Hand-Written Long-Form Still Thrives | Generated by AI
Question: Do people still write long-form blog posts entirely by hand, or does basically everyone now use AI at least for grammar fixes and heavy assistance?
Answer:
Yes, plenty of people still write long-form content largely by hand — but the population has split into distinct camps, and it’s worth understanding why each exists.
The hand-writers who persist. Writers like Gwern, Dan Luu, Simon Willison (mostly), and many Substack essayists still draft primarily themselves. Their reasoning is usually one of these: (1) writing is thinking — the struggle of composing a sentence is where the insight gets forged, and outsourcing it produces text without producing understanding; (2) voice is the product — readers subscribe to a specific mind, and AI smoothing flattens the idiosyncrasies that make the writing worth reading; (3) trust signaling — as AI-generated content floods the web, “clearly human, slightly rough” prose is becoming a credibility marker, almost like a handmade label.
The AI-assisted majority. You’re right that this is now the default for most technical bloggers, especially non-native English speakers. The common workflow: draft messy → LLM pass for grammar/clarity → human re-edit to restore voice. For someone like you writing in English as a second language, this is pure leverage — it removes the friction tax without removing the thinking. Karpathy himself has said he uses LLMs heavily for drafting and editing.
The fully-generated tier. SEO content farms and low-effort newsletters. This tier is collapsing in value — Google’s updates and reader fatigue are punishing it, which ironically strengthens the position of the first two camps.
The interesting dynamic for your situation: since your blog and notes site are your brand (AI · Truth), the calculus isn’t “AI or not” — it’s about where the thinking visibly lives. Your ~8,000 AI-answer notes are explicitly AI-collaborative and that’s honest and fine. But for the ~400 blog posts that carry your voice and attract high-end clients, the highest-value pattern is: your ideas, your structure, your rough draft — AI only for grammar and tightening. Readers (and potential clients) can increasingly smell fully-generated prose, and for a personal brand built on truth-seeking, that smell is expensive. Grammar-fix passes are invisible; ghost-written arguments are not.
So: long-form hand-writing isn’t dead, it’s becoming a differentiator. AI assistance is nearly universal for polishing, and there’s no shame in it — the line that matters is whether the thinking is yours.