Zilong Liang / Hack Notes on Dec 28, 2025
Paul Graham’s post on X about writing. I started writing recently (as you can probably tell), so I’ve been reading a lot about it. What’s interesting are the comments under this post. People are sharing their own thoughts on writing, and many are surprisingly inspiring. Reading them makes me feel less alone in my writing journey.
I just added a new note type called “quote notes”. Quote notes share quotes from books, articles, and other sources, sometimes with my own commentary.
Here’s the commit: zlliang/zlliang@4a7ee22. I also updated the relevant descriptions in Starting a Tech Blog at the End of 2025.
I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard thinking.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well
William wrote this in 2006. Nearly 20 years later, LLMs have made producing text easier than ever — yet concerns about AI-generated junk are growing too. Good writing remains rare and precious. It still needs to be written and rewritten, again and again, by humans.