Which Design Doc Did a Human Write?

Summary

The answer🔗How’d you do?Which version did readers think was AI?🔗Before writing this post, I surveyed my readers to see if they could spot the human version from among the three options.Just under 50% thought my version was the human-written one, beating the other versions by a 2:1 margin. Still, I was surprised that 1 in 4 readers judged my hand-written doc as “Definitely AI.”What made me obviously human🔗When readers guessed about which docs were AI-generated, I invited them to submit comments about what informed their guesses.The biggest giveaway of me being a human was that I expressed more personal opinions and shared details based on experience:It contained anecdotal experience (eg. in the Architecture section) and is a lot more personal than the other variants.Versions A and C almost never portray any autonomy ie; “I think” or “We’ll”.There aren’t really too many links in the other entries whereas there are a couple tangents in B like the John McAfee VICE link for exampleOther readers pointed out that the way I presented architecture and interface choices felt distinctly human:The User Interface ToC headings (and the ToC headings generally) feel human oriented (as far as how you’d think about actions) instead of just saying “View” which is technically correct but I personally would be less inclined to talk like that for non-business software (ie; for “home baked” software)Architecture’s headings are a sort of ordered chaos where they make sense as far as useful groupings to build up a mental model in someone else’s head but purely in terms of “categories”, it doesn’t make any sense because they’re all different “shapes” so it feels more human.My version also made unusual technology and licensing choices like NixCI and the PolyForm-Noncommercial license, whereas AI tends to stick with whatever’s most popular:there are a few technological decisions that imply a certain tech stack. For example choosing NixCI implies that the author is confident in writing NixOnce ...