I apologize ahead of time, what follows has no tooling applied to it. No grammar checks, no AI, and no edit passes for flow. It might be a bit rough, but that's important.
For those who know me, I've written hundreds of articles over the last 8 years. I realized very early into my journey of creating SolidJS that education was going to be a fundamental barrier. React's rhetoric had consumed the frontend space in such way that the discussion of different ideas was not welcomed warmly. It may have started with the ideas, but the complexity of the move to modern tooling had left many feeling overwhelmed. The term "JavaScript Fatigue" was being thrown around, and those who didn't sneak in before 2016 were subject to it.
My early writing was rough. I mean really rough. I'd try to articulate my ideas, but they were hard to translate. It wasn't that I didn't have decent command of the English language. I always had done well in school. But the ideas I wanted to articulate extended past code examples. They borrowed from years of observations and cross discipline learning. It would take the span of a whole article for me to get my point across and it was really easy to get lost in the details.
It didn't help that I wrote like I talked. Which is rather disjointed. When I used to type messages on ICQ and MSN back in the day I'd keep thumbing the "." as a way to convey to the recipient the pacing. The more "..." the longer the pause. I had needed to communicate at work, obviously and had gotten used to rewriting my emails on average three times so that I could cut out things that were unnecessary.
So I published my earlier articles on Medium in 2018 and fortunately for me, the early Solid community on Gitter and Spectrum started providing me edits. This pattern of reviewing my articles with the community never went away. Most of my articles today still appear in the Solid Discord days before publishing.
At some point, a community member suggested I pick up Grammarly. Honestly, it was such a huge help. I always skipped words and commas in certain places. Given I had the free tier it would also hint when I phrased something a lot oddly so I could at least give a shot at rewriting it.
This was better but honestly it fixed less than you would think. I wasn't falling into the simple traps. But the writing wasn't really anymore clear. The big break through there was when I started getting my work published through online publications. Specifically, "Angular in Depth" in 2019 time period. They were really supportive of my content but they saw that it was missing the audience.
I remember at one point @layzee sat down with me and picked through an article with me showing me how to break my writing up into more paragraphs. I was accustomed to having a paragraph express what I considered a complete idea. That meant 6-8 run-on sentences. He was like no more than 3. Give them a break to sit with what you just told them. Add spacing and images to your articles for the same reason.
I didn't like this much at first because it made my articles longer. Too long as far as I thought. But it also forced me to really focus on what I wanted to say. I'd need to do one editing pass to break things up and another to eliminate the cruft.
At this point, Solid was picking up steam, and there were others in the community that were interested in seeing us succeed. Some of you may not know but Theo Browne (T3.gg) reviewed many of my articles during the 2020-2022 time period. He had a lot less tolerance for sentences that didn't flow and he would go through and gut all my unnecessary phrasing. All the "And ...", "In fact", "But Honestly", "Actually..", "Simply put,". He emphasized it didn't add anything. By doing that I was able to save those for when I wanted to make a real impact.
So that gives you some insight into where my writing process was through the end of 2025. I'd write something rough, do multiple passes myself, run it through Grammarly, feed it to the Solid community. Have feedback, then pass it to a few specific reviewers (although some like Theo were getting too busy to look at my work regularly). And half a dozen people and twice as many hours later we had an article.
Now I never prompted an LLM intentionally before the end of 2025. As I have noted in previous articles, I was an AI laggard. Sure Gemini results would show up on a Google search. And I had dabbled with some image generation for Articles/Streams. But I did not use Chat LLMs directly at all. Funny enough, since late 2023 I had noticed two phenomena.
First, absolute garbage articles quoting my work in like "Best JavaScript Frameworks to use in 2023". At first I thought these were just low effort marketing articles. Some of them probably were. But after a while I came to recognize these as AI generated.
Second, people coming on to my articles and accusing them as being AI generated. My response would be, "Did you read the article?" There is no way AI makes that argument. But the general feedback was that the articles were vague because they tried to pack too much into a small space. And the move between macro and micro details was disorienting. Ironically my trademark writing style because it was born out of necessity.
I mostly pushed both of these aside. What had always mattered was the content. Those two couldn't be more obviously different. Even if I did my own yearly JavaScript summaries, any one with half a brain could tell the difference. My articles had takes that existed nowhere else and provided a deep insight.
I was working on Solid 2.0. High-level design stuff late 2025 and I decided to give LLMs a try. Not for coding just to talk through the problem and see if they had an insight. I believe GPT 5.3 was out but I was just using CoPilot for free which was on 5.1. I found the process very frustrating because it kept losing details. I realized pretty quickly I needed to have it write things down.
As I got more excited about formalizing these designs I got AI to write short explainers about what we had talked about so that I could share them in Discord. This was very helpful since my HackMDs I had been writing were cryptic and people could immediately understand what I was talking about this way. Maybe not deeply but the gist of it.
Summaries of really high level stuff. The thing I was particularly bad at writing. It was very common in the Solid community for people to post AI written summaries on my writing since no one seemed to get what I was saying and I didn't have time to clarify while working on cutting edge things.