(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think.

It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a large set of guardrails we've set up over the years (linters, typecheckers, security checks, LLM-assisted code quality checkers), and it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less and engineers think a level or two up (machine code < assembly/bytecode < source code < conversation with agent < artifact with high level design).

I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. But writing and coding are different enough in a number of ways that this is far from inevitable.

> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document.

What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know.

Who or what is the audience for that sort of long form writing? If it's a human, why would they read it? They'd just give it to an LLM and get the salient points back. If the audience is another LLM, why expand it?

The only use case is an audience of humans who still read and understand, and those people aren't going to be interested in a message when it is not apparent that the sender actually understands the message themselves.

You claim writing is thinking, but imply writing code isn't thinking.

My opinion of LLM design review isn't that high - it seems to miss design tweaks that could vastly simplify corner cases. But if your code isn't written for human consumption maybe it doesn't matter. I'm still directly responsible for what I commit, so I can't just offload it to Claude.

You are just talking about the output though. If you only think at a "higher level" you aren't doing the actual thinking. Its the same with code. The output may be good enough, but over time you lose touch with the details to the extent that you can no longer serve a useful steering function for the organization. Before coding agents I'd seen this with many humans when they get promoted passed the point where they work with code directly and can't figure out how to add value there.

Writing is already amenable to many different levels of abstraction, though. If an LLM can expand your outline into writing, then you aren’t writing at the correct level of abstraction in my opinion; you should instead be explaining how you arrived at your chosen outline. You don’t need to explain the details because any party can generate those with an LLM; same as how many PRs today can be auto-generated and no one needs to read implementations; that is no longer the correct level abstraction to work at. This should actually free us to do work at a higher level of abstraction —- more consideration of strategy, objectives, etc and less worry about implementation details.

You and the AI agree, but how about you and the team who will eventually read and do code review.

Cognitive burden increases marginally with AI assisted coding.

This is why we haven't seen big projects(think browsers and browser engines) spawning in the past year.

Do your coworkers send emails and create written work product using LLMs? I'm curious what the standards and culture are within an AI org.

I suspect some amount of long form writing will go the way of code - long form writing for the purpose of consumption by other AIs. Writing as a means of exchanging qualitative information, with no regard for how the reader will feel about it (beyond understanding what the words mean). Not everything can be distilled into data, but this doesn’t mean it is beyond the reach of LLMs.

On the other hand, long form writing for human consumption seems like it may evade LLMs for much, much longer.

> it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less

If you're not billed for usage, anyway.

Otherwise, for the other 99% of folks, that attitude is of course a pit trap that captures code bases and makes them maintainable only through the providers -- presumably one or few -- with a rich enough model to keep up with the growing mess. Preserving a code base that's legible, organized, and fundamentally maintainable by both humans and trailing commodity models is of imminent concern for anybody who doesn't want their margin strangled by your employer once it's too late to have other options.

As frontier capabilities advance, the details don't matter less; they matter more.

> Now, the code is largely high quality...

No. No it is not. Nobody who actually cares about the quality of their work is letting an LLM just turn out code without reviewing it carefully.