Why We Publish Our Raw Drafts — 0xen Cybersecurity

Large language models have made it trivially easy to produce polished writing on any topic. That’s the problem. If anyone can generate an expert-sounding article in seconds, why should you trust what you’re reading? How do you know there’s actual understanding behind the words?

We use LLMs extensively at 0xen — for code, for research, and yes, for writing. The productivity gains are too significant to ignore, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But we also understand that this creates a trust problem for our readers.

So we’re trying something different.

How We Write

Every long-form article on this site follows a transparent process:

A human writes the raw draft. This is unpolished, sometimes messy thinking — the kind of writing you produce when you’re focused on ideas rather than prose. It won’t win any style awards, but it proves that a real person with real understanding sat down and worked through the material.
An LLM polishes the draft. We use AI to improve clarity, structure, and readability. The ideas stay the same; the sentences get better.
We publish both versions. The polished article is what you’re reading now. The raw draft is available below — you can compare the two and judge for yourself how much is human thinking versus AI refinement.

Why This Matters

The conventional approaches to AI-assisted content are either to hide it or slap a generic “AI-assisted” label on it. Neither is satisfying. Hiding it is dishonest. A label without evidence is just a claim.

By publishing the raw draft alongside the polished version, we’re giving you something verifiable. You can see exactly what we brought to the table and what the AI contributed. The raw draft is our proof of work.

What We’re Betting On

We believe that as AI-generated content floods the internet, transparency will become a competitive advantage. Readers will gravitate toward sources that can demonstrate genuine expertise and honest process.

We’d rather show you the messy reality of how we work than present a polished facade with no way to verify what’s behind it. We hope you’ll find that refreshing — and that you’ll stay convinced there’s a human behind every one of our articles.

It is very hard not to use LLMS to write content, on one hand they provide an insane productivity boost, on the other hand, they destroy the reader’s trust. If anyone can ask an LLM to write an expert article one any topic, how can you, the reader trust its content or even have an LLM write the article for you? So we’re taking a novel approach to writing content, especially long form content on this website. We write our articles in a raw, unrefined style, where we don’t worry too much about how sentences read. We use LLMs to turn this raw article into something more polished. We then publish both, as you can see it for this very article. We will also make it clear everywhere where AI assistance was used and to what degree. We believe this transparent approach is the best of both worlds and we hope you will stay convinced: there’s a human behind every one of our articles.