Uh? I don't understand, are you saying that instead of asking Claude myself I should write a question for other people to do it? Which is by the way only the initial part of the work I described?

This is a very good analogy. You have to do way more effort to make sure it's correct than if you have asked it yourself with a controlled context. I generally don't want to feel lucky when I ask questions to coworkers.

No, it was a suitably nasty reply to someone who boasted of being nasty to colleagues trying to help.

If your question can be answered by Claude, and you didn't ask Claude yourself, and when other people do it for you, you complain that you could have done it yourself, then my honest reply is that you should just shut up and learn to use Claude.

"I don't know" is an extraordinarily powerful answer, but maybe it's getting ruined. I'm not sure it can be entirely ruined.

In a human interaction, when used confidently, it means 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front. I don't have to do the slightest thing to impress you. My foundation is so secure it doesn't need defending or justification at all". Also, 'that turns out to be outside the massive quantity of stuff I do know, how interesting'. Think Holmes, perhaps erroneously saying 'Now that I know that, I shall do my best to forget it' on the grounds that his work wasn't helped by the fact.

It could get ruined by an AI normalization of the idea that 'everybody should know literally everything, because asking an AI is the same as knowing and then you know the thing, having been told it'. Plenty of money is now marketing this position to the world, and so it's possible 'I don't know' will become ruined, a shameful response.

I feel like that may not happen in practice, though, because that pro-AI position is what used to be called 'pants-on-head R-slur' and I feel like the people who buy into this extreme position will make SUCH a disaster of things that it will tend to make that position, instead, the shameful response… and 'I don't know' will remain a valid signaling mechanism to convey 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front', all the more if it's more of a shocking response to get.

Asking the LLM a question _is_ a skill, just like googling. The problem is not asking a LLM, but pasting the 300-chars response without any context.

If I asked a question to Claude, it's because I couldn't answer it myself, but also, because I used my skills and domain expertise to explain clearly the problem to Claude.

And if I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it means that I have read and evaluated what Claude wrote back, and I have extracted the part of it that most clearly contains the answer as well as the diagnosis- if I gor anything relevant.

Of course I could instead pretend I came up with the answer myself in 5 minutes thanks to my superior analytical skills, and write down two short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?

…yes?

The amount of text isn’t equal and the benefit is primarily that I can push the LLM into a basin you don’t know the keywords for — something that takes a few minutes to type a couple sentences and me scan the results to make sure they’re roughly on track. And much, much less time than me trying to (re)write a treatise on a topic.

Dropping you an LLM reply is the equivalent of dropping you a link and telling you to learn about the topic — and appropriate in roughly the same circumstances.

Why would I reformulate what Claude already explained in a way that I find satisfactory? Only to give you the impression that I came up with it myself?

> if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.

If I send you some text copied and pasted from Claude, it means that I have read it and I think it's worth for you reading it. In this sense I'm already owning it. The problem is not the pasted answer, it's your assumption that a Claude-generated text must be "slop" that I haven't read.