Hi, everyone
Here are 11 observations regarding the wrong mindset shift among people who started loving LLMs a little too much. I collected all these examples based on real projects from the Big Tech companies I have seen personally. The poison of instant gratification, of "everything in seconds" that looked quite plausible, took not only tokens, but also valuable time of people who then end up in the neuroslop pile. LLMs become a substitute for thinking gradually, and it is done unconsciously. Increasingly more documents, strategies, architectures, and emails look as though they required any effort, whereas in reality, they are nothing but poorly reprocessed autocomplete. My manifesto is neither anti-LLM nor against them, it is pro-awareness and conscious usage. This manifesto fights with magical thinking, mindless copying & pasting, and people who think generation is a synonym for doing the job. I call it the LLMPositive Guy Manifesto.
The LLMPositive Guy Manifesto
- I give to my colleagues the whole output of LLMs as it is, without any further reading. If there are some specific questions addressed to me, I divert their attention: "you're missing the context," "let's leave it for later" and etc.
The longer the LLM's response, the more significant my work. Nobody's going to read thirty pages anyway, but achievement "Hard Worker" unlocked.
If there is any hallucination or confident nonsense in my text, I start attacking those people for lack of understanding: "it's a draft, it is none of your concern. You don't get my approach to prompt engineering."
I delegate responsibility for any document I generate to colleagues, as they will review it eventually. But only I can create proper prompts, thus the output is not neuroslop anymore.
I say things like "I sat down with the neural net," "the model told me," "the LLM suggested" - as the main argument for being right. Proof? Who cares about proof.
I take pride in keeping a poker face while passing off neuroslop generated half an hour before the meeting as the strategy or architecture I supposedly worked on all month.
If the LLM did something wrong, that means that the prompt had very high level of complexity and creativity. If the output was incorrect two times, it was my colleagues' fault for bad phrasing of the task. I am going to flag that blocker immediately.
I give to LLMs the company's confidential documents, code, NDAs, trade secrets and other stuff I shouldn't give away, as nobody is going to steal the data, as LLMs never lie. What I care about is getting a win locally and fast.
I delegate to LLMs the budget management, planning of my future career growth, personal education process, health concerns, and search for the meaning of life. I might read answers, but my goal is prompt generating every day. It is important for me because I want to have the right answers. I do not need to read them.
I regularly complain that I hit my plan's limits in a measly half hour. That's not a problem with what I'm building, it's proof of the scale of my ideas and ambitions.
I interrupt the LLM with clarifications to make it sound more confident. If the answer got worse, the model couldn't handle my level of abstraction.
Thanks for reading. If you've run into cases where you've seen sloppy LLM use, drop me a line — I'll happily add them to the manifesto. Let's stay in touch.
