Don't Paste the AI, please

Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)

Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.

Otherwise each of these coaxing sessions is something I have to keep in my head until resolved, which is a load in and off itself.

And even better - I can point Claude to that message and gives me a summary. You might say this is silly because we are paying the LLM tax, but knowing what to share, and then verifying against my situation are two different things.

Sometimes they have checked the wrong thing, sometimes they need guidance, sometimes I need to investigate before I can answer. A full LLM message with context is like “summary of their working context that I can resume on my end” so I don’t waste cycles asking or rechecking etc.

And it is still possible to be a learning experience for both of us since the initial message is the start, we can then talk to each other like humans, both much more in sync than before…

It is kinda ironic but I think it does push things in a better direction. Would I have loved it if the message was human, direct and to the point - obviously, but we are all busy, we got shit to do, and this is a useful “resume” mechanic

We need a dontpastethedontpastetheai.com to get ahead of this.

"read it all, yes even the bullets. especially the bullets"

if you read one thing from a large wall of text, its gonna be the bullet points, right? thats a big part of what they're for?

"It is the conversational equivalent of forwarding the email."

this is a terrible metaphor. it seems to rely on the idea you would be mad if you sent an email to someone and they forwarded to someone else? but thats useful, theyre literally sending it to someone who is presumably better placed to help you, or raising it to someone more important because they think what youre saying is important

Interesting to note the page also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"

We are afraid that one badly phrased message can hurt our reputation or even our jobs, so optimizing every message with softer wording, more political correctness, less directness is safer.

But the real problem is the culture underneath it. If people are constantly worried about how every sentence will be interpreted, eventually they stop speaking plainly, stop challenging decisions, and sometimes stop speaking up at all. So this is like attacking the consequences not the root causes. There should be some sort of measurement of how broken is a community or a company by letting a bot scan Slack/Teams and let the bot remind everyone the importance of lowering the fake index.

completely agree except a crucial step is missing here:

(1.5) validate the accuracy/truth/relevance of it

your own sincere and human take on rubbish will still be rubbish. validating is indeed the more uncomfortable/demanding task here but if you omit it you become just a "human ai beautifier", and this will actually undermine the trust in you as a human. if you are going to omit validation just paste away, be honest and let it be obvious, you can then blame the ai.

But the point is. They had search, so why didn't they think to do the search? They had the same tools as I did. And yet regularly they couldn't think of the answer. I still deal with this with AI today. When you ask a question, maybe you're asking for the interpretation of the question by the person on the other side. And it's that interpretation that goes to the LLM. Or otherwise some filter of how that person thinks about the question differently than you do.

Pasting AI output verbatim is the modern day equivalent of “let me google that for you.”

Unique human prompt + AI output which is useful and does a good job expanding on the prompt topic and which when pasted saves people the time of having to go prompt AI on the same topic (fully reviewed by a person before sharing it, to ensure the content has relevance)

This I have been doing a bit. I strictly asks it to never give me suggestions but raise questions, concerns, tell me if it feels if something can be better, style-wise or otherwise without giving me those options.

And a bit of other overall feedback requests.

And if the model adheres to this and doesn't jump the gun, it indeed works quite nice. But it often jumps the gun, forgets, doesn't give a f- about my instructions, or whatever. Maybe more robust local models will better.

Dont be a meat proxy! simple

Regarding the AI-like structure of the text, I assume that's satirical. I guess it's a separate topic, but the pipeline from people writing like AI satirically to people just writing like AI reminds me a lot of the way some acquaintances of mine have internalized speech patterns of the current POTUS – at first satirically, and now they just say "bigly", etc., all the time.

You're gonna need a stronger language. Why do you think people love AI? If I have to think and god forbid read the response I might as well live in the woods or something

DO NOT FUCKING PASTE AI RESPONSES TO ME, EVER, PERIOD.

When someone tells me they "talked to Claude" they sound retarded. Just tell me you looked into it, and I fucking swear to god if you just took what Claude said verbatim and do not understand the problem then you are a cunt and I will stop working with you.

When someone pastes LLM output in chat I completely ignore it. I will just continue the conversation as if they said nothing and silently mark them as cretinous in my mind.

This is not up for debate, you will talk to me in short well formed sentences and get to the fucking point or you will fuck off

idk about that

[edit] to extend the connections The charm of a messaging board like this is bringing "join attention" to a topic, not just sharing separate monologs.

And also, always wondering if something was written by a human or statistically generated could be seen as Epistemic Hypervigilance, leading to stress, and loss of epistemic trust. This could reduces opportunities for taking on new information of feedback, and cause rigidity and isolation.

Excellent advice, with one very large exception based upon human foibles.

Occasionally there are people who do not ask things in good faith. They ask you a question not because "they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement". Instead they ask the question because they're then going to go to extensive lengths to find every possible counterpoint or opposition to whatever answer you give. In 2026 those sorts of people who will ask and then revert 30 minutes later, after you've carefully detailed a well thought out answer, that "ChatGPT says..." Add that for time eternal they will hold the fact that you answered something for them as a liability that you must atone for, and for which you are responsible for every ramification of their interpretation of your answer[1].

If you ask someone something and they just copy an AI answer, it's such a cop out that I imagine there are many cases where the person knows they're dealing with someone who "asks questions" like this. I have people who I give thoughtful, considered answers to, but then I also have people that I basically say "I don't know...Google it", because giving an iota of an answer always turns out to become something I regret.

[1] - This is not unlike helping someone with their computer. There are people who we love to help, but then there are people that will then ascribe everything that ever goes wrong with their computer for time eternal to that time you showed them a shortcut in Excel. CPU died six years later? Probably because of that shortcut.

Almost certainly written by AI

If you are getting blocks of llm text perhaps it's because you don't deserve their input and could have satisfied your query by not making it someone else's problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389570

I do. "They all have the same tools as I do" is exactly what's infuriating. They either blatantly don't use them, or are too incompetent to do so effectively, which would track.

I have been making an effort to provide an "AI;DR" section as well, even before the term existed, because of brevity. But sending along the full(er) text as reference I think is perfectly fine in such cases.

This is really useful, I wish more people would understand this: you don't have to have an opinion on everything. In fact, you probably shouldn't have an opinion on most things.

My own take on the AI issue: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/

I like to think it helped, but likely what helped was that nobody seems to use Deep Research anymore, haha.

Make it a standing rule.

and i detest ai slop

so my solution is to speak combined with an ai cleanup like macwhisper or wispr flow of all the uhs and ahs and repetitions or rephrasings etc

you can even use ai to pretend a conversation or interview style

then i have stuff to edit

boom

Disagreed. Bad writing from a chatbot beats worse writing from its user every time - regardless of length.

One reason we have so much bot slop is the attractiveness of bad-writing bots to the many people whose writing is even worse.

OMFG! Even the "don't send AI answers" page text is fucking AI slop.

Can't they be bothered to write 200 words of their own?