Can Opus 4.8 Be Used to Edit Technical Articles? | Tech Stackups

Skip to main content<br>Commercial content creation and production have been subsumed by the tsunami that is generative AI. For writers and editors in this space, it hasn’t really been a case of “If you don’t use AI you’ll get left behind,” but rather, “You’re coming with us whether you like it or not.” (Thanks, big tech.)

Obviously, writing and editing processes have changed accordingly, with companies now expecting writers and editors to use AI as part of their workflows. This also means that expectations of delivery timeframes have changed: writers are expected to churn out far more work in far less time, at the same high standards as before.

For a technical writing company, this raises an obvious question: If we needed to produce more content more rapidly, how effectively can (and should) we use agentic AI to edit technical articles?

A few caveats upfront:​

I’m not a fan of using AI. Quite the opposite. And yet, I find myself bumping up against it no matter which way I turn to get away from it in this fast-paced digital world. “No ethical existence under capitalism,” I mutter sadly to myself as I plug prompts into Claude.

I believe there is still room for ethical creation under capitalism. For this reason, (and this may sound ironic and/or hypocritical, given the subject matter here), I don’t use AI to write my articles.<br>I’ve done my best to be as objective as I can about the end result of this task.

With that said, the point of this article was to determine to what extent the most advanced Anthropic model could function as an agentic editor on a technical, code-heavy piece of long-form writing.

The initial idea was to perform this task with Fable; I didn’t get very far with that, however, before the US government unceremoniously restricted foreign access to the model one day after release. After that, it made sense to move one rung down to the next model available on Claude Code: Opus 4.8.

Pre-conceived notions​

My opinion based on previous experience is that AI-generated writing is bland and devoid of personality, capable of saying a lot of nothing very confidently. (Like a politician, really.) If you ask it to take on a certain tone or capture a specific character’s voice, it will quickly run out of unique ways to construct sentences.

A quick demo on that point: I asked Sonnet 4.6 to write me a manifesto on why food is more important than anything else, in the voice of Son Goku. But even when taking on the distinctive verbal mannerisms of a character whose entire dialogue Claude has access to, the “AI-isms” cannot help but creep in. (That’s not a coincidence. That’s just predictable.)

And it doesn’t matter how comprehensive or precise your prompt is: eventually, the output will default back to that now-familiar clipped rhythm and self-aggrandising tone that makes you want to pull your eyeballs out and toss them at the screen.

This was definitely the case with models prior to Fable. I’d argue that, to an extent, it’s still the case with writing generated by Fable. Although it doesn’t contain the same language patterns symptomatic of writing generated by less advanced models, there are still certain beats that, over time, would likely start being flagged as new “AI tells”. One sample isn’t enough for me to tell, but where Opus and prior had “It’s not X, it’s Y” and a mic-drop cadence, Fable might end up being identifiable by a very rigidly academic tone. Because ultimately, when it comes to writing, AI can only draw from a limited data set. Humans can generate thoughts beyond that ceiling; LLMs can only work under it.

Editing with Opus 4.8​

I began with an article explaining how to use Better Auth with for Bryntum Gantt Charts. I started by asking Claude Code to flag structural flaws, grammatical flaws, and logical issues, as well as instructions that were unclear, inaccurate, or not contextualised for the reader.

I started with this request because these are the first issues we look for during a developmental edit. Does the piece make sense as a whole? Is there a clear introduction, middle, and conclusion? Is there consistent signposting for the reader? Are there points that are introduced but never concluded? Is there a steady flow of logic that runs through the text? By addressing these concerns, we can ensure that a piece of writing has both substance and sense.

The reason I asked Claude to identify issues and not make the corrections itself is simply that I didn’t trust it to make good choices. I also wanted to see if it would identify the issues I was looking for, whether it would flag any false negatives, or whether it would simply list a few surface-level features.

What Claude flagged​

I will admit (begrudgingly) that Opus performed better than I’d wanted it to. It identified the following sets of issues:

1. Potential issues with the code​

In this case, having Claude on hand would be useful for a technical...