What Is AI Good At?
PostsWhat is AI good at?By Scott Robinson·July 18, 2026<style>.lazyload-placeholder { display: none; }</style>AI is great at coding and mediocre at writing for the same reason: most useful code is really about pattern reuse and most good writing is not. Both code and essays are just text, but code has to follow exact rules while an essay can be written countless ways. You might expect a language model to be better at the less constrained task.
- ▪PostsWhat is AI good at?By Scott Robinson·July 18, 2026<style>.lazyload-placeholder { display: none; }</style>AI is great at coding and mediocre at writing for the same reason: most useful code is really about pattern reuse and most good wr
- ▪Both code and essays are just text, but code has to follow exact rules while an essay can be written countless ways.
- ▪You might expect a language model to be better at the less constrained task.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
PostsWhat is AI good at?By Scott Robinson·July 18, 2026<style>.lazyload-placeholder { display: none; }</style>AI is great at coding and mediocre at writing for the same reason: most useful code is really about pattern reuse and most good writing is not. At first, this might seem backwards. Both code and essays are just text, but code has to follow exact rules while an essay can be written countless ways. You might expect a language model to be better at the less constrained task. In practice, those constraints are actually part of what makes coding easier for AI. I've been thinking about this quite a bit since this tweet, so I figured I'd put some thoughts on paper (keyboard?). Coding and writing require very different things.
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