This sums up my current bugbear with people using Claude, as its output is too verbose. I don't mind the use of agentic tools, though I want a concise explanation written by a human.

But where it starts to get dicey is when you have both jargon and long text explanations being generated by machines, for people at different levels of understanding. “Bumped dependencies” is good. Everyone knows we are updating packages. “Performed a scheduled dependency refresh as part of ongoing maintenance practices. Minor and patch-level version bumps were applied across the dependency graph, including transitive dependencies where applicable” is bad.

This week, I was talking to someone at work about a topic they know a lot more about. It was a good exchange, I learned a lot. After the meeting, in the span of like half an hour, they sent me ten essay-length LLM outputs.

And it's just genuinely, like, what is the goal here? It's cool that they want to provide additional reading material, but clearly they did not proof-read it, so I could've just asked an LLM myself, if I deemed that helpful.

There is also just no chance in hell that I'm reading ten essays on the topic, especially when they're as poorly written as LLM output generally is. I genuinely took a few minutes to try to skim it and I covered maybe 10% of the text, but learned hardly anything.

I just really don't understand this mindset of "I can generate a lot of text, so I'm being helpful by sending it to you".

Today I stumbled upon Don't paste the AI:

When someone asks you something, they want your answer. Not a wall of ChatGPT text. A short answer from a human will always be worth more than one from a robot, even if the robot is right.