Show HN: What Would Paul Graham Write? An experiment in personality extension

9 points by georgestrakhov 12 hours ago

WWPGW (What Would Paul Graham Write?) is an experiment in synthetic personality extension.

The research question is simple: How close are we to being able to extend a human personality and patterns of thought in a meaningful way?

Why Paul Graham? Instead of using an average person with low signal-to-noise ratio sources like emails, this experiment works with a best-case scenario:

- Someone who has been thinking and documenting their thought process for an extended period

- Someone with a developed and distinct thinking and writing style

- Someone who writes many short-form pieces rather than few long books

- Someone moderately famous online - well represented in LLM training data

- Someone still alive - who could potentially assess the quality of their extension

- Someone with an existing community - for independent evaluation

The system:

- Allows users to generate essays by providing only a title

- Uses all of Paul Graham's essays as reference material

- Does RAG search of the reference material to provide the generator with the most relevant information in addition to the full corpus

- Employs a modern LLM (currently Gemini 2.5 flash preview) with large context window to generate new essays in his style (RAG's role is just to emphasize the most relevant parts)

- Collects ratings and comments on the generated essays

All generated essay data is freely available for research and analysis. (Download from https://wwpgw.georgestrakhov.com/about)

Technologies:

- scraper with python and Groq for smart MD conversion

- worker writer using cloudflare worker, queue, cloudflare autorag and openrouter

- website on nuxt3, deployed to nuxthub

Everything is open source. Have fun.