# There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text by Sophie Alpert

> For the complete site index, see [llms.txt](https://danny.is/llms.txt)

https://sophiebits.com/2026/06/25/there-are-no-lossless-transformations-of-natural-language-text

> It’s my hope that one day better AI tools might be able to help us think, but until then I fear that using AI to write does the exact opposite.
> 
> **Good writing is a tool to clearly communicate ideas from your brain into someone else’s**.

(my bold)

These are good rules for using AI in this context, and echo some of the rules and principles I've found myself writing in the past for *humans* working in distributed companies.

- You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs.
- Writing is thinking.
- More time should be spent authoring a document than consuming it.
- Longer is not better.

> There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text — every rewrite and rephrase changes the meaning of your writing, and if this is done by an entity that doesn’t have the most detailed mental representation of what you personally were trying to communicate, information will be lost. Readers will appreciate hearing your thoughts, even at the expense of supposed “polish”.