None of the human-readable text on this blog is written by AI, and I have no plans to change that. The weird grammar, incorrect assumptions, spelling errors, and annoying tics are all mine. Including the em dashes.
I don’t use LLMs for writing. On this blog, or in my professional life.
I use agents extensively for brainstorming, research, summarizing, checking facts, handling markup, finding references, analyzing data, and so on.
But I think that asking people to read LLM-generated text breaks a kind of social contract. When I publish a piece of writing under my name (e.g. in my blog, or a document at work), I want the reader to know that I deeply understand and own what I wrote. That I respect their time and effort. In exchange, I want them to be fully and deeply engaged with reading.
If I’m going to generate a doc from a prompt, then send it to somebody who summarizes it with an LLM and reads the summary, what have I achieved? I could have sent them the prompt, and let them explore the topic with their agent. A better use of their time! As an organization leader, I emphasize function over form. If you have half a page of thoughts, give me half a page. Don’t fill up another five pages with Claude’s thoughts. If I want Claude’s opinion (which I often do), I’ll ask for it. And get a custom version with my context!
I feel completely differently about code. I am 100% comfortable heading to a world where code is opaque to humans, and all I care about are the properties of that code. Almost all the code on this blog over the last two years is 100% AI generated. Mostly vibe-coded slop, to be honest.
Even three years ago, I deeply believed that code primarily exists to share ideas between people. I no longer believe that. I believe that sharing ideas between people is super important, but there are better ways free of the accidental complexity of a code base.
Finally, I do use LLMs for editing and critiquing my writing. But less than I used to, because I worry that over-use leads to a super defensive “block every exit” style of writing that obscures good communication. I feel the same way about writing to avoid bad comments on Twitter, reddit, or Hacker News. Defensive writing, especially defensive writing aimed to defend against malicious misreadings, obscures good communication.