The McPhee method sounds like a great framework for making writing prompts. That is, prompts for LLMs to write things.
>in stage one he accumulates notes; in stage two he selects them; in stage three he structures them; and in stage four he writes. By the time he is crafting sentences the structure of the piece as a whole, and of each section, even paragraph, and the logic connecting them all, is already determined, thanks to the mechanical work done in the first three stages. McPhee is on rails the whole time he writes his first draft. From there it’s all downhill and the standard thing that everybody does: revision, revision again, then refinement—a sculptor with ax, then knife, then scalpel.
I know hackernews kinda hates LLMs but I don think this idea has to be so offensive. Much of the work and value from the author is in collecting these fragments and structuring them. Purely from a communication standpoint, I have no issues whatsoever with an LLM stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar.
> Your writing can only be as good as your taste.
That is, using an LLM to help with "collecting these fragments and structuring them" might be okay--should the writer still be able to deeply immerse--but the "stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar" of a faux writer LLM is likely to leave a bad taste in the mind of some readers (e.g. those HN types who "kinda hates LLMs").
If you are motivated enough to write Apple Shortcuts a useful trick for ~Find type actions that overload is to Filter them into reassemblable pieces eg
action find items from reading list filter Title begins with A (then do B etc)
that this trick often works would be due to the internal nature of the Shortcuts implementation problems, so YMMV