Mechanical fluency

"It isn't 𝐗. It's 𝐘."

“Mechanical fluency” captures something essential about how LLMs write—they produce text that flows smoothly and follows linguistic patterns perfectly, but in a way that feels automated rather than intentional. It’s fluency without the human struggle.

When humans write fluently, there’s still friction—we pause, search for the right word, revise our thoughts mid-sentence. That friction often signals where meaning lives, where the writer is wrestling with ideas. LLMs bypass this entirely. They generate syntactically perfect prose that follows all the rules of good writing, but the smoothness itself becomes uncanny.

The mechanical aspect isn’t just about the technical process—it’s about how the output feels. Like watching a player piano perform Chopin: technically perfect, but missing the hesitations and emphasis that reveal interpretation. The LLM hits every grammatical note correctly, maintains consistent tone, follows narrative structure, but it does so with an evenness that human writing rarely achieves.

This creates a strange tension. We’ve been trained to equate fluency with competence, with having something meaningful to say. But mechanical fluency inverts this—the very smoothness that should signal mastery instead signals something hollow. It’s fluency as performance rather than expression.

That’s what makes the meaning excavation project interesting. If we can’t rely on the traditional markers of intent that come from writing struggle, we need new ways to detect where the actual semantic weight lies beneath the polished surface.

—

To be meta I wrote the above definition using Claude. As more of the text that we read in the world is written my language models, I am worried that language itself with start to smoothen. Our tools shape us and our writing is at risk of become optimized for easy consumption rather than communication.

I’m still trying to figure out if there is a place for this tool in my writing practice. For now I’m happy with the way it helps me frame and unravel the ball of yarn that is my thoughts. It helps me feel untangled, lighter and free to weave together the strands of my ideas.

-Mello