Should LLMs Write FOSS Books?

I flagged all of your submissions because they're low-quality and you're spamming the site. You've submitted four of these just today.

> I'm not trying to claim it as my own.

This is from the flag-killed Lisp submission:

>> About the Author

>> This book was written by someone who believes that Lisp is not just a programming language but a notation for expressing thought, and that parentheses are not obstacles but wings that let your code fly.

You are absolutely claiming it as your own, there is no mention of LLMs, Claude, or AI generating this content. The only hint that claude is involved in this is in the Git repository details themselves, but both commits are from you, not from claude.

> my Claude Code written book

> I carefully craft and review these

> I'm not trying to claim it as my own

I'm confused, is it your book, or not?

here's an idea. you call it a "FOSS book"? OK, treat writing it like an open-source project.

start a public GitHub repo. have your chatbot generate chapter 1. commit it to the repo, and in the commit message document the LLM prompt you used. "you are an established author writing a book called Teach Yourself Quantum Computing in 24 Hours" or whatever.

then, whatever "careful" edits you make manually to that LLM output, do those as separate commits/PRs. show your work. the LLM is going to hallucinate and get subtle details wrong, your role as a human co-author is theoretically to be a subject-matter expert and catch those mistakes.

My first one even captured the banter with the LLM: https://github.com/cloudstreet-dev/React-is-Awful/blob/main/...

I often tell Claude Code: "You're an author writing about..." and really dial in the content. When it says it was written by an author who _blank_, that author is a combination of my prompts and Opus 4.1's generated output. I would argue that there is a place for guides, opinions, and more from our LLM friends, and I don't make a penny telling you that or sharing what I've generated. I create these kinds of works because I value them, and the stars on the github repo tell me other people value them too. Take, for example "React is Awful" with over 300 stars. It fills a gap in the learning space, and is CC0. You can OPEN A PR if it's wrong about something, or contribute more. Seemed pretty chill to me.

I mean, AI generated content on HN is against the guidelines. I don't know if there are more recent statements by our fearless mods on it, but this is a well-known one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747

So linking to an AI-generated book may not be the same situation, so technically not against the rules... but probably is against the spirit of the site, so is probably not going to be appreciated by the community.

Just trying to be a good community member here. What are your thoughts?