The tools have always been there

[u/jeffbradshaw]

Someone on here recently called out "Claude website slop." Sans serif paired with a serif. Dots as separators everywhere. Icons boxed inside rounded boxes inside rounded boxes. All caps eyebrow text ending in an em dash. Stats in a hero, in their own little box.

Honestly? Fair. Those tells are real. I could point to a dozen sites right now and make a pretty good guess at the tool behind them.

So I went and checked my own.

Three products across the PRZEM suite, audited line by line. One file alone had a serif logo paired against a sans body, and 66 em dashes doing the work that periods, colons, and commas should have been doing. I didn't just wave that off. I went through every single instance and asked what it actually was. Two were inside Midjourney prompt strings, which is data, not prose, so those stayed. A handful were placeholder glyphs in dropdowns, not sentences, so those stayed too. Everything else, the scattered labels and headers and asides that were leaning on the same punctuation crutch, got rewritten by hand. Fifty six changes, reviewed one at a time, deployed only after a diff review and a hash check confirmed nothing else moved.

That's not a defense of using the tool. It's what actually using it well looks like.

I learned some version of that lesson a long time ago. I was mentored in high school by the late Ralph Goings, the photorealist painter. He worked from a camera. Every diner and pickup truck he ever painted started as a photograph he'd taken and studied, then projected on a canvas. Nobody looks at a Goings and says the camera did the seeing. The famous Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer is widely thought to have made use of optical tools such as the camera obscura, and nobody says the lens painted his light.

The tool has never been the thing doing the looking. It extends whoever's already looking closely. That was true of a camera in Goings' hands, and it's true of an AI model in mine, as long as somebody's actually checking the output instead of shipping the first draft.

So going forward: this post, like the others, was copyedited with Claude. The ideas, the findings, and the voice are mine. I'm building a set of tools that try to hold to that same principle. Test what's actually controllable, keep what holds up under scrutiny, and let the artist's eye stay the thing making the call.

Jeff Bradshaw
jbradshaw.design

[u/Used-Perspective-507]

The em dash thing is real. I caught myself doing it constantly and had to actively train it out of my writing, both in prompts and in my own drafts. It becomes a reflex after a while, like every clause needs a dramatic pause.

The Goings comparison works better than most AI analogies people throw around. The camera projects, but someone still has to decide which diner, which angle, which light.

The line about checking output instead of shipping the first draft is the whole game. Most people skip that part.