Comment by amelius
23 days ago
> Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter
Huh, what if I don't want to spend time answering a low-effort question? I will have a look if the default answers/approaches don't work.
What is low effort about "I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus. Not what the textbook says. If five studies conflicted, which would he trust? I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't."?
He checked the consensus, the textbook, and 5 studies. He's asking for an answer from experience and he gets "Ask Claude".
But even if you don't know, "I don't know" is a better answer than "Ask Claude", which blindly assumes that the asker hadn't thought of that, which is a weird thing to assume.
Then don’t answer it? Or just give a seconds worth of context into why you think it’s not important?
Context switches are not free.
Dozens of "quick questions" over the course of a day will drag down your productivity to about one third or worse.
I know that for me, it takes about 45 minutes of focus to enter a flow state, when I'm at my most productive. If I can never enter the zone, then I'm not really doing the thing that made me such a valuable player in the first place, am I?
He scheduled a call specifically to ask this question. What does context switching have to do with anything? Don't accept the call if you can't afford to switch context.
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