Fair, and I think this is the most interesting feedback here, especially because I made the same observation in the blog post itself:
> One of these caught me. `validateHypotheticalHooks` flagged the opening of a paragraph I was certain I’d written myself — and I had. But reading it back cold, it did sound ghost-authored; I’d absorbed the cadence from reading too much generated text and produced a fluent imitation of nothing.
As for the book, "trust me, I'm human" isn't going to cut it here (we literally prove humanity on the internet by training robots to act more like humans). As I posted earlier in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337307), most of the book's chapters began as blog posts that I've published for over a decade, well before AI slop came into the picture. The book is those, refined. 2026 me can't Terminator myself into creating a retroactive paper trail.
And thanks for the feedback. Human Ben is going to take another pass at the post and rewrite those you flagged so that they don't take away from the message.
Fair. The project originally started as "turn my blog into a book", with a 1:1 mapping of blog post to chapter. I got feedback early on that that wasn't landing, but if you compare the outline on the book site to my blog archive, the original posts are still there.
Chapters built on an earlier post making the same argument:
- Why everything should have a URL → "Why URLs?" (2015) + "Expose process through URLs" (2014)
- Speak like a human → "Write corporate blog posts as a human" (2015)
- Optimize for developer happiness → "On stickers and optimizing for happiness" (2015)
- The zen of open and async work → "The zen of GitHub" (2015)
- Lead like an engineer → "Manage like an engineer" (2023)
- Rethinking management for remote teams → "Deprecate management" (2012) + "Cathedral–bazaar management" (2023)
- Retool your documents → "Word vs. Markdown" (2014) + "We've been trained to make paper" (2012)
- The etiquette of issues and pull requests → "Types of pull requests" (2015) + "Pull requests are a form of documentation" (2023)
- Showing colleagues they're valued → "Three easy ways to show employees you appreciate them" (2017)
- Choosing the right collaboration tools → "Tools of the trade" (2020)
- What I wish I knew before going remote → "Eight things I wish I knew my first week at GitHub" (2016)
- Career conversations → "The brag doc" (2026)
- Intro to software development for non-technical roles → "GitHub for non-technical roles" (2023)
And chapters that are near-verbatim descendants of a named post:
- Leaders show their work → "Leaders show their work" (2022)
- Work loudly → "Work loudly" (2026)
- Meetings are a point of escalation → "Meetings are a point of escalation" (2023)
- The Andon principle for knowledge work → "Transparency & collaboration is the Andon of knowledge production" (2023)
- Engaging with dissent → "Dissenting voices" (2024)
- How to 1:1 → "One-on-one playbook" (2026)
- Agentic workflows → "Agentic workflows" (2026)
- Why you should work asynchronously → "Why async" (2022)
Interesting, I'm curious how much you think lessons and practices from say, 2012 or 2014 are holding up so far in a rapidly changing post-AI environment. That would be my next concern as a potential buyer.
I think as a proof-of-concept that a book and its marketing campaign can be executed from start to finish with a programmatic, automated approach, it's an interesting piece. It seems to be listed on multiple outlets, I'm curious how much that part of the process was able to be handled by agents vs being done manually. I would almost be more interested in a book about this process than the actual book.
And I do recommend applying a much stronger human-in-the-loop editing process to any material meant to market this book (and of course the book itself). Prior experience and taste are all we have left in this new era.
> I'm curious how much you think lessons and practices from say, 2012 or 2014 are holding up so far in a rapidly changing post-AI environment.
I didn't touch too much on AI in the book itself (since it's changing so quickly), but it was interesting to reflect that the fundamentals of 2012/2014 (Markdown, URLs, APIs, etc.) carry double the weight when we start thinking about machine readability.
> It seems to be listed on multiple outlets, I'm curious how much that part of the process was able to be handled by agents vs being done manually.
Entirely manual, and I suspect that's by design. I've never published a book before, so I did ask (non-agentic) AI questions about the process (should I use service X or service Y, should I do a pre-sale, etc.).
> And I do recommend applying a much stronger human-in-the-loop editing process to any material meant to market this book (and of course the book itself).
100% human in the loop. I wanted the public-facing presence to be reader-centric, not marketing/author centric, which I felt was the norm LLMs are trained on.
> Prior experience and taste are all we have left in this new era.
+100. I held the book to a much higher standard than I do musing I randomly post on the internet that hardly anyone reads. (I didn't expect this to get so much attention). I'm going to take another pass at both the post and the site tonight. Thanks for the feedback.
Nice! My rule (pre-AI) had always been never force a human to do what a robot can. If you can automate yourself out of your least favorite part of your job, that's a win for both you and your employer. You can move on to more meaningful work, or in some environments, just leave early. Reminds me of that old xkcd about the tradeoff in time between doing something manually vs. automating it.
Glad to inspire. That was the point of the post. For the record, I never made any guarantees that the book (or the website) was any good. Software or prose, you can have the most pristine build pipeline in the world, but "garbage in, garbage out" as they say.
I've gotten that feedback before. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer.
Full disclosure, a few months back when I had some tokens expiring, I had Copilot spike out a draft to see if there was anything "there" worth writing. If you check the revision history (linked from the bottom of the post), I did a full (human) blank page rewrite three days ago and then only used Claude for line edits like adding links or fixing failing lints.
Your own descriptive comment got downvoted and the only other comment I see is bashing you.
It seems you rub people the wrong way, but so far I'm scratching my head as to why you're receiving this degree of hate. Is this common for you? Does someone have a vendetta against you?
I think you’re way off. Hate is absurd, I don’t even know him. He’s automatically being downvoted for hyping his own product on HN, although he’s certainly not plugging it too hard.
Partially licensing, but also tokens + efficiency. As noted above, the book is written for humans (anecdotes, examples, etc.). Robots just need the facts and can extrapolate. If I were building a hosted service, a custom LLM with embeddings would probably beat both approaches.
This was my first "real" MCP server (previously I made an MCP server to control a Furby for GitHub Universe) and I learned a lot. A few things I learned (not an expert):
* Tool vs. Resource: Does it compute or does it serve
* Prompts -> Tools
* Deterministic vs. Probabilistic is a choice per tool
> One of these caught me. `validateHypotheticalHooks` flagged the opening of a paragraph I was certain I’d written myself — and I had. But reading it back cold, it did sound ghost-authored; I’d absorbed the cadence from reading too much generated text and produced a fluent imitation of nothing.
As for the book, "trust me, I'm human" isn't going to cut it here (we literally prove humanity on the internet by training robots to act more like humans). As I posted earlier in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337307), most of the book's chapters began as blog posts that I've published for over a decade, well before AI slop came into the picture. The book is those, refined. 2026 me can't Terminator myself into creating a retroactive paper trail.
And thanks for the feedback. Human Ben is going to take another pass at the post and rewrite those you flagged so that they don't take away from the message.