---
title: entry 2026-06-11
created: 2026-06-11
modified: 2026-06-11
tags: journal
---

## LLMs Make You Lazy and Stupid

I recently came across [this writeup](https://jola.dev/posts/the-social-contract-of-writing) on LLMs and their output and was taken by this quote (it, in turn, came from [elsewhere](https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers), but credit where credit is due for pointing it out to me):

> Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer,
> it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the
> reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands
> it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

This puts into words a feeling I've had in the pit of my stomach a lot recently. It shows up in incidents at work: "hey, I had Claude generate this 10 page analysis of the root causes". It shows up in design conversations: "I had Claude look at the current code base and respond". It shows up everywhere. But even the people outputting these large documents are not reading and ingesting the documents. They're not doing the work.

And a huge majority of learning about a thing is actually doing the investigation and the legwork to understand enough to write about the thing. When you're not doing that, and just reading Cliff's Notes, you're not actually learning. You're skipping steps just to get to the final output. And maybe most of the time that output is fine and maybe even totally correct. But you still didn't learn anything.

I can't imagine a world where I don't want to know things. Where I want to offload learning about things. Sure, there are plenty of things I don't care about, but if I'm getting paid to do a thing, you can be certain I will learn as much as possible about the topic. I just recently injured my ankle and have learned more about ankle tendons in the last week than I have in my entire life. What sort of person just wants to close their eyes and get to the end, without the journey? It's like reading the first and last chapters of a book.