One day people will notice that «search bubble» also applies to just sending the prompts…

(I’d say the useful option is of three parts: prompt, the output, and how much vetting of the output has happened; OK if the last part is literally precisely zero, then prompt is enough)

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So I’ve heard a lot of people say this:

can’t you just save us all the hassle and give me the prompt you used?

For context I do not use LLMs for writing prose that I’ll share with anyone, but do use them as a research assistant, code reviewer, part-time data analyst, and occasionally for writing code (which does not get committed without significant review).

Here’s where the “just give me the prompt you used” thing has never made sense to me: I essentially never one-shot anything. If any LLM output is going to leave my machine in some form, it has gone through multiple rounds of iteration and review. High probability that it has also had access to the large volume of private notes that I’ve accumulated over the last 2 decades.

A keyword list is almost better than a keyword list turned into long-winded prose by some AI.

100% agree with that and honestly lol that has been how I’ve often answered questions in the past. No big prose trying to explain something, just “look up ‘frequency-domain decomposition’. It’s from civil engineering but it’s probably a good technique for what we’re doing.” and then being available for follow-up if need be.

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A keyword list is almost better than a keyword list turned into long-winded prose by some AI.

A keyword-style enumeration is also often better than that list turned into long-winded prose by a human because it is «good writing».

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Used to be you could say : “I searched and found this : [link]”

This was sort of helpful, because searching took at least a little effort, established some sort of common baseline as articles or stackoverflow responses normally establish question context, as well as not implying that the responder really knows what they’re talking about. Still, it was not entirely polite, as your interlocutor could have, and probably had, searched themselves.

“Claude says” seems strictly worse, but I can’t express why very well in communicable terms. I would rather people simply didn’t, and just said “I don’t know, ask claude”, rather than proxying it for me.

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Often I am 80% confident that something is wrong, to me the appeal of Claude is that I can quickly check, and be certain that it is wrong and how it is wrong.

I find that this is most appealing when it’s my own idea that might be wrong. My local LLM is a surprisingly capable critic of my ideas. And it is very good at finding the one nasty corner case that will send my entire design back the drawing board. Of course, I’d find that corner case eventually, but it might be 12 hours of work later, or perhaps when I’m working on version 2 and I find out I committed to a bad API. Like any outside technical criticism, I’ll decide that half of it is probably wrong, and filter the other half through my own knowledge.

But none of this excuses either outsourcing my own thinking, or just parroting Claude at my coworkers.

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I feel like “over-engineered” is a misleading term here. It implies that it was a deliberate engineering effort, when often it was just cancerous growth. No engineer would think “Oh, the Golden Gate bridge is aging, let’s build a brand new smaller bridge with less capacity on top of it to resolve the problem!”

The worst software constructs I’ve seen were a product of ignorant, rushed and/or disempowered developers. So, the opposite of engineering.

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