Comment by mrbonner
19 days ago
Where I work, we are required to write a substantial number of documents to "express our thoughts for leadership team clearly". At one point, I remember spent every single moment of my daily life at work to think about every word, sentence and paragraph that I put down in a technical document. At some point I was skeptical that all this effort was worthy as the whole point of writing is to communicate ideas. If the document was under the microscope for "nit bits" then we lost the original intention. Unless, I'm publishing a book for example.
Now with LLM, I think everyone at work uses it to generate documents. And then, we all just use LLM to summarize the documents for us in a few paragraphs. The whole exercise is now a waste of time.
Document writing culture is great but I'm starting to wonder the real benefits in the erabof LLM. To demonstrate this point, I asked my team to just create slides for the next sync up, something that is frowned upon in my culture. To my surprise, the meeting seems to be very productive with everyone engages in the discussion and not bogged down too much in reading for 30 minutes then discuss. It was just: 1) agenda for today 2) slides 3) q&a
I think we cut about 50% of everyone time for that monthly meeting.
>everyone at work uses it to generate documents. And then, we all just use LLM to summarize the documents for us in a few paragraphs.
Thought that was just a tongue in cheek joke. Hope that doesn't become widespread...
It makes sense. Many reasons I write the documents conflict with how it will be used.
I often write a ton of bloat in documentation to seem impressive or comprehensive. I put in my performance review once that I contributed over half the total pages. Nobody checked that I added value. They checked that I added pages.
It isn't meant to be useful as I am not a meaningful shareholder, so I don't care if the user's time is well spent reading it. I work for my boss, not the user.
So both sides using LLMs makes sense, as their incentives are different.
It exactly matches the meme where people use LLMs to expand some bullet points to a full document, and then other people use LLMs to convert a full document to some bullet points.
I think it's impossible to tell who is telling any kind of truth online, or who is just "vibe posting"