> 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.

Expands into a document for _who_ to read? another LLM to re-compress?

It's baffling you people are in control of such a strong product when you are obsessed with this intellectual pornography; wow - look at how smart it made my thoughts look (n.b. look, not read). Don't look too close. And certainly don't ask me what it means.

Many programmers don't write long text; their way of getting a deep understanding of a problem domain is to build something, is to write code - in a process very similar to writing a long piece of text - it has the same reflection and externalization of thought.

The widespread introduction of LLM code generation is very destructive to that.

Perhaps LLMs can be brought to support human cognition in the same way writing can; but that has yet to be designed and it does not seem to be the way things are heading.

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.

> You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document.

What a horrible, cold, inhumane world that would be.

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.

> 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.

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.

You could try this [0] I’ve started doing this and it’s helped a lot.

1. I understand fully the code and everything it does 2. You can pick up on mistakes super early and it can adjust the plan is it goes. 3. Faster than writing it by hand but slower than letting the LLM do it.

[0] https://ankursethi.com/blog/prevent-cognitive-debt-by-manual...

> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code.

I worry about AI Loopidity here though. Think about the similar analogy of email. If my set of ideas is condensable to bullet points, but I use AI to expand the content, then I add no information density and a lot of noise. Other folks then use AI to summarize the content to a list of bullet points, ideally the same but not certainly the same, and thus communication has been only partially successful.

>(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.

You get pushback for this? I saw an anthropic job post recently, and they wanted you specifically to have claude muck with your resume before applying.

One could imagine a universe where the agent fills in citations and supportive points and so on, or makes a more conclusive argument but it seems you’d get better results leaving that to read time if it’s a one-shot. Steering prompts etc. with tool use to bring in other sources etc of course change this entirely. And regardless, I doubt we will read content like that directly ever again. Agents will act as per-person highly specialized adapter layers for information transmission.

The entire point is what runtime you’re running your code on. A computer with any modern stack requires a lot of text for you to communicate “spin a square around on its center” to it. A human requires only that short string because they have a faster natural language interpreter.

Text meant for a human can communicate “spin a square around its center” much better than any code that mimics it. In some sense, all programming is boilerplate expansion because computers have (until now) been unable to be programmed with anything approaching natural language.

> 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.

You can already do this. And you can build pipelines where AI performs fact checks on what it writes, with citations a human can reference as well.

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.

> I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think.

Later

> 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.

So in the future, it won't be necessary for you to think?

> It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding.

Really huffing your own farts there, huh?

Nobody is going to read that though, reading will go the way of code reviews. That’s the problem.

> You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document.

This is just noise generation. If anyone is meant to actually read the document it should be written by you.

> 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.