March 18, 2026
Great writing may be the last refuge of human superiority on models. It's quite surprising to me that we still detect fairly well AI slop vs great writing but have all, as software engineers, accepted AI generated code as the new norm.
We used to pride ourselves in our craft, sometimes even comparing code to an art or poetry. Let's be honest. It didn't take long for us to jump on the bandwagon and flood our codebases with agent generated code while enforcing very minimal (no) style oversight.
Hypothesis A: Coding style was just an illusion all along and we never really cared.
Hypothesis B: Engineers are lazier than they care for style.
Hypothesis C: Good code style is correlated to correctness and models post-training/RL on coding tasks allow emergence of strong coding style.
It's likely a mix of all three. But assuming C has some truth to it, contrary to code, most writing tasks are hard to tie to a verifiable outcome which may prevent models from hill-climbing towards strong writing style, lacking a definite signal to reinforce against.
(Now I wonder if models' writing style is less sloppy when generating informal maths proofs since this is a unique setup where the modality is "English" but models are heavily RL-ed on tasks that have verifiable outcomes (maths exercises with numerical answers))[0].
Not only do we (still) (hopefully) outperform models when it comes to writing but it is also becoming an increasingly critical skill to structure one's thoughts as we get more and more removed from the iterative crafting process. We used to expect from engineers great code, we are increasingly expecting from them great write-ups to frame and shape a problem for humans and agents alike. At a more micro level, interacting with agents (hence most of coding in 2026) is writing, and arguably, the better our writing is, the more efficient our agentic coding sessions should be.
I made the point in "No flow is the new flow"[1] that agentic coding deprived software engineers from the state of flow that was so dear to their hearts. Maybe the new flow for us is writing. Great authentic human writing.
[0] The $1b question is what hill-climb leads to
em-dashes?
[1]
https://spolu.sh/notes/20260311_no_flow_is_the_new_flow.html