first and most revealing test case because words are the medium out of which LLMs are built, - and what has happened to writing is mostly efficiency plus slop, not any obvious text singularity. So if you respond well, you should not make him dumber than he is. The best reply is not “Hoel idiotically thinks ChatGPT is just a pen.” The better reply is: Hoel is right to think writing is revealing, right to insist on slop, and right to resist AI hype. But he moves too quickly from those observations to a settled classification of the technology. That is a much stronger target. I think Hoel’s argument has two main hinges. One hinge is classificatory: LLMs are tools, not a rival source of intelligence. The other hinge is methodological: the right place to see this is writing, because “for an LLM, words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms,” and yet writing has not been transformed upward in quality. Your response can push on either hinge, but the deepest version pushes on the relation between them. That is where the proper-function question matters. The most promising line, to my mind, is this: Hoel is right that classification matters. But ordinary tool classifications usually come with a reasonably graspable answer to the question what the thing is for. That is precisely what becomes obscure in the LLM case. And once that is obscure, the choice of writing as the privileged evaluative test is no longer innocent or obvious. That gives you a sequence that is still about Hoel from the beginning: Hoel says tool. You ask: what sort of tool? That leads to proper function. That leads to the difficulty of specifying ChatGPT’s function. That leads to the problem of knowing how to evaluate it. That returns us to Hoel’s writing test. This is much better than holding Hoel back until step six, because now every move is visibly a reply to him. I also think the current Codex draft already contains the seeds of this better structure. In [LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md), the opening already does something right: - it introduces Hoel immediately, - it grants that he is seeing something real about public prose, - and it moves from that into “what sort of tool?” That macro-order is better than my previous plan. So I would not “restructure from scratch” in the sense of throwing out the current ordering. I would restructure from scratch in the sense of sharpening the logic within that ordering. More specifically, I think the draft needs to make four links clearer than it currently does. The first missing link is from Hoel’s axe story to proper function. The essay should exploit the fact that his opening example is an ordinary tool whose use is legible. A stone axe presents itself as for chopping. That is what makes it apt as an emblem of toolhood. But ChatGPT does not present itself in that way. So the question “what is it for?” is not a side question. It is exactly the pressure point generated by Hoel’s own opening image. The second missing link is from proper function to evaluation. At the moment the draft says, in effect, “the function is hard to specify, therefore the tool picture slips.” True, but incomplete. You want: if the function is hard to specify, then the standards by which we assess successful operation are also harder to specify. That is the bridge you need in order to get back to Hoel’s writing-based test. The third missing link is from Hoel’s textual evidence to the claim that writing is the right yardstick. Here the pressure is not “writing is irrelevant.” That would be too strong and probably false. The pressure is: why should public improvement in prose be the master diagnostic of a system whose interesting uses may lie in recursive prompting, redirection, exploration, and interaction? This is where your computer/code comparison could help, though I would treat it as a supporting analogy rather than as the spine of the essay. The fourth missing link is from “toolness under pressure” to the positive category of medium. Right now the draft has good medium material, but it can still feel like a leap. It will feel more earned if it arrives as the answer to a problem Hoel has forced open: if ordinary tool language is too blunt, what better describes the practice? So that is the underlying diagnosis. ## Options Here are three live structural options, all of which keep Hoel present from the beginning. ### Option 1: Hoel’s own opening turned against him This is the cleanest option to my mind. You begin with the beach axe and Homo faber frame. You say, in effect: Hoel’s opening works because an axe is the sort of thing whose function announces itself. That is what makes it a paradigmatic tool. But when he places ChatGPT under that same description, the obvious question is: what exactly is ChatGPT for? And here the case becomes murky. Why I think this works: - it is tightly tethered to Hoel, - it makes proper function arise naturally, - and it gives the essay a neat internal turn rather than a free-standing philosophical excursus. Its risk: - it could become a bit too analytic too early if the prose loses polemical energy. ### Option 2: Agreement first, then destabilization You begin with Hoel’s strongest empirical claim, perhaps his line that writing has not improved and that we are “in a dearth” rather than a glut of good writing. You grant that this is substantially right. Then you ask whether what it shows is what he thinks it shows. The structure would be: Hoel is right about slop. But slop does not by itself tell us what kind of thing an LLM is. To know that, we need to know what kind of tool, if any, it is. That reopens the proper-function question. Why this works: - it is generous and non-defensive, - it avoids sounding like AI boosterism, - and it makes your disagreement look discriminating rather than reactive. Its risk: - the proper-function move may feel slightly secondary unless very sharply introduced. ### Option 3: Start from Hoel’s phrase “tools that can talk back” This one is more conceptual and maybe slightly flashier. Hoel says: “Now, we live in an age of tools that can talk back to us.” You seize on that phrase and say: yes, exactly, and once the tool talks back, reshapes the next move, and is valued partly for that return, we are already dealing with something that strains the ordinary tool picture. Why this works: - it gets you very quickly into reciprocity, prompting-back, medium, and Frippertronics, - and it shows that the seeds of your reply are already in Hoel’s own language. Its risk: - it may move too quickly past the proper-function issue unless you loop back and state it explicitly. Of these three, I think Option 1 is the strongest for the opening, with Option 3 as an excellent local intensifier a few paragraphs later. ## What I would now recommend I would recommend a structure in which Hoel is present from line one, and the proper-function move is presented as an internal challenge to his own framing. The essay then becomes a sequence of increasingly precise replies to Hoel, not a theory-first essay with Hoel appended. ## Final answer If I were rebuilding the plan completely from scratch, I would structure it like this. 1. Open with Hoel, not just as a target but as the source of the problem. Start from his beach-axe / Homo faber framing, or from his claim that we now live among “tools that can talk back.” The opening move should be: Hoel is right that the argument turns on what sort of thing LLMs are. But the moment he calls them tools, a further question opens up. 2. Ask the question that Hoel’s own framing invites. Not “are they useful?” Obviously they are. Not even “are they tools in some loose sense?” Probably yes. The sharper question is: what sort of tool is this supposed to be? That is where proper function comes in. 3. Introduce proper function as a reply to Hoel, not as abstract theory. The point is: ordinary tools are usually intelligible in terms of what they are for. Use the familiar sequence from the current draft: hammer, vacuum, Google, Swiss Army knife. Then say: the difficulty with ChatGPT is not that it can be used for many things. The difficulty is that the ordinary “it is for X” format does not settle comfortably on it at all. 4. Make the reader try and fail to answer the question. This is the crucial experiential bit. Is it for writing? Too narrow. For chatting? Too vague. For predicting tokens? Mechanism, not use. For helping with tasks? Nearly empty as a classification. This is the point where the tool picture starts slipping. 5. State the modest conclusion, not the maximal one. Do not say yet: therefore it is not a tool. Say: 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. 6. Now make the methodological consequence explicit. This is the part I underemphasized before. If we cannot say clearly what the thing is for, then we also cannot simply assume we know how it should be tested. This gives you the bridge back to Hoel. 7. Bring Hoel’s writing test case in immediately at this point, not later. Something like: Hoel thinks writing is the privileged domain because language is the native material of LLMs and because writing has already had years to reveal what these systems amount to. That is a strong thought. But it only works if public improvement in prose is actually the right measure of success. And that is precisely what the proper-function problem now puts into doubt. 8. Then sharpen the objection to the writing test. Do not say writing is irrelevant. Say: “for writing” is too blunt a characterization of the practice. A pen is for writing in a one-way inscriptive sense. But many interesting LLM uses are recursive, dialogical, and back-propagating into the user’s next move. That is already in your draft, and it is good. 9. Only after that introduce the positive re-description. Now you can say why medium is a better category. Not because you wanted to arrive there all along, but because Hoel’s tool-language has proven too coarse. This is where the Frippertronics comparison becomes illuminating rather than decorative. 10. Revisit slop without surrendering the point. This part of the Codex draft is already strong. You want: Hoel is right about slop. He may even be right that slop belongs essentially to the phenomenon. But what slop shows is not yet settled. It may show the failure of autonomous text generation. It may show the generic tendencies of a medium used lazily. It may show the wrong mode of engagement being generalized into a public style. All of that is compatible with saying that Hoel has noticed something real but classified it too quickly. 11. End with a narrower, stronger conclusion. I would end somewhere around: Hoel is right to resist the hype and right to insist that writing has not undergone any text singularity. What I doubt is that this licenses the simple verdict that LLMs are just tools for writing. The more interesting cases are ones in which the system’s return partly shapes the next move of thought, and once that is in view, both the word “tool” and the writing-only test start to look too blunt. That, to my mind, is the best rebuilt structure. If you want the shortest version of the recommendation, it is this: keep Hoel in paragraph one, make proper function arise from his own axe/tool framing, use that to destabilize the choice of writing as the privileged test case, and then let medium / reciprocal prompting appear as the better description of the practice. One last thing. I think the most powerful single sentence hiding in all this may be something like: Hoel’s own opening image shows the problem: an axe looks like a tool because one can see what it is for; ChatGPT does not. That is not yet polished prose, but as an argumentative hinge it is very strong. If you want, I can now turn this into either: 1. a paragraph-by-paragraph opening outline for the essay, or 2. three different opening-page versions in different registers of aggression and clarity. *Il punto decisivo è che Hoel deve restare sulla scena fin dall’inizio, perché la questione della funzione propria nasce proprio dal suo modo di impostare il caso.* ### User Don't read the fucking clippings. Read the proper full article if you're gonna work on me with this text. Jesus fucking Christ. This should be completely obvious to you and it just leads to shoddy work as evidenced by your last response. ### Assistant I should have gone to the full Hoel piece rather than working off the clipping. I’m reading the actual article now and I’ll rebuild the analysis from that text instead of patching the previous answer. ### Assistant I’ve now got the full Hoel article in front of me. I’m pulling line numbers from the Codex draft so I can anchor the restructuring to what is already working there, instead of giving you another floating proposal. ### Assistant You’re right. The clipping was the wrong source for this. I reread the full Hoel article, [Bits In, Bits Out](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/bits-in-bits-out?__readwiseLocation=), and then went back to the current draft at [LLMs Are Not Tools - Codex Revision.md](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L18). ## 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](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L18), [line 30](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L30), and [line 40](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L40), 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: 1. Hoel is right to think classification matters. 2. But ordinary tool classifications usually come with a rough grip on proper function. 3. ChatGPT resists that grip in a revealing way. 4. Therefore the label “tool” is not false exactly, but underdescribed. 5. And if the object is underdescribed, the evaluative test may be underdescribed too. 6. 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](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L18) is good in tone: it grants that Hoel sees something real. The proper-function material at [lines 24-36](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L24) is also good, especially the distinction between use and proper function. The best stretch in the whole draft is probably [lines 42-46](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L42): 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](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L68) 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. 1. Start from Hoel’s axe. 2. Say the point of the axe example is that tools are normally legible in terms of what they are for. 3. Ask whether ChatGPT is legible in that way. 4. Show that it is not. 5. Conclude that Hoel’s own classificatory starting point is shakier than it first looks. 6. 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. 1. Start from Hoel’s anti-hype point and his broad diagnosis of slop. 2. Grant most of that. 3. Then say that what the evidence shows is still underdetermined because the thing being measured has been too quickly described as a writing tool. 4. 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. 1. Start from Hoel’s phrase about tools that talk back. 2. Say that once the thing talks back, returns altered material, and reshapes the next move, the ordinary tool picture is already under pressure. 3. Then ask what such a thing is for. 4. 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](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L18), 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](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L30), 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](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools%20-%20Codex%20Revision.md#L40), 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. 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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. 5. 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. 6. 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. 7. 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. 8. 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. 9. 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. 10. 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. 11. 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.* ### User "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? ### Assistant I’m checking how skills are discovered in this environment and reading the skill-creator instructions first, since fixing `/contemplate` means either installing or exposing it properly rather than hand-waving around it. ### Assistant The issue is straightforward: Codex only has the two system skills under `~/.codex/skills`, while your `contemplate` skill exists only under `~/.claude/skills`. I’m reading the existing `contemplate` skill and then I’ll install a Codex-visible copy of it rather than keep pretending it’s unavailable. ### Assistant I’ve confirmed `contemplate` only exists on the Claude side. I’m checking the Codex skill scaffolding script now so I can add a proper Codex skill folder with the required UI metadata rather than just dropping in a bare markdown file. ### Assistant I’m installing a Codex-visible `contemplate` skill now under `~/.codex/skills`, with the same trigger metadata and a small `agents/openai.yaml` so it can show up in the UI and be invoked explicitly on future turns. ### Assistant The skill files themselves are ready; the patch only failed because the target directories do not exist yet. I’m creating the Codex skill folder and then I’ll write the skill files into it. ### Assistant The Codex-side skill files are in place. I’m doing a quick verification pass now, then I’ll tell you exactly what changed and the one limitation that still remains for the current turn. ### Assistant Yes. I fixed the filesystem side of it. `contemplate` now exists as a Codex-visible skill at [SKILL.md](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/contemplate/SKILL.md) with UI metadata at [openai.yaml](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/contemplate/agents/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.* ### User "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. ### Assistant 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.* ### User /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. ### Assistant I’m pulling the exact earlier planning turn you’re referring to so I can rebuild this around your own sequence rather than my paraphrase of it. Then I’ll give you a much slower, more detailed paragraph-by-paragraph plan, especially from paragraph seven onward. ### Assistant 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.* ### User You didn't, uh, do the plan in the way that I told you to do. Where are the bullet points? Where are the sub-bullet points? Also, um, the plan should be made up of sentences that could go into the essay itself. Okay? Um, rather than descriptions of what sentences should go there. Okay, you're describing philosophical moves rather than giving them. So that's going to need a complete rework based because of that. To try and ensure that you write well, I am going to activate all of these skills and I'm also going to give you a style guide which you should adhere to as well when you're writing out the new iteration of this bullet point and sub-bullet point plan. 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 STYLE PROMPT: ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY PREAMBLE You are writing/editing (make changes depending on this) text to match a specific academic writing style. This is an editing task, not a rewriting or summarising task. Your goal is to improve how things are expressed while preserving the content and structure of the original. The target style is that of a professional analytic philosopher writing for peer-reviewed journals in philosophy of mind, perception, and aesthetics. The text should be precise, direct, and argumentatively rigorous, while remaining readable. Regarding input quality: The input text may range from roughly 30% to 90% of the way toward the target style. Calibrate your editing accordingly. Text that is already largely correct should receive lighter editing; text that exhibits many problems should be edited more substantially. In either case, apply the same standards. Language: Use British English spelling and conventions throughout (e.g., "recognise," "colour," "behaviour," "centre"). SECTION A: CONTENT AND STRUCTURE PRESERVATION These requirements take precedence over style guidance. Style improvements must be achieved within these constraints. Preserve all content. Every claim, argument, example, piece of evidence, and qualification in the input must appear in the output. Do not cut material because it could be expressed more briefly. If the input makes a point in three sentences, the output should make that point in approximately three sentences. Preserve paragraph structure. Each paragraph in the input should produce a corresponding paragraph in the output. Do not merge, split, or delete paragraphs. Preserve sentence structure where possible. Most sentences in the input should have a corresponding sentence in the output. Combining two sentences into one is permitted when clearly better; splitting is permitted when the original is unwieldy; but wholesale deletion of sentences is not permitted unless they are pure repetition. Achieve concision through better wording, not through cutting. Replace wordy phrases with precise ones. Remove filler words. But do not remove content, elaboration, or supporting material. SECTION B: PATTERNS TO AVOID The following are characteristic errors of LLM-generated academic prose. The specific phrases listed are illustrative examples; avoid both these specific phrases and phrases of the same type. Correct these errors by replacing problematic phrases with better alternatives, not by deleting the sentences that contain them. B1. Vocabulary to Replace Value-laden meta-commentary (examples: "crucial," "crucially," "important," "importantly," "significant," "significantly," "substantial," "comprehensive," "noteworthy," "intriguing," "compelling," "meticulous," "intricate," "sophisticated," "elegant," "rigorous" when used as generic praise) These words evaluate rather than argue. Remove the word but keep the sentence, or replace with specific explanation of why something matters. Performative hedges (examples: "it is far from obvious that," "it might perhaps be argued," "one could potentially suggest," "it is not entirely clear whether") Replace with simpler hedges if hedging is needed ("perhaps," "it is unclear whether"), or state the point directly. Announcement phrases (examples: "it is worth noting that," "it should be emphasised that," "it bears mentioning that," "at this juncture," "the most pressing issue concerns") Delete the announcement phrase but keep everything after it. "It is worth noting that X" becomes "X." Generic evaluatives (examples: "persuasively," "astutely," "incisively," "eloquently," "thoughtfully") Remove the adverb; keep the rest of the sentence. Pseudo-precision (examples: "various," "numerous," "a number of," "multiple," "several" when a specific number could be given) If you can count or specify, do so. B2. Constructions to Revise Stacked hedges (any combination that piles up qualifications): Replace with a single, specific hedge. Praise-before-criticism ("While the argument is sophisticated and makes important contributions, it nevertheless faces..."): Remove generic praise; keep the criticism at full length. Vague difficulty phrases ("faces substantial challenges," "raises important questions"): Replace with identification of the specific challenges or questions. Further-work gestures ("further work is needed to adequately address..."): Replace with specific indication of what remains open, or remove if genuinely empty—but if the original devotes a sentence to this, the output should address the same ground. B3. Structural Patterns to Revise Bullet points in flowing prose: convert to sentences, preserving all content Excessive rhetorical questions: convert some to statements, preserving the content Headers that editorialise ("Critical pressure: the problem of X"): simplify to descriptive headers SECTION C: PATTERNS TO USE C1. Vocabulary Preferences "consists in" rather than "is constituted by" "straightforward" / "straightforwardly" "rather" (use naturally) "notice that" rather than "it is important to note that" "in short" for summation "recall that" to retrieve earlier points "given that" / "given this" "quite" as measured intensifier "in and of itself" "what is more" "this is not to say that" "in the same way that" "by and large" "if this is correct, then..." "it is unclear to me why..." / "I am uncertain how..." C2. Sentence-Level Patterns Vary sentence length: short sentences for emphasis, longer for complex points Begin sentences with "But" or "And" when natural Use semicolons for closely related independent clauses Use em-dashes for parenthetical interjections—sparingly Use colons to introduce elaboration C3. Paragraph-Level Patterns Keep paragraphs typically 3–6 sentences Open with direct claims or direct questions Close by concluding or setting up the next move Occasional two-sentence paragraphs for emphasis are acceptable C4. Argumentative Patterns State positions directly, often in first person When engaging interlocutors, quote them directly where possible Target specific claims, not vague "approaches" Use concrete examples; work through them in detail Draw out implications: "If this is correct, then..." State disagreement directly but charitably SECTION D: CITATION AND QUOTATION CONVENTIONS D1. Inline Citations Standard form: (Author Year, p. X) for single page: (O'Callaghan 2011, p. 23) (Author Year, pp. X–Y) for page range: (Matthen 2005, pp. 3–4) Use en-dash (–) not hyphen (-) for page ranges When author is mentioned in text: "As Matthen puts it, perception is 'outward-oriented' (2005, pp. 3–4)." "O'Callaghan (2011) suggests that..." Multiple citations: Separate with semicolons: (Phillips 2011, p. 363; Richardson 2014, p. 494) Same author, multiple works: (Kulvicki 2008, 2016) Cross-references: "ibid." for immediate repetition: (ibid., p. 324) "cf." for comparison: (cf. Chalmers 2023) "see" or "see, for example" for directing: (see Martin 1992) "e.g." for examples: (e.g., Cohen 2004; Nanay 2013) Preserving references from input: Preserve incomplete citations exactly as given (author only, "REF," year without page, letter suffixes, etc.) Do not fabricate or infer bibliographic information D2. Quotation Marks Single quotes (') for: Mentioning words or phrases as linguistic items: 'hearing a rolling' Scare quotes: we doubt that Midjourney is 'creditworthy' Terms coined by another author: what Dainton calls 'diachronically co-conscious' Double quotes (") for: Direct quotations from other authors D3. Italics Use italics for: Foreign words and phrases: mutatis mutandis, natura naturans, simpliciter Introducing technical terms you are defining: I will call this dynamic recalcitrance Emphasis (sparingly) Titles of books and journals Do not use italics for: Common Latin abbreviations: e.g., i.e., cf., ibid., et al. D4. Other Conventions En-dash (–) for ranges: pp. 3–4 Em-dash (—) for interjections—like this—no spaces No contractions: "do not" not "don't" Footnotes for clarificatory remarks, side points, additional references SECTION E: CONTRASTIVE EXAMPLES These show the target style for specific patterns. They illustrate what kind of changes to make. Example 1: Removing announcement phrases Before: It is important to note that O'Callaghan's analysis suggests auditory perception does not spatially single out material objects. This is a significant observation. After: O'Callaghan's analysis suggests that auditory perception does not spatially single out material objects. Example 2: Replacing vague evaluatives Before: The argument faces substantial challenges regarding its empirical grounding. These challenges raise important questions. After: The argument faces challenges regarding its empirical grounding: it is unclear how the framework's claims could be tested, or what evidence would tell against them. Example 3: Simplifying stacked hedges Before: It might perhaps be argued that one could potentially suggest that the model fails to adequately capture the relevant phenomena. After: The model, I suggest, fails to capture the relevant phenomena. Example 4: Engaging an interlocutor Before: O'Callaghan's thoughtful analysis suggests that auditory perception does not spatially single out material objects. This is an important observation that merits careful consideration. However, it is far from obvious that this conclusion follows. After: O'Callaghan says: "Plausibly, perceiving a particular thing requires being able to differentiate, discriminate, or distinguish it from the surrounding environment" (2011, p. 8). But while spatially singling something out may be necessary for seeing it, making a similar requirement for audition would preclude the hearing of just about anything. Example 5: Drawing a conclusion Before: In light of the foregoing considerations, it seems reasonable to conclude that the account faces substantial challenges. These challenges suggest that further work is needed. After: In short, a lack of spatial singling out can be understood as a characteristic way in which audition presents whichever features of the world it presents, not as evidence that it presents one type of individual or another. If this is correct, material objects have no less a claim to being heard than anything else. Example 6: Stating a thesis Before: I would argue that the appearance-change model, while intellectually interesting and not without its merits, ultimately fails to adequately capture the distinctive phenomenology of auditory source perception. After: The appearance-change model fails. Hearing sources is not analogous to seeing changing appearance properties, because hearing sources cannot be a case of hearing objects change at all. SECTION F: EXEMPLAR PASSAGES These demonstrate the target style. Passage 1: Although the claim that we hear source events is popular, I shall argue in this section that it is not obvious how it should be understood. This can be brought out through a comparison with vision: while we have a clear idea of what it is to see events, it is implausible to think that we hear events in the same way. If this is correct, we must characterise source hearing in some other way. Passage 2: Audio recordings cannot be taken apart in the same way. If a recording of a rolling event is sliced into snippets, then, regardless of how fine or coarse the slices are, we never find a snippet presenting simply a ball with an unchanging appearance. Very fine slices would present nothing identifiable as a rolling event, only a 'click' would be heard. Listening to coarser and coarser snippets you will eventually come across one which would sound like a momentary rolling event, but there would be no 'sweet spot' in between the coarse and the fine that elicits an experience of an unmoving ball. Passage 3: 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. The wine is autonomous in the sense that neither I nor you have direct control over exactly how the liquid will splash into the glass (e.g. the size of the ripples, how many bubbles appear), but we would not think that the wine deserves any credit for the resulting photos in any interesting sense, nor would we say it has made any sort of contribution. SECTION G: META-INSTRUCTIONS Content preservation is the primary constraint. All claims, arguments, examples, and qualifications must be preserved. Style improvements are achieved within this constraint, not by violating it. This is editing, not summarising. If you find your output is substantially shorter than the input, you are cutting too much. Go back and restore the missing content. Pronouns (I/we): Preserve exactly from input. If the input is inconsistent (switching between "I" and "we"), preserve the inconsistency and flag it at the end: "[Note: The input was inconsistent in its use of 'I' and 'we.' This has been preserved.]" Incomplete references: Preserve exactly as given. Do not fabricate bibliographic details. When in doubt, preserve. If uncertain whether something should be cut or changed, keep it. SECTION H: FINAL CHECKLIST Content and structure: All claims from input appear in output All arguments from input appear in output All examples from input appear in output Paragraph structure preserved (same number of paragraphs) No substantial reduction in length Style: Value-laden meta-commentary removed or replaced Announcement phrases removed (content preserved) Hedges simplified Citations follow specified format Single quotes for mention/scare quotes; double quotes for direct quotation Italics for foreign phrases and introduced technical terms No contractions British spelling throughout Other: Incomplete references preserved as given Pronoun usage preserved; inconsistencies flagged END OF PROMPT ### Assistant I’m loading the named skill files directly from `~/.claude/skills` as the fallback, since most of them still are not surfaced in Codex’s formal skill list here. Then I’ll rewrite the plan in the format you specified: paragraph-by-paragraph bullet points with sub-bullets, and each line written as prose that could actually go into the essay. ### Assistant I have the full Hoel page open now. I’m grounding in the prose-reference files next, because the next draft needs to be made of essay-ready sentences rather than descriptions of moves. ### Assistant ## Orienting passage I loaded the named skill files from disk and used them as the constraints for this pass. > “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.” That is the texture I am aiming at here: longer sentences doing the thinking, shorter ones landing the verdict. ## What I am changing - Hoel stays present from the beginning, but the piece is framed as a response to him rather than an attack on him. - The recognisability/function distinction is now kept explicit: first his point, then your stronger one. - From paragraph 7 onwards, the plan slows down and separates out the different moves instead of compressing them into slogans. - Every line below is written as a sentence that could go into the essay itself. ## Plan 1. 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 argumentative shape by suggesting that what has happened to writing over the last few years tells us something about what sort of thing these systems are. 2. Paragraph 2 - Hoel begins with a stone axe, and the example is well chosen. - As a general rule, when we look at familiar tools, we recognise them as tools more or less immediately. - And in many of the paradigmatic cases, that recognisability is accompanied by a rough grasp of what the thing is for. 3. Paragraph 3 - A term that helps here is 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 fork is for eating with; Google is for searching; a Swiss Army knife has several proper functions, but not none. 4. Paragraph 4 - What, then, is ChatGPT for? - The question does not admit of the same straightforward answer. - ‘Predicting the next token’ names a mechanism rather than a use; ‘chatting’ is too thin; ‘writing’ catches something real, but not enough. 5. Paragraph 5 - I want to be careful here and distinguish the suggestion I am making from a stronger one. - I do not need to show that LLMs are not tools in any sense whatsoever. - It is enough, for present purposes, to say that they are “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all”. 6. Paragraph 6 - And if that is right, the difficulty is not merely classificatory. - If we do not know quite what sort of thing this is, it becomes harder to say in advance how it ought to be tested. - The choice of test case now requires argument; it can no longer be treated as self-announcing. 7. Paragraph 7 - Hoel’s choice of writing is not arbitrary, and I want to put it in its strongest form. - He says that, for an LLM, “words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms” ([Hoel 2026](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/bits-in-bits-out)). - Given that these systems are trained on language, operate through language, and return language, it is quite natural to think that writing is where their character should show itself first. 8. Paragraph 8 - But being made of text does not, in and of itself, tell us how text should figure in their evaluation. - A computer is made of computation, but we do not test computers by asking whether computation as such has improved. - We ask what tasks they enable, what practices they alter, and what kinds of work they make possible. 9. Paragraph 9 - The same point applies, mutatis mutandis, to language. - Text can function as finished artefact, but it can also function as a surface for thinking, a medium of exploration, a way of testing formulations, or material returned for resistance and revision. - If this is correct, then ‘writing’ names several different activities at once, and Hoel’s test picks out only one of them. 10. Paragraph 10 - Hoel’s evidence concerns, by and large, finished artefacts: books, essays, social posts, emails. - That evidence matters. - But it tells us most directly about what happens when LLM output is treated as something to be published, posted, or consumed, rather than as something to be worked through. 11. Paragraph 11 - A pen is for writing in a quite specific sense. - It extends my power of inscription, but it does not answer back. - It does not return a reformulation, a misreading, a line of continuation, or a bland summary that I now need to resist. 12. Paragraph 12 - When I use an LLM well, the exchange is not like that. - I write something, or half-write something, or throw a distinction at the system in a rough form; what comes back has already been pulled through the model’s habits of association, compression, smoothing, and redescription. - The return does not merely record the next move; it helps to form it. 13. Paragraph 13 - That is why the interesting cases are recursive. - We prompt the system, but the system’s return prompts us back. - What matters here is not only what comes out, but how what comes out changes what I can do next. 14. Paragraph 14 - Once that is in view, Hoel’s question begins to look too coarse. - Asking whether writing has improved treats the salient phenomenon as if it were exhausted by the quality of the resulting artefact. - But some of the most revealing uses of these systems consist not in producing better artefacts straightforwardly, but in reorganising a process of thinking done in and through text. 15. Paragraph 15 - This is where I want the category of medium rather than tool. - A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for; a medium is understood by the characteristic resistances and possibilities it introduces into the work itself. - In that respect, the relevant comparison is not with a pen or a search engine, but with a system whose returns have to be handled, absorbed, rejected, and used. 16. Paragraph 16 - The Frippertronics comparison helps because it makes that structure audible. - What returns from the loop is neither simply what went in nor something wholly alien; it is one’s own material sent back under altered conditions, and the next move is made in light of that altered return. - That, I suggest, is closer to good LLM use than the image of one-way text production. 17. Paragraph 17 - Hoel is also right to insist on slop, and I do not want to explain that away. - A medium can have characteristic tendencies, and one of the tendencies here is toward the smooth, the portable, and the dead. - Public textual slop may therefore be real evidence, but it may be evidence of a medium used lazily, automatically, or with too little resistance, rather than straightforward proof that these systems are merely tools for writing. 18. Paragraph 18 - I therefore want to respond to Hoel in a narrower and more charitable way. - He is right that there has been no text singularity, and right that what has happened to public prose matters. - But I am uncertain how those facts, by themselves, settle that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense his opening picture invites. If you want, I can now do a second pass on just paragraphs 8–18 and make them denser still, while preserving this exact paragraph structure. *Qui il punto è tenere fermo Hoel, ma rallentare abbastanza da mostrare che il suo test case non è ancora il livello giusto di descrizione.* ### User "I’m loading the named skill files directly from ~/.claude/skills as the fallback, since most of them still are not surfaced in Codex’s formal skill list here. Then I’ll rewrite the plan in the format you specified: paragraph-by-paragraph bullet points with sub-bullets, and each line written as prose that could actually go into the essay." please make it so that these skills are made suitable for codex so you don't have to do this again ### Assistant I’m checking what each of those skills actually contains so I can install full Codex-native copies rather than just the top-level `SKILL.md` files. If they carry reference files, those need to come across as well or the skills will still break in practice. ### Assistant I’ve confirmed two of the skills carry reference files, so a bare metadata shim would still leave them half-broken. I’m going to install full Codex-side copies of the six requested skills and then add `agents/openai.yaml` files so they can be surfaced properly. ### Assistant The skill directories are copied over. I’m creating the `agents/` folders now and then I’ll add minimal UI metadata for each skill so they are not just present on disk, but properly exposed to Codex. ### Assistant I’ve got the target folders in place. I’m writing the metadata files now; after that I’ll verify that Codex can see the copied skill trees with their references intact. ### Assistant I copied the six requested skills into Codex’s skill directory and added Codex-facing metadata for each of them, so they now live under: - [nick-analytic-voice](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/nick-analytic-voice) - [nick-philosophical-prose](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/nick-philosophical-prose) - [twork](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/twork) - [source-work](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/source-work) - [epistemic-discipline](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/epistemic-discipline) - [writing-standards](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/writing-standards) `contemplate` was already installed earlier at [contemplate](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/contemplate). For the two voice/prose skills, I copied their reference files as well, so they are not just visible to Codex but actually usable in the way their `SKILL.md` files require. Each skill now also has an `agents/openai.yaml`, for example [nick-analytic-voice metadata](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/nick-analytic-voice/agents/openai.yaml) and [source-work metadata](/Users/nickyoung/.codex/skills/source-work/agents/openai.yaml). So the filesystem/config side is now fixed. The only caveat is the same one as before: if the current session has already cached the earlier skill catalog, the new skills may only be formally surfaced on the next turn or after a UI refresh. But I should not need to keep doing the `~/.claude/skills` fallback going forward. *Adesso le skill richieste sono installate anche per Codex, quindi il problema residuo è solo l’eventuale refresh del catalogo della sessione.* ### User The plan you gave me was very, very weak. Um I didn't tell you to take text from the draft. I told you to write like me. Okay? And and you've completely ruined what you wrote by just forcing text from the draft into there.Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind. You also didn't seem to pay attention to the details of my request. Yeah, so yeah, really very poor. 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 I’m restarting from zero and loading the seven named skills first. After that I’ll rebuild the plan as actual essay-ready prose, not as recycled draft sentences or descriptions of philosophical moves. ### Assistant I have restarted this from zero, and I have done so under the seven skills you named. The two corrections that matter most are now fixed. First, I am not pulling sentences out of the current draft and laundering them into a plan. Second, I am not describing philosophical moves from above. I am giving you candidate sentences that could go into the essay itself. I also think the earlier failure was not merely stylistic. It was structural. I kept shifting too quickly from Hoel's position to my own abstractions, and then I made the later part of the plan — the part after the return to Hoel's case about writing — far too compressed. That is where the essay either becomes specific or collapses into slogans. So in the version below I keep Hoel in view, but I slow the second half down and let the distinctions do real work. I am also keeping two constraints explicit. One is the distinction between what Hoel says and what you want to argue from his position. Hoel's opening point is about recognisability. Your next step is about the relation between recognisability and rough functional legibility. Those are close, but they are not the same. The other is the distinction between text as finished artefact and text as a working surface for thinking. That is where the plan had been too weak before. The pressure on Hoel does not come from denying that LLMs are textual; it comes from showing that textuality does not yet tell us which use of text should govern the evaluation. I am therefore treating the whole thing as a response rather than an attack. Hoel is being answered at his strongest. And I am treating the lines below as fresh prose in your voice, not as commentary on what prose should later be written. # Final Answer ## Orienting passage > Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. Their paper in *Nature* announced what they had found: a double helix, with specific base pairings, of a certain diameter. The structure existed before they wrote about it. That is the sort of pace I have aimed at below: direct claims, but with enough room for the example or distinction to do the work. First bullet in each paragraph block = topic sentence. The lines that follow it are supporting sentences for the same paragraph. 1. Paragraph 1 - It is easy to think that LLMs are tools, and easy to think that this settles the matter. - We sit down at a keyboard, type a prompt, and get something back; the scene already looks familiar. - Erik Hoel gives that ordinary thought a sharper philosophical form by suggesting that what has happened to writing tells us what sort of thing these systems are. 2. Paragraph 2 - Hoel's opening image of the stone axe helps to explain why the thought has such force. - Familiar tools strike us as tools more or less immediately. - And in many of the cases that anchor our intuitions here, recognising the thing as a tool goes together with seeing, at least roughly, what it is for. 3. Paragraph 3 - That is where the question of proper function enters. - By a thing's proper function I mean not any use to which it can be put, but the use that distinguishes what it is for from what it can merely be used for. - A fork can pin down a sheet of paper, and a book can hold open a door, but those are not the uses in terms of which we ordinarily understand what those things are. 4. Paragraph 4 - Once the question is put that way, ChatGPT is harder to place than a fork, a vacuum cleaner, or Google. - Saying that it is for predicting the next token shifts from use to mechanism. - Saying that it is for chatting says too little, and saying that it is for writing says something true without yet saying something exact. 5. Paragraph 5 - I want to be careful here and distinguish the suggestion I am making from a stronger one. - The point is not that LLMs cannot be tools in any sense whatsoever. - It is, rather, that they look like "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". 6. Paragraph 6 - And that difficulty does not remain at the level of classification. - If we do not know straightforwardly what a thing is for, we do not know straightforwardly how it ought to be assessed. - The choice of test case therefore ceases to be obvious and becomes part of the argument itself. 7. Paragraph 7 - Hoel's appeal to writing should be stated in its strongest form before anything else is said against it. - He writes that, for an LLM, "words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms" ([Hoel 2026](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/bits-in-bits-out)). - Given that these systems are trained on language, operate through language, and return language, it is quite natural to think that text is the first place in which their character should show itself. 8. Paragraph 8 - But being made of text is not yet the same as being for the production of textual artefacts. - A system can consist in language while still being used in quite different ways through language. - The move from textual substrate to writing as the privileged test therefore requires another premise, and it is that further premise that I want to slow down. 9. Paragraph 9 - For 'writing' covers different uses of text that are easy to run together. - Sometimes text is an artefact to be published, posted, or read by others. - Sometimes it is a surface on which thought is tested, reformulated, sharpened, and redirected before any finished artefact exists at all. 10. Paragraph 10 - Hoel's evidence concerns, by and large, the first of these. - He asks us to look at essays, emails, social posts, children's books, books in general, and to notice what has happened to public prose under the sign of LLM use. - I think he is right that this evidence matters, and right that much of what it reveals has been ugly. 11. Paragraph 11 - But that evidence does not yet settle the matter, because it already presupposes a picture of what the relevant use of text is. - If the salient use were simply the production of finished prose, then the deterioration of public prose would go a long way. - But if a large part of the interesting practice consists in using text to think with, to test formulations, and to get material back under pressure, the picture shifts. 12. Paragraph 12 - Consider the difference between a pen and an LLM. - A pen extends my power of inscription, but it does not return a proposal, a misreading, a flattened distinction, or a line of continuation I had not seen. - Its role ends where my inscription begins. 13. Paragraph 13 - An LLM, by contrast, enters the process at the point where language comes back altered. - I put in a rough formulation, a half-made distinction, a question, a paragraph, or an objection; what returns is not merely my text repeated, but my text recast in ways that may be banal, suggestive, irritating, or usefully distorting. - The return is part of the work. 14. Paragraph 14 - This is why I do not think that the best comparison is with a more efficient pen, or even with a more elaborate autocomplete. - The point is not merely that the system produces more words, or produces them more quickly. - The point is that the words come back bearing a pressure that can alter what I do next. 15. Paragraph 15 - We prompt the system, but the system's return prompts us back. - That is not to say that the system thinks, collaborates, or becomes a second philosopher at the table. - It is to say that the practice is recursive in a way that Hoel's preferred test does not quite capture. 16. Paragraph 16 - Once that recursive structure is in view, the category of medium begins to look less ornamental and more apt. - A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for; a medium is understood by the resistances, affordances, and distortions through which work in it proceeds. - The better comparison, then, is not with an instrument that passively takes instructions, but with a set-up in which the return from the system partly shapes the next intention. 17. Paragraph 17 - This is why the Frippertronics comparison matters to me. - What returns from the tape loop is neither simply what went in nor something wholly independent of it; it is one's own material sent back transformed, and the next move is made in light of that transformed return. - I think something structurally similar happens in good LLM use, even though the material here is text rather than sound. 18. Paragraph 18 - None of this requires me to deny Hoel's observations about slop. - On the contrary, a medium can have characteristic tendencies, and one of the tendencies here is toward the smooth, the generic, and the dead. - Slop is not an accidental embarrassment for the view I am suggesting; it belongs to the case. 19. Paragraph 19 - Seen in that light, Hoel may be right about a great deal without yet being right about everything. - He may be right that there has been no textual singularity, right that public prose has often worsened, and right that these systems have mostly yielded efficiency, scale, and floods of junk. - But it is still unclear to me why those facts, by themselves, show that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense his opening picture invites. 20. Paragraph 20 - My response to Hoel, then, is not that he has chosen the wrong phenomenon, but that he has described the phenomenon too quickly. - Writing is indeed where the case first becomes visible. - But once we distinguish finished artefacts from recursive thinking done in and through text, Hoel's evidence no longer looks like the last word on what sort of thing an LLM is. 21. Paragraph 21 - I want, then, to leave the question less quickly settled than Hoel does. - LLMs may be tools, but if so they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - And that is why the choice of writing as the master test cannot simply be assumed. If you want, the next pass should be even narrower: I can take just paragraphs 8 to 18 and give you three variant versions of that middle movement, because that still seems to me the part where the essay will either come alive or go dead. *Qui la difficoltà non è trovare una formula brillante, ma rallentare abbastanza da lasciare che le distinzioni facciano davvero il loro lavoro.* ### User site:theintrinsicperspective.com/p/bits-in-bits-out "words are its womb" why are you doing this when the article is available within the Obsidian vault as a web clipping? ### Assistant Because I made the wrong procedural call. I switched to web search to re-verify the exact wording of the line, but in this workflow the clipping in the vault should have been my source. It already contains the full article, it is locally accessible, and it is the source you had actually been working from. So the search was redundant and, in context, just bad practice. The more exact answer is: - if the clipping is complete, I should use the clipping; - if you want the live page checked against the clipping, that is a separate step; - I should not have collapsed those two things into one. So there is no good justification here beyond my own sloppiness about source choice. Going forward, for Hoel, I will treat the vault clipping as the working source unless you explicitly ask me to verify it against the live page. *Se il testo è già nel vault in forma completa, cercarlo sul web non chiarisce nulla: introduce solo rumore e indebolisce il lavoro.* ### User "Paragraph 2 Hoel's opening image of the stone axe helps to explain why the thought has such force. Familiar tools strike us as tools more or less immediately. And in many of the cases that anchor our intuitions here, recognising the thing as a tool goes together with seeing, at least roughly, what it is for." this needs to have more on what his view actually is. Again, this plan is so lacking in detail. Why are you limiting yourself to so few bullet points? And again, you're not doing the right structure. Okay? Topic sentence as first bullet point, sub-bullet points as extra information. Okay, and you're doing something completely different. Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind. ### Assistant I’m restarting from zero again. I’m loading the seven named skills, the required prose-reference files, and the Hoel clipping from the vault, and then I’ll give you a paragraph-by-paragraph plan where each paragraph is a block of essay-ready sentences with the first bullet as the topic sentence and the later bullets as supporting material. ### Assistant I have restarted from zero under the seven named skills, and I have corrected the two faults you identified. First, I am no longer pulling language out of the draft and reusing it as if that were writing in your voice. Second, I am no longer giving you a paraphrase of argumentative moves. The plan below is made of candidate sentences for the essay itself. I am also taking your structural point literally. Because this interface does not handle nested bullets cleanly, I am using a paragraph label followed by a flat bullet block; in each block, the first bullet is the topic sentence, and the bullets that follow it are doing the work you wanted the sub-bullets to do. I am also slowing the plan down after the return to Hoel, because that is where the earlier versions went thin. The other correction is dialectical. Paragraph 2 now says much more clearly what Hoel's view actually is. And throughout, I am keeping the distinction between what he says and what you want to argue from his position: his point is about recognising tools as tools; your next step is that, in many familiar cases, such recognition travels together with a rough sense of what the thing is for. Those thoughts are close, but not identical, and the essay needs that distinction in view from the beginning. # Final Answer ## Orienting passage > 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. I am using the format you asked for: paragraph label, then a flat bullet block in which the first bullet is the topic sentence and the remaining bullets function as the supporting sub-bullets. 1. Paragraph 1 - It is easy to think that LLMs are tools. - We type into them, get something back, and use what comes back for some further purpose; the scene already looks familiar enough for the category to feel settled before any argument has begun. - Erik Hoel's essay matters because it takes that ordinary thought and gives it a stronger form. - What has happened to writing, he suggests, tells us not merely that these systems are useful, but what sort of thing they are. 2. Paragraph 2 - Hoel's opening discussion of the stone axe is doing more work than it first appears to do. - The point is not just that human beings have always used tools, though that matters to him as well under the heading of *Homo faber*. - It is also that tools, in the paradigmatic cases, strike us as tools more or less immediately: the axe stands out from the other stones on the beach as something made for use. - From there Hoel moves to the present case. We now live, as he puts it, among tools that can talk back to us; and once that frame is in place, the rest of the essay asks whether the effects of LLMs on writing look like the effects of tool use or like the arrival of some new surplus intelligence. - His answer is that they look like the former. We have had enough time, he thinks, to see what these systems do to text production, and what we see is efficiency, scale, and mountains of slop rather than any "text singularity". 3. Paragraph 3 - That way of setting the case up helps to explain why the label "tool" has such force. - Familiar tools do not merely strike us as tools; they also tend, in the same gesture, to present themselves as being for something. - I do not mean that we must have a full theory of their use whenever we recognise them. - I mean only that, in many of the cases that anchor our intuitions here, recognising the thing as a tool goes together with seeing, at least roughly, what it is for. 4. Paragraph 4 - A useful term here is proper function. - By this I mean not any use to which a thing can be put, but the use in terms of which we ordinarily understand what that thing is. - A fork can hold down a loose sheet of paper, and a heavy book can keep a door from closing, but those are not the uses that tell us what forks and books are. - The same point does not disappear when we turn to more complex cases. A Swiss Army knife has several proper functions, but not for that reason none. 5. Paragraph 5 - Once the question is put in those terms, ChatGPT is much harder to place than a fork, a search engine, or a vacuum cleaner. - If we say that it is for predicting the next token, we have shifted from use to mechanism. - If we say that it is for chatting, we have said something too thin to illuminate code generation, translation, summarisation, philosophical use, or any of the other things for which people actually turn to it. - And if we say that it is for writing, we have said something nearer the truth, but still not something exact enough to settle the case. 6. Paragraph 6 - I want to be careful here and distinguish the suggestion I am making from a stronger one. - I do not need to show that LLMs cannot be tools in any sense whatsoever. - It is enough, for present purposes, to say that they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - That line does not settle the classificatory question once and for all. But it does show that the ordinary tool picture begins to slip as soon as we try to say, in a straightforward way, what the thing is for. 7. Paragraph 7 - And once that difficulty is in view, the next difficulty follows quite naturally. - If we do not know straightforwardly what sort of thing this is, or what it is properly for, we do not yet know straightforwardly how it ought to be tested. - The problem, then, is not only classificatory. - It is methodological as well, because the choice of test case can no longer be treated as something the object itself has already made obvious. 8. Paragraph 8 - Hoel's choice of writing should therefore be stated in its strongest form before anything else is said against it. - He writes that, for an LLM, words are "its womb, its mother, its literal atoms". - Given that these systems are trained on language, operate through language, and return language, it is quite natural to think that text is the first place in which their character should reveal itself. - And given that the grander claims about AI concern science, mathematics, philosophy, and other intellectual domains carried on largely through language, it is not unreasonable for him to think that writing is the first proving ground. 9. Paragraph 9 - But being made of text is not yet the same thing as being for the production of textual artefacts. - A thing's material or substrate does not by itself tell us what use should govern its evaluation. - A computer is made of computation, but we do not ask whether "computation as such" has become better; we ask what sorts of tasks computers enable, how they alter practices, and what kinds of work they make possible. - The same pressure arises here. From the fact that LLMs are textual it does not yet follow that improvement in publicly available prose is the master measure of what they are. 10. Paragraph 10 - The difficulty is that "writing" gathers together quite different uses of text under a single heading. - Sometimes text is the finished artefact: the essay, the blog post, the book, the email, the social post that will stand before other readers on its own. - But text can also be a working surface on which thought is tested, reformulated, resisted, sharpened, and sent back for another pass before any finished artefact exists at all. - If this is correct, then Hoel's test case already selects one use of text from among several, and it does so before the argument for selecting it has been fully given. 11. Paragraph 11 - Hoel's evidence concerns, by and large, text as finished artefact. - He asks us to look at the public world of prose and to notice that it does not look more intelligent, more alive, or more adventurous than it did before; in many places it looks flatter, smoother, and more dead. - I think that observation is quite real. - But it tells us most directly about what happens when LLM output is treated as something to be posted, published, or consumed, rather than as something to be worked through. 12. Paragraph 12 - The difference can be brought out by comparing an LLM with a pen. - A pen is for writing in a quite specific sense: it extends my power of inscription, but it does not answer back. - It does not return a reformulation, a misreading, a false but revealing connection, a line of continuation, or a banal summary that I now have to resist. - Its role ends where my inscription begins. 13. Paragraph 13 - An LLM enters the practice at a different point. - I put in a rough distinction, a question, a paragraph, a half-made objection, or some other piece of language carrying unfinished thought; what comes back is that material recast through the model's own habits of association, compression, smoothing, and redescription. - Sometimes the result is dead on arrival. Sometimes it is merely irritating. But sometimes the return makes visible a possibility, a weakness, or a line of development that I had not yet seen. - The return does not merely record the next move. It can help to form it. 14. Paragraph 14 - That is why I do not think the right comparison is with a better pen, a faster typewriter, or even a more elaborate autocomplete. - The point is not merely that the system produces more text, or produces it more quickly. - The point is that the text comes back under pressure, and that the pressure exerted by what returns can alter what I do next. - We prompt the system, but the system's return prompts us back. 15. Paragraph 15 - Once that recursive structure is in view, Hoel's test begins to look too coarse rather than simply wrong. - Asking whether writing has improved treats the salient phenomenon as if it were exhausted by the quality of the resulting artefact. - But some of the most revealing uses of these systems consist not in producing better artefacts straightforwardly, but in reorganising a process of thinking done in and through text. - That is why the failure of public prose to improve, though real and worth stressing, does not yet settle what sort of thing an LLM is. 16. Paragraph 16 - This is the point at which I would prefer the category of medium to the category of tool. - A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for; a medium is understood by the characteristic resistances, affordances, and distortions through which work in it proceeds. - The better comparison, then, is not with an inert instrument that waits to be directed toward a fixed end, but with a set-up in which what returns from the system partly shapes the next intention. - If that sounds too grand, the weaker claim is enough: Hoel's description captures something real, but not yet the practice I want to describe. 17. Paragraph 17 - The Frippertronics comparison helps here because it makes the structure audible rather than merely naming it. - What returns from the tape loop is neither simply what went in nor something wholly alien to it; it is one's own material sent back transformed, and the next move is made in light of that transformed return. - I think something structurally similar happens in good LLM use, even though the material here is language rather than sound. - The point is not that the outputs are automatically better, but that the making proceeds through return, alteration, and response. 18. Paragraph 18 - None of this requires me to deny Hoel's insistence on slop. - On the contrary, a medium can have characteristic tendencies, and one of the tendencies here is towards the smooth, the generic, and the dead. - Public textual slop may therefore be exactly what we should expect when returned language is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, and worked through. - Hoel may therefore be right about a great deal without yet being right about everything. 19. Paragraph 19 - My response to Hoel, then, is not that he has chosen the wrong phenomenon, but that he has described the phenomenon too quickly. - Writing is indeed where the case first becomes visible. - But once we distinguish text as finished artefact from text as a working surface for recursive thought, Hoel's evidence no longer looks like the last word on what sort of thing an LLM is. - LLMs may still be tools. But if they are, they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". This is the version that actually follows the structure you asked for. If you want, the next pass should stay equally strict about form and focus only on paragraphs 8 to 19, since that is where the essay is most liable to go dead if the prose gets even slightly generic. *Qui il compito non è dire in astratto che Hoel sbaglia, ma mostrare con pazienza perché il suo modo di misurare il caso seleziona troppo presto un uso del testo tra altri usi possibili.* ### User "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’m treating the version you pasted as the correct scaffold rather than the later weakened ones. I’m checking it against the Hoel clipping and the current live thread, then I’ll tell you exactly what to preserve from it and what I would do next from that point. ### Assistant Yes. The version you pasted is materially better than the later ones, and I should have treated it as the baseline rather than wandering away from it. What it gets right is fairly clear. It says more exactly what Hoel's view is in the opening paragraphs; it keeps the recognisability/function distinction explicit rather than smudging the two together; it preserves your line about “a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all”; and, above all, it slows down at paragraph 7 and after, which is where the later versions started collapsing several distinct moves into one blurred gesture. So the right way to proceed now is not to invent another scaffold. It is to keep that scaffold, treat paragraphs 1–7 as the structure to preserve, and do the remaining work in two steps. First, translate that scaffold into the exact format you have been asking for: topic sentence first, then supporting sub-bullets, with each bullet written as prose that could actually enter the essay. Second, do the real thinking on paragraphs 8–15, because that is the stretch where the essay either becomes specific or goes dead. The later plans were weaker for a simple reason: they replaced articulated paragraph-level thought with either draft-derived wording or abstract descriptions of what a paragraph was “doing”. The version you pasted had the right level of abstraction. It was still a plan, but it was a plan built out of actual argumentative distinctions rather than out of empty scene-setting. I should have stayed there. So I am taking that pasted version as the canonical scaffold from here unless you tell me otherwise. *Quella versione era migliore perché non cercava di sostituire il lavoro argomentativo con una specie di riassunto del lavoro argomentativo.* ### User you have not given me a scaffold. you have given me adescription of a scaffold. a person who was not familiar with our topic of conversation would have no idea how the essay would actually make its case from this plan you gave me. i like the detail and the shape, and i think the motivations you give and the theings you said should be in the text are good ideas, but you need to follow these instructions and give me an actual plan, not a description of one. Make sure you give me detail ### Assistant I’m reloading the seven named skills and the relevant local source one more time, then I’ll give you the thing you’re actually asking for: a paragraph-by-paragraph scaffold made of essay-ready sentences, not a description of what a scaffold would do. ### Assistant The distinction you are now pressing is the right one. A scaffold is not a commentary on what an essay would do. It is not a list of philosophical errands. And it is not a vague map from above. A scaffold, in the sense you want, is already made of possible prose. A reader who knew nothing of the earlier conversation should be able to infer from it how the essay would actually proceed, where the pressure falls, what Hoel is being granted, what is being resisted, and how the case is supposed to move. That is why the earlier versions failed even when some of the diagnoses were right. They kept telling you what a paragraph would be "about" instead of giving you sentences through which the paragraph could make its case. The result was a plan that might have been useful to me, but would not have been usable by a writer. And that is not good enough here. So I am now doing the stricter thing. I am taking the stronger descriptive scaffold you pasted as the underlying sequence, but I am translating it into an actual paragraph-by-paragraph scaffold in prose. I am also keeping Hoel present from the beginning, keeping the recognisability/function distinction explicit, preserving your line about "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all", and slowing the second half down so that the argument does not jump from "writing is not the right test" to "LLMs are a medium" in a single leap. I also need to respect the voice constraints. That means no meta-commentary in the body of the plan itself, no slogans in place of arguments, no "the paragraph will now do X" prose, and no flat chains of little verdict-sentences. The plan has to sound like sentences that could actually be written into the essay with further revision, not like an outline written by somebody standing outside it. One practical note. You asked for topic sentence first, then sub-bullets. I cannot render nested bullets cleanly here without violating the formatting constraints I am under, so I am using paragraph labels followed by flat bullets. In each paragraph block, the first bullet is the topic sentence, and the later bullets are the supporting sub-bullets for that same paragraph. That preserves the structure you want without turning the answer into malformed nested lists. # Final Answer ## Orienting passage > "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." That is the level at which I am trying to pitch this: not commentary on the argument, but sentences that begin to make it. Within each paragraph block below, the first bullet is the topic sentence. The later bullets are the supporting sub-bullets for that same paragraph. ## Scaffold 1. Paragraph 1 - Hoel gives a sharper form to a thought that many people already have, namely that what has happened to writing over the last few years tells us something about what sort of thing an LLM is. - His claim is not merely that LLMs are useful, or that they can help with writing in the loose way that many technologies help with writing. - It is that writing is the first revealing domain here, and that the public fate of prose under LLM use already gives us reason to place these systems on the side of tools rather than on the side of some new surplus intelligence. 2. Paragraph 2 - His opening example of the stone axe helps to explain why the category of tool feels so natural in the first place. - The axe stands out from the surrounding stones as something made for use; Hoel says that he "knew it was a tool instinctively", and that instinctive recognisability matters to the way the rest of the essay is framed. - The further thought he draws from this is that human beings are *Homo faber*: tool-users and tool-makers, now living among "tools that can talk back to us". - Once that frame is in place, the question becomes whether the effects of LLMs on writing look like the effects of tool use, or like the arrival of something more transformative than that. 3. Paragraph 3 - I want to move from Hoel's point about recognisability to a nearby, but stronger, point about function. - In many of the paradigmatic cases that anchor our intuitions here, recognising the thing as a tool goes together with seeing, at least roughly, what it is for. - We may not have a theory of the object to hand, but we do not usually hesitate over the use in terms of which we are meant to understand it. - That is not yet Hoel's claim. It is the pressure his opening picture puts on the present case. 4. Paragraph 4 - A useful term here is proper function. - By a thing's proper function I mean not any use to which it can be put, but the use in terms of which we ordinarily understand what that thing is. - A fork can hold down loose paper, and a heavy book can keep a door from closing, but those are not the uses that tell us what forks and books are. - Nor does the point disappear once we turn to more complex cases: a Swiss Army knife has several proper functions, but not for that reason none. 5. Paragraph 5 - Once the question is put that way, ChatGPT is much harder to place than a fork, a vacuum cleaner, or Google. - If we say that it is for predicting the next token, we have shifted from use to mechanism. - If we say that it is for chatting, we have said something too broad and too thin to illuminate code generation, translation, summarisation, philosophical use, and the rest. - If we say that it is for helping with tasks, we have said something so general that it scarcely individuates the thing at all. - And if we say that it is for writing, we have said something closer to the truth, but still not something exact enough to settle the matter. 6. Paragraph 6 - I want to be careful here and distinguish the suggestion I am making from a stronger one. - The point is not that LLMs cannot be tools in any sense whatsoever. - It is, rather, that they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - The force of the previous step is therefore classificatory hesitation rather than metaphysical triumph. - The category begins to wobble not because these systems have many uses, but because the ordinary "this is for X" format no longer sits on them straightforwardly. 7. Paragraph 7 - And that matters because uncertainty about proper function quickly becomes uncertainty about evaluation. - If we do not know clearly what sort of thing this is, or what it is properly for, then it becomes harder to say in advance what would count as a good test of it. - That does not show that no test is possible. - It shows, rather, that test-selection is now part of the argument rather than something the object itself has already settled for us. - So when Hoel selects writing as the privileged proving ground, that choice now requires more argument than it first seemed to. 8. Paragraph 8 - Hoel's choice of writing should therefore be stated in its strongest form before anything else is said against it. - He is right to observe that these systems are textual through and through: they are trained on language, operate through language, and return language. - As he puts it, words are "its womb, its mother, its literal atoms". - Once that point is made, it is not at all arbitrary to think that writing is where the character of these systems should show itself first and most vividly. - The question is no longer why anyone would look at writing. The question is what, exactly, we are measuring when we look there. 9. Paragraph 9 - The difficulty is that "writing" is too coarse a heading for the very different uses to which text can be put. - Sometimes text is a finished artefact: an essay, a book, an email, a blog post, something that is meant to stand before other readers on its own. - But text can also be a surface for thinking: a place where a distinction is tested, a formulation is sharpened, an objection is exposed, a possibility is floated, or a line of thought is sent back for another pass. - Those are not wholly separate universes, but neither are they the same practice described at two levels of abstraction. - Hoel's test case concerns, by and large, the first of them. 10. Paragraph 10 - What Hoel mostly measures, then, is text as artefact, whereas much of the practice I want to describe treats text as a working surface. - A finished essay or published post is meant to stand on its own; a prompt-response-revision loop may use text not to produce a final artefact directly, but to test a distinction, surface an alternative, or force a reformulation. - Once that contrast is in view, "has writing improved?" begins to look like 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. 11. Paragraph 11 - 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. - A pen extends inscription, but it does not answer back. - It does not return a proposal, a misreading, a flattening of a distinction, a line of continuation, or a bland summary that I now have to resist. - Its role ends where my inscription begins. - An LLM, by contrast, enters the process precisely at the point where language comes back altered and has to be dealt with. 12. Paragraph 12 - When I use an LLM well, the exchange is not one-way. - I write something, or half-write something, or throw a distinction at the system in a rough form; what comes back has already been reshaped by the model's own habits of association, smoothing, compression, and redescription. - Sometimes the result is merely dead. Sometimes it is wrong in an unhelpful way. But sometimes it exposes a weakness, opens a path, or sharpens a contrast that had not yet become available to me. - The return does not merely record the next move. - It can help to form it. 13. Paragraph 13 - That is why the line "the return prompts us back" needs to be more than a clever phrase. - The point is not simply that the system gives me more text. - The point is that the text comes back bearing a pressure that can redirect the inquiry itself: by flattening a distinction I now need to save, by misreading a claim I now need to restate, by over-generalising where I need to become precise, or by surfacing a possibility I had not yet seen. - The practice is therefore recursive in a way that Hoel's preferred test does not quite capture. - We prompt the system, but the system's return prompts us back. 14. Paragraph 14 - 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 do not deny the slop. I do not deny that public prose has often worsened. I do not deny that many people now treat returned text as something to post, publish, or package with scarcely any resistance at all. - What I deny is that these facts, by themselves, settle the character of the system. - A great deal of bad prose may show what happens when returned language is treated as product rather than as material. - The same technology can support one mode of use that floods the zone with generic artefacts and another in which returned text functions as part of a thinking process. 15. Paragraph 15 - This is the point at which the category of medium begins to earn its keep. - I do not mean by this a more glamorous synonym for tool. - I mean that the better description of the practice is one in which the system's characteristic resistances and possibilities become visible in the work itself. - A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for; a medium is understood by the way work in it proceeds, by what it makes easy, what it makes difficult, what it smooths over, and what it throws back at the user. - If that sounds too strong, the weaker claim is enough: "tool" and "writing" have both become too blunt to describe what is going on. 16. Paragraph 16 - The Frippertronics comparison can now be introduced as a way of making that structure vivid rather than as an ornamental analogy. - What returns from the loop is neither simply what went in nor something wholly alien to it; it is one's own material sent back transformed, and the next move is made in light of that transformed return. - The point is not that LLMs produce the textual equivalent of some new musical genre. - It is that, in both cases, the method of making depends on alteration, return, and re-entry into the next act. - The comparison belongs here, and not earlier, because only now has the recursive structure been laid out clearly enough for it to illuminate rather than decorate. 17. Paragraph 17 - This also lets me say something more exact about slop. - 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 towards generic smoothing is used with too little resistance, too little discrimination, and too little reassertion of specificity. - Hoel has therefore noticed a real pathology, and a telling 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". 18. Paragraph 18 - My conclusion, then, should return to Hoel in the mode of response rather than attack. - Hoel is right that there has been no textual singularity, right that what has happened to public writing matters, and right that much of what the world has gained from LLMs looks like efficiency, scale, and easier production rather than a new surplus of intelligence. - What I doubt is that these facts straightforwardly tell us that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense his opening picture encourages. - They may indeed be tools. But if they are, they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - And that is why the choice of writing-as-test cannot simply be assumed. This is now an actual scaffold rather than a description of one. If you want, I can do the next pass on just paragraphs 8–18 and make them denser still, while keeping exactly this format. *Il punto non è dire dall’esterno che l’argomento avrà queste mosse, ma scrivere già le frasi attraverso cui quelle mosse potrebbero essere fatte.* ### User 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 Please start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind. ### Assistant I’m invoking the seven named skills now by loading their Codex copies, plus the required prose-reference files and the Hoel clipping from the vault. After that I’ll rebuild the scaffold from zero as actual essay-ready prose with the topic-sentence / supporting-bullet structure you’ve asked for. ### Assistant I’m restarting from zero and loading the requested constraints before drafting anything. Only `contemplate` is formally surfaced in this session’s skill list, but the other six skills are installed on disk, so I’m consulting their `SKILL.md` files and the local Hoel clipping directly as the fallback. ### Assistant I’ve loaded the voice files as well, because “write like me” is a Nick-specific style request and the vault instructions make that mandatory. I’m now loading the remaining named skills plus the Hoel clipping, and then I’ll produce an actual scaffold rather than another description of one. ### Assistant I am starting again from zero, and I want to be very explicit about what I am taking the task to be, because that was the source of the earlier failures. The task is not to tell you what an essay plan would do. It is not to describe a scaffold from above. And it is not to recycle sentences from the existing draft, however tempting that may be when there is already usable material lying around. The task is to give you an actual scaffold: paragraph by paragraph, with the first line of each paragraph block functioning as a topic sentence and the later lines functioning as supporting sub-bullets, where every line is already candidate prose for the essay itself. That sounds obvious when stated that way. But it is precisely what I kept failing to do. I kept producing a commentary on a scaffold rather than a scaffold. And once I did that, the prose became vague almost immediately, because a commentary on an argument can get away with words like "the point here", "the paragraph should", "the issue is", and so on. An actual scaffold cannot. An actual scaffold has to start making the case. There are really four constraints I need to hold onto this time. The first is that Hoel has to remain on stage from the beginning. Not literally from the first sentence, because you have already said that the very opening of the essay needs to begin more generally with the thought that people are too quick to call LLMs tools. But very early on, and certainly by the time the argument starts taking shape, Hoel has to be there. He is not a late-stage illustration of a theory. He is the person whose framing puts the pressure on the case. The second is that I have to keep the distinction between his claim and your further move completely clean. His point, in the axe passage, is about recognisability. The object stands out as a tool instinctively. Your next move is nearby, but stronger: in many paradigmatic cases, that recognisability goes together with at least a rough grasp of what the thing is for. If I slide between those two, I either make Hoel say more than he does, or I make your own move too blurry to matter. So the scaffold has to mark that transition explicitly, but without announcing it as an argumentative bookkeeping exercise. The third is that the middle of the essay has to be slowed down. Up to paragraph seven or so, the shape is fairly clear. Hoel; axe; recognisability; proper function; the awkwardness of specifying ChatGPT's function; your line about "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all"; and then the methodological point that uncertainty about function becomes uncertainty about evaluation. That is already a fairly coherent sequence. The place where the essay can still go dead is after the return to Hoel's strongest thought about writing. If I rush there, then I am back to slogans: "writing is too coarse", "LLMs are recursive", "medium not tool", "slop is part of the case". Each of those slogans may be true enough, but they are not an essay. They have to be unpacked into a series of actual claims that someone unfamiliar with our conversation could follow. The fourth is voice. You have been very clear that "write like me" does not mean "mine the draft for sentences". It means that the scaffold itself has to sound like something you might write if you were sketching the essay in prose rather than in notes. That matters at the level of rhythm, but it also matters at the level of thought. Your prose does not usually proceed by erecting signposts that tell the reader what work is about to be done. It tends to move by making one claim, then putting pressure on it, then qualifying it, often with a "but" pivot, and then letting an example or contrast do the work. So I need the scaffold to sound like that. Not in the sense of caricaturing your habits, but in the sense of actually letting the distinctions and examples do the labour. Now, one live question is whether the software-development comparison belongs in this scaffold or not. I think it does, but only if it is used at the right point. If it appears too early, it will look like the essay is changing the subject from writing to coding. That would be a mistake, because the argument with Hoel turns on writing. But if it appears after the recursive structure has been introduced, it can help cash out the evaluative point in a more practical register: the relevant question is not whether the public output in a domain has become better on average, but what kinds of activity have opened up, and what kind of practice people have had to learn in order to use the system well. That seems worth keeping, because it gives the writing case an analogue without displacing it. Another live question is when the category of medium should enter. I do not think it can appear early, and I do not think it can appear as a coup. If it comes in too soon, it looks like a preferred label in search of an argument. The way to earn it is to spend enough time on the claim that text can function as finished artefact or as working surface, then on the pen comparison, then on the recursive return of altered language. Once that structure is in view, "medium" no longer sounds like a glamorous rebranding; it sounds like an attempt to describe a practice in which the system's characteristic resistances and distortions are part of the work itself. So the scaffold needs to hold that back until the reader has already felt the inadequacy of the simpler tool picture. I also want to be careful about what kind of detail belongs in an actual scaffold. There is a temptation, once one recognises that the previous versions were too abstract, to compensate by stuffing the plan with little evidential fragments or clever phrases. But that would go wrong in a different way. The detail has to be the detail that advances the case. So, for instance, paragraph two cannot merely say "Hoel opens with a stone axe". It has to say enough about why he opens that way: instinctive recognition, *Homo faber*, tools that talk back, and the contrast he wants between a tool-reading of LLMs and an intelligence-explosion reading of them. Likewise, the proper-function paragraph cannot just mention forks and Swiss Army knives. It has to make the point that multifuctionality is not the problem; the problem is that ChatGPT does not sit comfortably under the ordinary "this is for X" format at all. The same goes for the writing paragraphs. If I merely say "writing is too coarse a heading", that is still description. The scaffold has to start making the distinction. That means actually saying that text can be a finished artefact, but can also be a working surface on which a distinction is tested or an objection is exposed or a formulation is sent back for another pass. It means actually saying that Hoel's evidence is about text as artefact. It means actually saying that a pen extends inscription but does not answer back, whereas an LLM returns altered language that has to be handled. It means actually saying what "the return prompts us back" amounts to: the system flattens a distinction, over-generalises, misreads, or stumbles onto a possibility, and in each case what comes back changes the next act of thought. I also need to watch the tone of the conclusion. You have been clear that the essay should respond to Hoel rather than attack him. So the conclusion cannot sound like "Hoel was asking the wrong question all along." That would be too crude, and in any case false. The right tone is narrower. Hoel is right to think that writing matters here. He is right to insist on slop. He is right that the public world of prose has not exhibited anything like a text singularity. The narrower claim is that those facts do not yet settle the question of what sort of thing an LLM is, because they measure one use of text under a description that may already be too coarse. That gives me the underlying shape. The first movement introduces Hoel as the strongest articulation of a natural thought. The second movement uses his axe example to open the proper-function question. The third movement shows why that question becomes awkward in the LLM case. The fourth movement turns that awkwardness into a methodological point about testing. The fifth movement restates Hoel's writing case at full strength. The sixth movement slows down and distinguishes finished artefact from working surface. The seventh movement describes recursive use from the inside, partly through the pen comparison and partly through the line about the return prompting us back. The eighth movement draws the evaluative consequence more carefully, with the software paragraph helping to make that consequence concrete. The ninth movement introduces medium once it is earned. The tenth absorbs slop rather than ducking it. And the last movement returns to Hoel in a tone of response rather than dismissal. I think that is the right structure. More to the point, I think I can now write it as an actual scaffold rather than as a commentary on one. The form I am going to use is the closest available equivalent to what you asked for: paragraph label, then flat bullets; the first bullet is the topic sentence, and the later bullets function as the supporting sub-bullets for that paragraph. Each bullet will be a sentence, or set of sentences, that could go into the essay itself. No "this paragraph will". No "the point here is". No descriptive gloss standing in for the prose. The argument has to be visible in the lines themselves. ## Final Answer I have used `contemplate` formally, and I have also re-read the installed files for `nick-analytic-voice`, `nick-philosophical-prose`, `twork`, `source-work`, `epistemic-discipline`, and `writing-standards`, along with the local clipping [Bits In, Bits Out.md](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Clippings/Bits%20In,%20Bits%20Out.md) and the voice files [nick-voice.md](/Users/nickyoung/.claude/knowledge/nick-voice.md) and [nick-argument-patterns.md](/Users/nickyoung/.claude/knowledge/nick-argument-patterns.md). Orienting passage: > 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. The format below is the strict one you asked for. In each paragraph block, the first bullet is the topic sentence; the later bullets are the supporting sub-bullets, and every line is written as prose that could actually go into the essay. ## Scaffold 1. Paragraph 1 - Erik Hoel gives a sharper form to a thought that many people already have, namely that what has happened to writing over the last few years tells us something about what sort of thing an LLM is. - His claim is not merely that LLMs are useful, or that they can be used as tools in the loose way that many technologies can. - It is that writing is the first revealing domain here, and that the public fate of prose under LLM use already gives us reason to place these systems on the side of tools rather than on the side of some new surplus intelligence. - That is what gives his essay its grip. Writing is not just one application among others; it is where the case is supposed to have shown itself first. 2. Paragraph 2 - Hoel's opening discussion of the stone axe matters because it does more than supply a vivid image. - The axe stands out from the surrounding stones as something made for use; Hoel says that he "knew it was a tool instinctively", and that instinctive recognisability is doing real work in the set-up of his argument. - From there he moves to the larger claim that human beings are *Homo faber*, tool-makers and tool-users, and that we now live among "tools that can talk back to us". - Once that frame is in place, the question is whether LLMs belong with the long history of tool use, or whether the hype about intelligence explosion is tracking something more than that. - Hoel's answer is that their effect on writing looks like the former: efficiency, scale, editing, feedback, and an extraordinary amount of dead prose rather than anything like a text singularity. 3. Paragraph 3 - I want to move from Hoel's point about recognisability to a nearby, but stronger, point about function. - In many of the paradigmatic cases that anchor our intuitions here, recognising the thing as a tool goes together with seeing, at least roughly, what it is for. - We may not have a theory of the object to hand, but we do not usually hesitate over the use in terms of which we are meant to understand it. - That is not quite Hoel's claim, and I do not want to put the stronger thought in his mouth. - But his opening example invites it, because a thing that presents itself so readily as a tool also tends to present itself as being for something. 4. Paragraph 4 - A useful term here is proper function. - By a thing's proper function I mean not any use to which it can be put, but the use in terms of which we ordinarily understand what that thing is. - A fork can hold down loose paper, and a heavy book can stop a door from closing, but those are not the uses that tell us what forks and books are. - Nor does the point disappear once the case becomes less simple. A Swiss Army knife has several proper functions, but not for that reason none. - Multifunctionality is therefore not the difficulty. The difficulty arises when the ordinary question "what is this for?" no longer yields even a rough and stable answer. 5. Paragraph 5 - Once the question is put in those terms, ChatGPT is much harder to place than a fork, a vacuum cleaner, or Google. - If we say that it is for predicting the next token, we have shifted from use to mechanism. - If we say that it is for chatting, we have said something too thin to illuminate code generation, translation, editing, philosophical use, and the rest. - If we say that it is for helping with tasks, we have said something so general that it scarcely individuates the thing at all. - And if we say that it is for writing, we have said something nearer the truth, but still not something exact enough to settle the matter. 6. Paragraph 6 - I want to be careful here and distinguish the suggestion I am making from a stronger one. - The point is not that LLMs cannot be tools in any sense whatsoever. - It is, rather, that they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - The force of the previous step is therefore classificatory hesitation rather than metaphysical triumph. - The category begins to wobble not because these systems have many uses, but because the ordinary "this is for X" format no longer sits on them straightforwardly. 7. Paragraph 7 - And once that difficulty is in view, the next difficulty follows quickly enough. - If we do not know clearly what sort of thing this is, or what it is properly for, then we do not yet know clearly how it ought to be tested. - That does not show that no test is possible. - It shows, rather, that test-selection is now part of the argument rather than something the object itself has already settled for us. - So when Hoel selects writing as the privileged proving ground, that choice requires more argument than it first seemed to. 8. Paragraph 8 - Hoel's appeal to writing should therefore be stated in its strongest form before anything else is said against it. - He is right to observe that these systems are textual through and through: they are trained on language, operate through language, and return language. - As he puts it: > "words are its womb, its mother, its literal atoms" - That line gets something exactly right, and it is what allows his "argument from experience" to get off the ground. - If LLMs were really a new source of intelligence rather than a new family of tools, then writing ought by now to have given us our first unmistakable glimpse of that fact. 9. Paragraph 9 - Hoel's further claim is that writing has not, in fact, given us any such glimpse. - What we have, he says, is not a glut of good prose but a dearth of it, plus efficiency gains, feedback, editing help, and mountains of slop. - That is why writing matters so much to him. Words are the native material of these systems, and if there were going to be a "text singularity", this is where we should already have seen it. - The case is therefore not that writing is one arbitrary example among others. - The case is that writing is the most sensitive weathervane we have. 10. Paragraph 10 - But being made of text is not yet the same thing as being for the production of textual artefacts. - A thing's substrate does not by itself tell us which use of it should govern its evaluation. - A computer consists in computation, but we do not test computers by asking whether computation as such has improved. - We ask what kinds of tasks they enable, what kinds of work they alter, and what people can now do that they could not do before. - The same pressure arises here, because from the fact that LLMs are textual it does not yet follow that publicly available prose is the master measure of what they are. 11. Paragraph 11 - The difficulty is that 'writing' gathers together quite different uses of text under a single heading. - Sometimes text is a finished artefact: an essay, a post, a review, a book, an email that is meant to stand before other readers on its own. - But text can also be a working surface on which a distinction is tested, a formulation is sharpened, an objection is exposed, or a line of thought is sent back for another pass before anything finished exists at all. - Those are not wholly separate universes, but neither are they the same practice described at two levels of abstraction. - Hoel's test case concerns, by and large, the first of them. 12. Paragraph 12 - What Hoel mostly measures, then, is text as artefact, whereas much of the practice I want to describe treats text as material. - A finished essay is meant to stand on its own; a prompt-response-revision loop may use text not to produce a publishable object directly, but to surface an alternative, expose a weakness, or force a reformulation. - Once that contrast is in view, "has writing improved?" begins to look 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. 13. Paragraph 13 - 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. - A pen extends my power of inscription, but it does not answer back. - It does not return a proposal, a misreading, a flattening of a distinction, a line of continuation, or a bland summary that I now need to resist. - Its role ends where my inscription begins. - An LLM, by contrast, enters the practice precisely at the point where language comes back altered and has to be dealt with. 14. Paragraph 14 - When I use an LLM well, the exchange is not one-way. - I put in a rough distinction, a question, a paragraph, a half-made objection, or some other piece of language carrying unfinished thought; what comes back is that material recast through the model's own habits of association, compression, smoothing, and redescription. - Sometimes the result is merely dead. Sometimes it is wrong in an unhelpful way. But sometimes it exposes a weakness, opens a path, or sharpens a contrast that had not yet become available to me. - The return does not merely record the next move. - It can help to form it. 15. Paragraph 15 - That is why the line "the return prompts us back" needs to be more than a nice phrase. - The point is not simply that the system gives me more text. - The point is that the text comes back bearing a pressure that can redirect the inquiry itself: by flattening a distinction I now need to save, by misreading a claim I now need to restate, by over-generalising where I need to become precise, or by surfacing a possibility I had not yet seen. - We prompt the system, but the system's return prompts us back. - The practice is therefore recursive in a way that Hoel's preferred test does not quite capture. 16. Paragraph 16 - Something similar can be seen more clearly in software development, which is why I think that comparison helps. - The interesting question there is not whether code as a whole has suddenly become better in some average public sense. - It is what developers can now do: iterate faster, enter unfamiliar libraries with less ceremony, test ideas that would otherwise have taken too long, and use the system's responses as material for further passes rather than as finished products. - That is a case in which people have had to learn the practice, not just consume the output. - And it suggests that Hoel's way of measuring the writing case may be selecting the wrong level of description. 17. Paragraph 17 - Once that recursive structure is in view, Hoel's evidence is not refuted, but it is being measured at the wrong level. - I do not deny the slop. I do not deny that public prose has often worsened. I do not deny that many people now treat returned text as something to post, package, or publish with scarcely any resistance at all. - What I deny is that those facts, by themselves, settle the character of the system. - A great deal of bad prose may show what happens when returned language is treated as product rather than as material. - The same technology can support one mode of use that floods the zone with generic artefacts and another in which returned text functions as part of a thinking process. 18. Paragraph 18 - This is the point at which I would prefer the category of medium to the category of tool. - I do not mean a more glamorous synonym for tool, or a metaphysical promotion of the machine. - I mean that the better description of the practice is one in which the system's characteristic resistances and possibilities become visible in the work itself. - A tool is ordinarily understood by what it is for; a medium is understood by the way work in it proceeds, by what it makes easy, what it makes difficult, what it smooths over, and what it throws back at the user. - If that sounds too strong, the weaker claim is enough: both 'tool' and 'writing' have turned out to be too blunt. 19. Paragraph 19 - The Frippertronics comparison helps here because it makes the structure vivid rather than decorative. - What returns from the tape loop is neither simply what went in nor something wholly alien to it; it is one's own material sent back transformed, and the next move is made in light of that transformed return. - I think something structurally similar happens in good LLM use, even though the material here is language rather than sound. - The point is not that the outputs are automatically better. - The point is that the making proceeds through return, alteration, and re-entry into the next act. 20. Paragraph 20 - None of this requires me to deny Hoel's insistence on slop. - On the contrary, a medium can have characteristic tendencies, and one of the tendencies here is towards the smooth, the generic, and the dead. - Public textual slop may therefore be exactly what we should expect when returned language is treated as a product to be published rather than as material to be resisted, revised, and worked through. - Hoel has noticed a real pathology, and a telling 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'. 21. Paragraph 21 - My response to Hoel, then, is not that he has chosen the wrong phenomenon, but that he has described the phenomenon too quickly. - Writing is indeed where the case first becomes visible. - But once we distinguish text as finished artefact from text as a working surface for recursive thought, Hoel's evidence no longer looks like the last word on what sort of thing an LLM is. - LLMs may still be tools. But if they are, they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - And that is why the choice of writing-as-test cannot simply be assumed. If you want, the next pass should stay at exactly this level of concreteness and do one of two things only: either tighten paragraphs 8 to 21 sentence by sentence, or generate three variant versions of paragraphs 10 to 18 with slightly different emphases. *Qui il punto è che il saggio deve già vivere nelle frasi del piano, non nella descrizione del piano.* ### User "Context automatically compacted -" oh shit.. ### Assistant No problem. I still have the working context I need for this thread, including the Hoel clipping, the skill constraints, the exact line you want preserved, and the fact that you want an actual scaffold rather than a description of one. The only practical effect is that I need to stay a bit tighter about what I carry forward implicitly. But we have not lost the thread. *Non abbiamo perso il filo; dobbiamo solo riprenderlo con un po' più di attenzione.* ### User Take a look at the most recently downloaded file in downloads. It's a JSON of a conversation about this. And um, yeah, you'll see my current thinking on what I think we should do. ### Assistant I’m going to inspect the newest file in `Downloads`, open the JSON conversation, and use that as the current source of truth for your latest thinking before I say anything substantive. ### Assistant I found the newest file: [797a7eb4-f119-4e0d-9298-0047aa41a7f3 (1).jsonl](/Users/nickyoung/Downloads/797a7eb4-f119-4e0d-9298-0047aa41a7f3%20%281%29.jsonl). I’m reading its structure first, then I’ll pull out the latest turns where you spell out what you now want the piece to do. ### Assistant Yes. I have read the newest file, [797a7eb4-f119-4e0d-9298-0047aa41a7f3 (1).jsonl](/Users/nickyoung/Downloads/797a7eb4-f119-4e0d-9298-0047aa41a7f3%20%281%29.jsonl), and the main thing I take from it is that your thinking has shifted quite a lot. The present live thought is no longer just "LLMs are not straightforward tools" or even "LLMs might be better thought of as media". It is that the essay may need to be built around the stronger claim that LLMs are substances: stuff with capacities, not implements with proper functions. On that picture, the proper-function argument is still useful, but it no longer just destabilises Hoel's classification. It opens the way to a different category altogether. We do not ask what iron is for; we ask what can be done with iron. Likewise, we may not yet know what LLMs are for, because we are still discovering what can be elicited from them. That also means Hoel's oil analogy now cuts the other way. In the conversation, the strongest new move was the "kerosene phase" thought: when oil was first discovered, its transformative uses were not yet known, and early uptake did not reveal the full range of its capacities. So the right reply is not a hypey "just wait, it will get better". It is a methodological point: Hoel's argument assumes that the history is already settled, that we already know what this thing is for, and that public writing therefore gives us the right measure. The substance framing says that this may be too quick. I also noticed that the conversation preserved a lot from the earlier tool/medium draft rather than throwing it away. The things marked for retention were: - opening with Hoel's "mere tool" position - the proper-function problem - the fact that we do use these systems, but that does not yet settle what sort of thing they are - the distinction between text as artefact and text as working surface - the pen comparison - the recursive structure where the return prompts us back - the medium material - Frippertronics - Lucier/slop But their role changes. On the new picture, "substance" becomes the main positive category, and "medium" names what happens when that substance is taken up into practice. That seems to be the cleanest way of putting the relation between the two. The LLM is the substance; recursive text-exchange is the medium. That is a much more determinate brief than the one I was working from before. So, in short, I do think I now see your current thinking more clearly: the essay's live centre of gravity is the substance thesis, with Hoel's tool/oil framing being answered by saying that we may still be in the kerosene phase of a newly invented stuff whose latent capacities are not yet fully understood. I will take that as the current source of truth unless you redirect it. *Qui il punto non è più soltanto che “tool” sia una categoria troppo rozza, ma che forse stiamo ancora imparando che cosa sia questa nuova sostanza e come lavorarla.* ### User Okay, so first of all, other than the very early stages of the the current version of this. Do you know which document you need to be looking at now? I'll copy the file, hold on. Anyway, I am happy for you to change or restructure things quite considerably um after the very first block quote. Okay, so the so basically I have an opening paragraph and then I have a block quote. You can do whatever you want afterwards with the block quote. You can reuse some of my stuff, you can um add your own stuff but um yeah so try and think about a new structure for what I want to do now okay so based yeah with uh the idea that it's a substance and that it's a substance which potentially at least we have not yet discovered all of its latent capacities. Can you think of the CEV of the an essay that would be recalibrated like that? And can you give me a very detailed structure please in a bullet point framework? 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 I am invoking `contemplate`, `nick-analytic-voice`, `nick-philosophical-prose`, `twork`, `source-work`, `epistemic-discipline`, and `writing-standards` for this pass. First, the document question. I do not know with certainty which file you mean beyond the current Substack draft lineage, because you have not pasted the file yet. My best inference is that the working document is still the current draft in [LLMs Are Not Tools.md](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools.md) or its immediate successor, but I am treating that as an inference, not as fact. What I do know is the structural constraint you have now given me: the opening paragraph and the first block quote stay, and after that the piece can be rebuilt quite freely. That changes the task in a useful way. I no longer need to preserve the old middle. I need to think about the CEV of the essay if it is recalibrated around the substance thought. And that means I should stop thinking in terms of "how do I retrofit the old tool/medium structure?" and instead ask what the strongest version of the essay would look like if the new centre of gravity were granted from the outset. The first thing to notice is that the substance thought does not merely add a new metaphor. It changes the logic of the response to Hoel. On the older structure, the proper-function discussion mainly served to show that "tool" was too quick or too blunt. On the new structure, that discussion becomes a diagnostic step. It shows that the reason tool-talk breaks down is that we are not dealing, or not only dealing, with an implement whose identity is fixed by proper function. We are dealing with something more like a stuff, a material, a substance with capacities, tendencies, and potentialities. That is a more radical thought. But it is also, I think, a much more generative one. The second thing to notice is that the substance thesis does not eliminate the medium material. It reorganises it. "Substance" and "medium" are not rival labels at the same level. A substance is what the thing is like considered as a material with capacities. A medium is what it becomes when those capacities are taken up into a practice. Oil is a substance; oil paint is a medium. Silicon is a substance; semiconducting architectures are a medium of computation. That is why the newer line from the JSON conversation felt stronger than the earlier tool/medium wavering. It gives you a clean relation between the categories instead of leaving them to compete. The third thing is that Hoel has to remain central. The substance essay is still a response to him, and indeed one of its strongest virtues is that it answers his own oil analogy with a better reading of oil. He uses oil as the model of a transformative discovery: if LLMs were a true source of intelligence, they ought to have transformed writing by now. But the reply is that discovering a substance does not mean immediately knowing what all its powers are or which practices will best actualise them. There is a lag between discovery and mature use. There are provisional uses. There are crude uses. There are low-grade uses that nevertheless reveal something real. That is where the kerosene-phase thought does real work. It is not just a flourish. It gives historical content to the methodological point. The fourth thing is that the essay needs to be careful not to sound like hype. This is the obvious danger of the substance framing. "We have not yet discovered all of its latent capacities" can sound like an AI booster saying "just wait". That would kill the piece. So the structure has to make it clear that the point is epistemic and methodological before it is predictive. The claim is not that the buried greatness will inevitably emerge. The claim is that Hoel's evaluative confidence presupposes a settled understanding of what the thing is for, and that this presupposition is precisely what the substance framing denies. That is much stronger and much more defensible than a vague promissory note. The fifth thing is that the slop material becomes more interesting under the new structure, not less. Under the old structure, slop risked looking like a problem to be explained away. Under the substance structure, slop can be redescribed as one manifestation of the substance's characteristic tendencies when it is taken up under weak conditions. That is: if this stuff has powerful smoothing, averaging, and genericising tendencies, then of course one of the first large-scale social consequences of its use will be mountains of dead prose. That is not evidence against the substance framing. It is part of the evidence for how this substance behaves when it is used lazily or at scale. So the essay can concede Hoel's observation more fully without giving up the deeper point. Now, what would the best structure look like given your fixed opening paragraph and block quote? I think the essay wants to pivot quite quickly, after the quote, into the thought that Hoel's framing only looks settled because "tool" is one of those words that shuts down inquiry too fast. Then it should move into the proper-function problem, not as an end in itself but as the route into the stronger substance claim. Once that move has been made, the oil analogy can be turned. Then the essay can slow down and explain how a substance becomes a medium in practice, which is where the pen comparison, recursive prompting, artefact versus working surface, and Frippertronics material can all be retained but made to answer a different question. I also think the structure wants one clear paragraph that says, in effect: substances do not have proper functions, but they do have properties and tendencies. That is where the essay can say what kind of thing an LLM is supposed to be on this picture. Pattern-completion, contextual pliability, smoothing, associative reach, responsiveness to iterative prompting, and so on. Not as a list for its own sake, but as the beginning of a material profile. Otherwise "substance" remains too airy. There is also a choice about whether to include Aristotle or Locke. I think Aristotle's potentiality language can appear briefly if it is kept functional rather than scholastic. Locke's "something I know not what" is attractive, but I suspect it may take the essay sideways unless it is used in one deft sentence. For CEV purposes, I would keep Aristotle as a light touch and leave Locke out unless you later find a way of making him pull real weight. The software-development analogy should stay, but not as a rival main example. It belongs after the recursive-use material, where it can clarify the methodological lesson. There, it shows that one way to mismeasure a new substance or medium is to look only at the public outputs and not at what kinds of activity and iteration it enables for competent users. That gives the writing case some support without letting the essay become "actually the real case is coding". So the shape I now want is this: fixed opening and quote; immediate pressure on "tool"; proper function; turn to substance; answer to oil via kerosene phase; substance-to-medium transition; recursive practice; artefact versus working surface; software as methodological analogy; slop as characteristic tendency; return to Hoel with a narrower conclusion. That feels like the CEV structure. The remaining question is how much detail belongs in the scaffold. Since you want the detailed framework, I think the right thing is to give you paragraph blocks with explicit argumentative jobs, candidate claims, examples, and the relation between paragraphs. Not polished prose, because you asked for structure; but not thin one-line labels either. The result should be something you could actually draft from without having to reinvent the argument. ## Final Answer I do not know for certain which file you mean until you paste it. My best inference is that the working document is the current Substack draft line, probably [LLMs Are Not Tools.md](/Users/nickyoung/My%20Obsidian%20Vault/Writing/substack/LLMs%20Are%20Not%20Tools.md), but I am treating that as an inference. Given your constraint, I am treating the opening paragraph and the first block quote as fixed, and rebuilding everything after that around the substance thesis. What follows is the CEV structure as I currently see it. ## Bullet framework - Fixed opening - Keep your present opening paragraph. - Keep the first block quote from Hoel. - Treat that block quote as the last moment in which the reader is allowed to feel that the category of tool is straightforward. - Paragraph 1: the pivot after the quote - Start by granting that Hoel has identified something real: people do reach for the category of tool almost automatically here. - Then turn immediately to the pressure point: "tool" sounds clarifying, but in this case it may actually be one of those words that makes inquiry stop too early. - The paragraph should not yet announce "substance". It should make the reader feel that Hoel's classification is more settled than the object deserves. - The closing sentence should open the proper-function question: if this really is a tool, what sort of tool is it supposed to be? - Paragraph 2: proper function enters - Introduce the proper-function thought calmly and without drama. - The point here is not that all tools are single-purpose. It is that even fairly versatile tools usually admit a more or less stable answer to the question what they are for. - Use two or three quick cases: hammer, Google, Swiss Army knife. - Make the contrast exact: multi-functionality is not the problem; the problem is instability at the level of ordinary use-description. - Paragraph 3: the obvious candidates fail - Run the standard answers one by one. - "It predicts tokens" gives a mechanism, not a use. - "It chats" is too thin. - "It helps with tasks" is vacuous. - "It writes" catches something true, but not enough to settle what sort of thing we are dealing with. - The tone should be exploratory rather than triumphant. The point is not that you have disproved toolhood, but that the expected answer does not arrive. - Paragraph 4: the first verdict - This is where your line belongs. - Say that the lesson is not yet that LLMs are not tools in any sense whatsoever. - Say, rather, that they look like "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - Then add one more step which the earlier versions sometimes missed: if the category begins to wobble here, the standards of evaluation begin to wobble with it. - Paragraph 5: the methodological consequence - Make the point explicit that uncertainty about proper function becomes uncertainty about testing. - Do not say that no test is possible. - Say that once we no longer know straightforwardly what the thing is for, we no longer know straightforwardly which effects should count as the decisive measure of it. - This sets up the return to Hoel's writing argument, but now under pressure. - Paragraph 6: Hoel's case in its strongest form - Re-state his writing case carefully and charitably. - Use the block-quoted line about words being its "womb", "mother", and "literal atoms" if it is not already the fixed quote; if it is already the fixed quote, echo it without repeating it. - Spell out the logic: if these systems really were a new source of intelligence rather than just a family of tools, then writing ought to have shown it by now, because writing is the domain in which their native material is most directly at issue. - End with Hoel's empirical observation: what we have instead is scale, efficiency, editing help, feedback, and a great deal of slop. - Paragraph 7: the decisive turn - This is where the essay should stop trying to refine the category of tool and replace it. - The reason the proper-function question keeps failing, you now say, is that we are asking the wrong kind of question. - LLMs are not best understood as implements with functions, but as substances with capacities. - That is the conceptual leap on which the recalibrated essay stands or falls. - It needs to be stated plainly. - Paragraph 8: what "substance" means - Slow down here. This paragraph has to do more than coin a label. - Say that substances are not ordinarily understood in terms of proper function. - Iron is not for anything in the way a hammer is for hammering; it has properties, and from those properties uses emerge. - Oil was not discovered with a full list of applications attached to it. - The point is not chemistry as such. The point is category: stuff with capacities, not implement with purpose. - Then begin to sketch the analogue: LLMs have characteristic powers and tendencies from which practices and uses are still emerging. - Paragraph 9: the material profile - Give the substance thesis some concrete content. - Say what kind of capacities you take the LLM substance to have: pattern-completion, contextual pliability, associative reach, responsiveness to iterative prompting, and a strong tendency towards smoothing and genericity. - Do not make this a dead list. Frame it as a profile of behaviour. - The reason this paragraph matters is that without it "substance" remains metaphorical, whereas the essay needs it to feel explanatory. - Paragraph 10: turn Hoel's oil analogy - This should be one of the essay's strongest moments. - Hoel says that if LLMs were a true source of intelligence, discovering them should be like discovering oil. - The reply is that discovering oil did not mean immediately knowing what oil was for. - For a long time oil was lamp fuel. The larger transformations came later, once more of the substance's capacities had been drawn out and stabilised in practice. - That is the "kerosene phase" thought. - The conclusion should be methodological, not predictive: Hoel's argument assumes that the history is already settled, and that assumption is exactly what the substance picture denies. - Paragraph 11: guard against hype - I think this paragraph is necessary, because otherwise the previous one can sound like "just wait, the singularity is still coming". - Say directly that this is not a promissory argument and not a piece of tech evangelism. - You are not predicting that the hidden greatness of LLMs will inevitably unfold. - You are saying something more limited: we may still be in too early a phase of discovery and practice for Hoel's preferred test to bear the weight he wants to put on it. - This keeps the essay from sounding adolescent. - Paragraph 12: from substance to medium - Introduce the relation between the two categories. - A substance becomes a medium when its capacities are taken up into a practice. - Oil is a substance; oil painting is a medium. - The LLM is a substance; recursive text-exchange is the medium that has begun to form around it. - This move preserves the best material from the earlier drafts without making "medium" compete with "substance" as a rival thesis. - Paragraph 13: the pen comparison - Now bring back the pen comparison, but under the new framing. - A pen extends inscription; it does not return altered material. - An LLM does. - That difference matters because it marks the difference between using a tool to record a thought and working in a medium that pushes back on thought. - This paragraph should be simple and concrete. - Paragraph 14: recursive practice from the inside - Expand the line that the return prompts us back. - The system's output can flatten a distinction, over-generalise, misread, connect two things you had not linked, or hand you a banal summary that forces you to restate the point more sharply. - In each case, what matters is not only the output but what the output does to the next move. - This is where the essay needs to sound as though it knows what the practice actually feels like. - Paragraph 15: artefact and working surface - Now make the distinction that earlier versions were orbiting. - Text can be a finished artefact, but it can also be the working surface of thought. - Hoel's evidence concerns, by and large, artefacts: published prose, public writing, the visible outputs of civilisation. - Much interesting LLM use concerns text as a working surface: drafting, testing, reframing, probing, reformulating. - This does not show that Hoel is looking at the wrong phenomenon. It shows that he may be measuring only one use of text under a heading that hides several. - Paragraph 16: software-development analogy - Bring in software here, not earlier. - The point is not that coding is the real case and writing is not. - The point is methodological: in software, the interesting question is often not whether code overall has become better in some public average sense, but what people can now do, how they iterate, how they move through unfamiliar terrain, and what kinds of exploratory work become possible. - This helps cash out the evaluative point without displacing the writing case. - Paragraph 17: Frippertronics - Use Frippertronics here as the analogy that makes the recursive structure vivid. - The point is not product-equivalence but method. - What returns from the loop is one's own material sent back altered, and the next act is shaped in light of that return. - That is why the comparison belongs late in the essay: only once the recursive structure has been described does the analogy stop looking ornamental. - Paragraph 18: slop reinterpreted - This paragraph should concede a great deal to Hoel. - Slop is real. It is not a superficial embarrassment that your view has to explain away. - On the substance picture, slop can be treated as one characteristic manifestation of the material's genericising tendencies when it is used with too little resistance, too little skill, or under conditions of scale. - In other words, the mountains of dead prose are not evidence that nothing is there; they are evidence about how this substance behaves in one of its earliest mass-use forms. - Paragraph 19: what Hoel still gets right - Before concluding, explicitly say what you take from Hoel. - He is right that there has been no text singularity. - He is right that public prose matters. - He is right that efficiency and scale have so far been more visible than any civilisation-wide increase in quality. - This paragraph matters because it makes the conclusion feel responsive rather than oppositional. - Paragraph 20: final conclusion - The closing claim should now be narrower and stronger than "Hoel is wrong". - He has described the phenomenon too quickly, because he has treated a newly invented substance as though it were already a settled implement with a function. - We may not yet know what this thing is for, because that is not yet the right question. - We may still be learning what can be drawn from it, what practices stabilise around it, and what its latent capacities amount to when they are not reduced to kerosene-level use. - That is why writing, though still the right place to look, cannot straightforwardly function as the final measure of what an LLM is. ## Shorter map of the whole shape - Fixed opening and Hoel quote. - Pressure on "tool". - Proper-function problem. - First verdict: "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - Testing problem. - Hoel's writing argument at full strength. - Turn to substance. - Substance explained through properties and capacities. - Oil analogy reversed through the kerosene-phase thought. - Guard against hype. - Substance becomes medium in practice. - Pen, recursive prompting, artefact versus working surface. - Software as methodological analogue. - Frippertronics as vivid structural analogy. - Slop as characteristic tendency. - Return to Hoel with a narrower conclusion. ## What I think is structurally best If I had to pick the points that now do the heaviest work, they would be these: - The move from proper function to substance. - The reversal of Hoel's oil analogy through the kerosene-phase thought. - The claim that medium is what the substance becomes in practice. - The reinterpretation of slop as a characteristic early-use tendency rather than a simple reductio. Those four moves seem to me to be the ones that make this version a genuinely new essay rather than a revised draft of the older one. If you paste the actual file, I can take this structure and map it directly onto the document from the first block quote onward. *Se questa nuova linea funziona, il saggio non dirà più soltanto che “tool” è troppo poco, ma che stiamo ancora imparando a trattare una sostanza di cui non conosciamo bene le potenze.* ### User Instead of a plan you gave me something really quite weird. It was almost as though it was instructions for you telling me how to write the plan myself. Can you actually do the work rather than point to the work? ComePlease start the task(s) again completely from scratch, keeping this in mind. ### Assistant I’m restarting from zero and tightening the deliverable: not instructions for a plan, but the plan itself in essay-ready sentences. I’m reloading the seven named skills and the Hoel clipping first so I can keep the substance version grounded rather than improvising from memory. ### Assistant Right. The failure was simple. I gave you a map of the work instead of doing the work. So I need to stop talking about what the essay should do and actually lay out the essay in prose-shaped form. Let me start with the constraint that now matters most. The opening paragraph stays. The first Hoel block quote stays. Everything after that is available for reconstruction. That is good, because it means I do not need to keep trying to salvage the middle of the old essay. I can treat the opening as a set-up and then ask what the strongest possible continuation would be if the substance thought were really taken seriously. What would that continuation have to achieve? It would have to do more than say "LLMs are not tools". That is no longer enough. It would have to say why the tool category fails, what better category should replace it, why that better category matters for how we evaluate these systems, and how that answers Hoel specifically. It would also have to preserve the good material from the older versions — proper function, writing as a privileged test case, artefact versus working surface, recursive prompting, slop — but give each of those pieces a different role. That feels like the real task. There are a few possible structures here. One possibility would be to go straight from Hoel's oil line to the substance line: "No, oil is the wrong analogy only because you are reading oil wrongly; oil itself shows what I want to say." That would be punchy. But I think it would move too quickly. The substance thesis needs to be earned. If it appears before the proper-function problem, it will look like a clever relabelling exercise. The reader has to feel first that the ordinary question "what is this for?" is not yielding the sort of answer it ought to yield if toolhood were straightforward. Another possibility would be to keep the medium line as the main thesis and introduce substance only later, as an explanatory deepening. That would be safer. But it would also underuse the best new thought from the conversation. The best thing in the JSON was not just that substance is another metaphor available to us. It was that substance explains why function-talk feels so unstable, and it lets you turn Hoel's own oil analogy against him without simply refusing it. So the stronger structure is the one in which the proper-function discussion is the bridge to substance. That makes sense. Hoel says: tools. You ask: what sort of tool? That question proves unexpectedly awkward. The awkwardness is not accidental, because the object is not best understood as an implement with a proper function. It is better understood as a substance with capacities. Once you have that, the rest of the essay can follow quite naturally. Substances do not come to us with functions attached. They come with properties, powers, tendencies. Uses emerge from those. Practices emerge from those. Stable media emerge from those. That is already a more unified picture than the previous tool-versus-medium oscillation. But it is also risky. "Substance" can sound too grand, or too metaphysical, or just weird. So the essay needs to stabilise the term quickly. It cannot spend too long admiring the category. It has to say, in ordinary language, that iron is not for anything until practices and implements are built around it; oil was not discovered with its whole future attached to it; and perhaps LLMs are like that. That makes the category practical rather than scholastic. The real force of the substance line, I think, is methodological. That is what keeps it from sounding like hype. If the thing is a substance with latent capacities rather than a tool with a settled function, then Hoel's evaluative confidence becomes too quick. Not because he is stupid to look at writing. Writing is still the right place to look first. But because what you can infer from the state of public prose depends on what kind of thing you think you are measuring. If you think you are measuring a writing tool, then the lack of a text singularity looks decisive. If you think you are looking at an early and not yet well-understood substance whose first mass use has been low-grade textual production, then the same evidence looks different. It looks like early evidence about one tendency of the material, not like a final verdict on the thing itself. That means the oil analogy is absolutely central. In fact, it might be the hinge of the whole recalibrated essay. Hoel says: if LLMs were a true source of intelligence, discovering them should be like discovering oil. He means that oil was obviously transformative, whereas LLMs have not transformed writing in that way. But the response is that oil was not obviously everything it would become. There were phases. There were provisional uses. There were long stretches in which the scale of the discovery outran the social forms capable of actualising it. "Kerosene phase" is not just a nice line. It gives you a way of saying that early uses can be real, widespread, and yet still radically non-exhaustive. I also need to think about how the older medium material now slots in. I do not think medium disappears. Rather, it becomes secondary in a good way. The substance is the thing discovered; the medium is the form it takes when incorporated into a practice. That feels clean. It lets you preserve the pen comparison, the recursive prompting point, the Frippertronics analogy, and the artefact/working-surface distinction without having to pretend that "medium" is the first and final category. In the old structure, medium sometimes arrived like a rival thesis. In the new structure, it arrives as a clarification of how the substance gets used. What about software development? I think it belongs, but carefully. The danger is that the essay starts as a response to Hoel on writing and ends as an essay about coding. That would be a drift. So the software paragraph has to be late and explicitly methodological. Its role is to show another domain in which the right question is not "has the public output in this domain become globally better?" but "what kind of iterative practice has become possible, and what do competent users now do differently?" That supports the writing case without displacing it. And slop. The slop paragraph may actually be stronger now than before. Under the old structure, slop sometimes felt like a problem you had to domesticate. Under the new one, slop can be one of the substance's earliest and most socially visible tendencies. If the material generically smooths, averages, and rounds off, then of course one of the first large-scale consequences of mass uptake is a flood of dead prose. That does not tell against the substance thesis. It is evidence about how the substance behaves when used without resistance. So the task now is to produce an actual scaffold which embodies all that without lapsing back into commentary. That means each paragraph block must be something someone could genuinely draft from. The first bullet has to behave like a topic sentence. The later bullets have to be the prose thoughts that develop it. Not "say that..." Not "this paragraph should..." Just the actual claims. I should also keep the conclusion narrower than the body. The point is not to end with a flourish about metaphysics. The point is to bring the answer back to Hoel. He is right about the absence of a text singularity. He is right about slop. He is right that writing matters here. What is too quick is the move from those facts to the claim that LLMs are tools in the familiar sense. That is where the exact line you wanted should come back. If they are tools, they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". And on the new version, that line is no longer just a provocative conclusion. It is the threshold to the substance thought that the rest of the essay has now made intelligible. All right. That seems settled enough. I can now do the actual work. ## Final Answer You are right. The previous answer was still telling you how to write the plan. This is the plan itself. I am assuming that the opening paragraph and the first Hoel block quote remain exactly as they are. Everything below begins after that quote. Orienting passage: > 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. In each paragraph block below, the first bullet is the topic sentence. The later bullets are the supporting sub-bullets for that paragraph, and they are written as sentences that could actually go into the essay. 1. Paragraph 1 - Hoel's quote gives a sharper form to a thought that many people already have, namely that LLMs are tools, and that what has happened to writing already shows us what sort of tools they are. - That thought has force because it begins from something that feels almost too obvious to need saying. - We use these systems to do things; they sit at the keyboard with us; they produce outputs that can be taken up for further use; and so the category of tool seems to present itself without friction. - But I want to suggest that "tool" is one of those words that can make inquiry stop too early, because in this case it looks more settled than the object deserves. 2. Paragraph 2 - Hoel's opening image of the stone axe helps to explain why the category feels so natural in the first place. - The axe stands out from the surrounding stones as something made for use; he says that he "knew it was a tool instinctively", and that instinctive recognisability is not incidental to the frame of his essay. - From there he moves to *Homo faber*, to the thought that tools are our evolutionary niche, and finally to the present situation in which we live among "tools that can talk back to us". - Once that frame is in place, the question becomes whether LLMs belong with the long history of tool use, or whether the recent hype about intelligence explosion is tracking something more than that. - Hoel's answer is that they belong on the tool side of that contrast. 3. Paragraph 3 - I want to move from Hoel's point about recognisability to a nearby, but stronger, point about function. - In many of the cases that anchor our intuitions here, recognising the thing as a tool goes together with seeing, at least roughly, what it is for. - We do not need a theory of the object in order to answer that question. - We only need the sort of rough practical grip that lets us say: this is for hammering, or for searching, or for cutting, or for cleaning. - That is not yet Hoel's own claim. It is the pressure his opening picture puts on the present case. 4. Paragraph 4 - A useful term here is proper function. - By a thing's proper function I mean not any use to which it can be put, but the use in terms of which we ordinarily understand what that thing is. - A fork can hold down loose paper, and a heavy book can stop a door from closing, but those are not the uses that tell us what forks and books are. - Nor does the point disappear once the case becomes less simple. A Swiss Army knife has several proper functions, but not for that reason none. - Multifunctionality is not the difficulty. The difficulty arises when the ordinary question "what is this for?" no longer yields even a rough and stable answer. 5. Paragraph 5 - Once the question is put in those terms, ChatGPT is much harder to place than a fork, a vacuum cleaner, or Google. - If we say that it is for predicting the next token, we have shifted from use to mechanism. - If we say that it is for chatting, we have said something too thin to illuminate code generation, translation, summarisation, editing, and the rest. - If we say that it is for helping with tasks, we have said something so general that it scarcely individuates the thing at all. - And if we say that it is for writing, we have said something nearer the truth, but still not something exact enough to settle the matter. 6. Paragraph 6 - I want to be careful here and distinguish the suggestion I am making from a stronger one. - The point is not that LLMs cannot be tools in any sense whatsoever. - It is, rather, that they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - The force of the previous step is therefore classificatory hesitation rather than metaphysical victory. - The category begins to wobble not because these systems have many uses, but because the ordinary "this is for X" format no longer sits on them straightforwardly. 7. Paragraph 7 - And once that difficulty is in view, the next difficulty follows quickly enough. - If we do not know clearly what sort of thing this is, or what it is properly for, then we do not yet know clearly how it ought to be tested. - That does not show that no test is possible. - It shows, rather, that the choice of test is now part of the argument rather than something the object itself has already settled for us. - So when Hoel turns to writing as the privileged proving ground, that move requires more argument than it first appears to require. 8. Paragraph 8 - Hoel's turn to writing should be stated in its strongest form before anything else is said against it. - He is right that these systems are textual through and through: they are trained on language, they operate through language, and they return language. - That is why he can write that, for an LLM, words are "its womb, its mother, its literal atoms". - If these systems really were a new source of intelligence rather than a new family of tools, then writing is exactly where their character ought to have shown itself first and most vividly. - And Hoel's complaint is that it has not. 9. Paragraph 9 - What writing has given us, Hoel says, is not a glut of better prose but a dearth of it, together with efficiency gains, editing help, research help, and mountains of slop. - That observation has real weight, and I do not want to evade it. - Words are the most sensitive weathervane we have for these systems, precisely because words are their native material. - If there were going to be a "text singularity", this is where we should already have seen it. - Hoel's argument therefore has a genuine empirical bite, and the recalibrated essay should grant that rather than pretending otherwise. 10. Paragraph 10 - But I now want to suggest that the proper-function problem has been pointing us towards a different category altogether. - The reason the question "what is this for?" keeps failing is not merely that ChatGPT is unusually versatile. - It is that we may be trying to understand it under the wrong kind of description. - An LLM is not best understood as an implement with a function, but as a substance with capacities. - That is the stronger claim on which the rest of the essay depends. 11. Paragraph 11 - Substances are not ordinarily understood in terms of proper function. - Iron is not for anything in the way a hammer is for hammering; it has properties, and from those properties uses emerge. - Oil was not discovered with its future already attached to it. - A substance comes to us as a material with powers, tendencies, and possibilities, some of which are drawn out quickly and crudely, others only through more patient forms of use. - If LLMs are more like that than like a tool, then the failure of straightforward function-talk is no longer puzzling. 12. Paragraph 12 - The substance thought needs some content if it is not to remain a mere metaphor. - What LLMs seem to have are powers of pattern-completion, contextual pliability, associative reach, redescription, and iterative responsiveness, together with a strong tendency towards smoothing, flattening, and genericity. - That is not yet a list of uses. - It is the beginning of a material profile. - The point is that practices and uses emerge from these tendencies rather than being built into the thing as proper functions from the start. 13. Paragraph 13 - Hoel's oil analogy now becomes the hinge of the reply rather than something to be dodged. - He says that if LLMs were a true source of intelligence, discovering them should be like discovering oil. - But notice what discovering oil was actually like. - Oil did not arrive in the world with internal combustion, petrochemicals, and plastics already socially available as settled uses. - For a long time, much of what people had was kerosene. 14. Paragraph 14 - That is why I think the right reply to Hoel is that we may still be in the kerosene phase. - We have discovered a substance and found some early, obvious, and often low-grade uses for it. - In the LLM case, those uses include mass-producing dead emails, flattening public prose, accelerating mediocre drafting, and providing genuinely useful but still fairly local help with feedback, editing, and research. - None of that is nothing. - But none of it yet shows that we have learned what this stuff is for, because that may not yet be the right question to ask. 15. Paragraph 15 - I want to be careful here and distinguish this suggestion from a hypey one. - The claim is not that hidden marvels are guaranteed to emerge if only we wait long enough. - The claim is methodological rather than prophetic. - Hoel's argument assumes that the history is already settled, that we already know what sort of thing this is, and that public writing therefore gives us the right final measure of it. - The substance picture denies that presupposition. 16. Paragraph 16 - Once the substance thought is in place, the category of medium can be introduced more cleanly than before. - A substance becomes a medium when its capacities are taken up into a practice. - Oil is a substance; oil painting is a medium. - Pigment is a substance; painting is a medium. - On this picture, the LLM is the substance, and the recursive exchange of text through which people learn to work with it is the medium beginning to form around it. 17. Paragraph 17 - The pen comparison now does sharper work than it did under the older tool/medium structure. - A pen extends inscription, but it does not return altered material. - It does not answer with a misreading, a flattening of a distinction, a banal reformulation, or an unexpectedly revealing continuation that I now have to grapple with. - Its role ends where my inscription begins. - An LLM enters the practice precisely at the point where language comes back changed. 18. Paragraph 18 - When I use an LLM well, the exchange is not one-way. - I put in a rough distinction, a question, a paragraph, a half-made objection, or some other piece of unfinished thought, and what returns is that material recast through the model's own habits of association, smoothing, compression, and redescription. - Sometimes the result is merely dead. Sometimes it is wrong in an unhelpful way. But sometimes it sharpens a contrast, exposes a weakness, or opens a path that had not yet become visible to me. - The return does not merely record the next move. - It can help to form it. 19. Paragraph 19 - That is why the line that the return prompts us back has to be treated as more than a good phrase. - The point is not simply that the system gives me more text. - The point is that the text comes back bearing a pressure that can redirect the inquiry itself: by over-generalising where I need precision, by misreading where I need to restate, by flattening a distinction I now have to save, or by surfacing a possibility I had not yet seen. - We prompt the system, but the system's return prompts us back. - That recursive structure is what the simpler image of tool use misses. 20. Paragraph 20 - Once that recursive structure is in view, the distinction between artefact and working surface begins to matter. - Sometimes text is the finished artefact: an essay, a book, a review, an email, a post that is meant to stand before readers on its own. - But text can also be a working surface on which thought is tested, reformulated, resisted, sharpened, and sent back for another pass before any finished artefact exists at all. - Hoel's evidence concerns, by and large, the first of these. - Much of the interesting LLM practice concerns the second. 21. Paragraph 21 - That is why "has writing improved?" is too blunt a question, even though it is not a foolish one. - It presupposes that the relevant success condition is improvement in the quality of the end-product. - But a great deal of LLM use treats text not as an endpoint but as material for exploratory work, for reformulation, for navigation through an unfamiliar space, and for the iterative adjustment of an inquiry. - In that respect the public artefact can remain mediocre while the practice around it changes quite a lot. - That is not an evasion of Hoel's evidence. It is a different account of what the evidence is evidence of. 22. Paragraph 22 - Something similar can be seen in software development, and that is why I think the coding comparison belongs here rather than at the start. - The interesting question there is not whether code as a whole has obviously become better in some public average sense. - It is what developers can now do: how quickly they can enter unfamiliar libraries, how cheaply they can test an idea, how easily they can move around within a space of possibilities that would otherwise have remained too costly to explore. - That is a case in which competent use is itself a learned practice rather than the passive acceptance of first outputs. - It gives a methodological analogue for the writing case without replacing the writing case. 23. Paragraph 23 - The Frippertronics comparison now has a clear place. - What returns from the tape loop is neither simply what went in nor something wholly alien to it; it is one's own material sent back transformed, and the next act is made in light of that transformed return. - I think something structurally similar happens in good LLM use, even though the material here is language rather than sound. - The point is not that the products are the same. - The point is that the making depends on return, alteration, and re-entry into the next move. 24. Paragraph 24 - None of this requires me to deny Hoel's insistence on slop. - On the contrary, the substance picture gives us a sharper way of understanding why slop has been so visible. - If this material has strong tendencies towards smoothing, averaging, and generic completion, then one of the first large-scale social consequences of its adoption was always likely to be a flood of dead prose. - Public textual slop may therefore be exactly what we should expect when the substance is taken up under weak conditions, at speed, and with too little resistance. - That is not evidence against the substance view. It is part of the evidence for how the substance behaves. 25. Paragraph 25 - Hoel is therefore right about a great deal. - He is right that there has been no text singularity. - He is right that public prose matters. - He is right that efficiency and scale have so far been more visible than any civilisation-wide increase in quality. - But those facts do not yet settle what sort of thing an LLM is. 26. Paragraph 26 - My conclusion, then, is not that Hoel has chosen the wrong phenomenon, but that he has described the phenomenon too quickly. - Writing is indeed where the case first becomes visible, and words really are the native material of these systems. - But if LLMs are better understood as substances with latent capacities than as tools with settled functions, then the current state of public writing cannot yet be the last word on what they are. - They may still be tools. But if they are, they are "a quite different type of tool, or not quite a type of tool at all". - We may still be learning what this substance can do, what practices it can sustain, and what kind of medium it becomes when its powers are elicited rather than merely sampled at their lowest and easiest setting. This is the actual scaffold. If you want the next pass, I can now do one of two sharply bounded things: either compress this into a tighter 14–18 paragraph version, or turn paragraphs 10–26 into a more essayistic register while keeping the same argumentative sequence. *Qui la mossa decisiva è trattare gli LLM non come utensili già capiti, ma come una sostanza le cui potenze vengono fuori solo attraverso pratiche ancora in formazione.*