Personally I want to double down on this approach I wrote about a couple of weeks ago: https://www.sealambda.com/blog/this-post-passed-unit-tests/

Which is, to keep using LLMs as reviewers, rather than as writers.

the author ironically uses a lot of words to say very little, though I agree with the conclusion. it’s already annoying to have someone use a lot of words to say very little (especially in a business context). now it’s free and easily accessible for anyone, whereas before it at least took some social stamina

so people will do it, people will be annoyed by it, people will prioritize to more efficient communicators

> it’s already annoying to have someone use a lot of words to say very little

Totally agreed. I'd like to cut to the point with a bit of pleasantry at the beginning just because I have to.

It is like https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html being written down at length.

I do agree with the fact, that this is an annoying phenomenon. It took me a while to understand that there are people who are not just using LLM to write these style of emails, but those people are the source of the training data for LLMs.

The solution is "simple", to move aways from such people and stick to genuine communicators.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the blog author seems to have chosen "a thousand words."

And if that's not an option, another solution is to use AI to summarize those long emails. In the end both parties will be writing and reading terse little emails, with the verbose text in the middle as the world's most ridiculous communication protocol.

I consider myself a “genuine communicator” insofar as I write messages thoughtfully and thoroughly.

Though I suspect many of my emails go unread, and people have confessed that they ran my personal messages to them through an LLM to generate something for them to report up in some spreadsheet etc tool.

Or in the case of some managers for whom the critical technical detail goes over their head, they just re-ask their questions in a call and try to get to “is it done yet” and “how many engineers can I add to make it go faster”.

I think I might be on the chopping block if a move was made to get rid of overly-thorough verbose communicators, genuine or not

But it sounds like you might be filling your emails with actual facts, rather than the sort of fluff that an LLM could do for you.

I agree that LLMs turn short prompts into long code blocks, but I don't agree that it's fluff in the same way that email pleasantries are fluff.

The short prompt leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The code itself leaves zero room for interpretation (assuming the behavior of the coding language is well understood). I don't agree that AI will allow us to start relying on code that isn't fully defined just because it might allow our emails to remove fluff that didn't contribute to the meaning at all.

> One day we'll just send bullet points as emails. We'll reach business speak protocol version 2.0. That which was verbose becomes terse. No more time wasted translating thoughts and injecting platitudes.

I'll celebrate the day this happens and gets widespread. Conversing with Americans is painful compared to Germans, because Americans insist on being coddled all the time and the very second you don't they'll complain behind your back to your boss.

Fun fact - that cultural difference was also a huge part why Wal-Mart failed to gain traction here in Germany. German consumers really didn't like staff welcoming them with a smile, that and bad press from crossed labor laws was their downfall.

Smile isn’t that bad, smiling with a pistol to the back of their head is :)

You can do this in Cursor already. Write a README or a SPEC file and the LLM will try to "complete your thoughts", except that it's off often enough. I find this hugely distracting, as if someone always interrupts your train of thought with random stuff.

For me the speed is already there. LLMs can write boilerplate code at least an order of magnitude faster than I can.

Just today I generate U-Net code for a certain scenario. I had to tweak some parameters, at the end I got it working in <1hr.

> LLMs can write boilerplate code at least an order of magnitude faster than I can.

This is my biggest fear with everyone adopting LLMs without considering the consequences.

In the past, I used "Do I have to write a lot of boilerplate here?" as a sort of litmus test for figuring out when to refactor. If I spend the entire day just writing boilerplate, I'm 99% sure I'm doing the wrong thing, at least most of the time.

But now, junior developers won't even get the intuition that if they're spending the entire day just typing boilerplate something is wrong, instead they'll just get the LLM to do it and there is no careful thoughts/reflections about the design and architecture.

Of course, reflection is still possible, but I'm afraid it won't be as natural and "in your face" which kind of forces you to learn it, instead it'll only be a thing for people who consider it in the first place.

For me, it’s the opposite – speed is there, intelligence is still lacking sometimes.

I’m OK waiting 10 minutes with o1-pro, but I want a deep insight into the issue I’m brainstorming. Hopefully GPT-5 will deliver.

> The speed is currently missing

I feel like the opposite/something else is missing. I can write lots of text quickly, if I just write down my unfiltered stream of thoughts, both together with and without an LLM, but what's the point?

What takes really long time, is making a large text contain just the important parts. Saying less takes longer time, at least for me, but hopefully saves the time and effort for people reading it. At least that's the idea.

The quote "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" comes to mind.

That's not entirely true. AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population.

Yes AI makes mistakes, so do humans very often.

Humans make mistakes, sure, but if a human starts hallucinating we immediately lose trust in them.

> AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population

So can a calculator.

But who will actually read the “autocompleted” text?

At that point any other human being will likely also have one to scan incoming text.

i was expecting a "written from these bullet points by an llm" at the end.

The primary commercial application for AI seems to be enshittification. I think that will continue.

Frankly I don't think the end users will notice much difference.

Excel '98 probably covers 90% of what the average excel user needs, yet here we are with a grossly bloated SaaS excel app in 2025. Constant SaaS feature-pack enshitification that people are either pushed or tricked into.

I think software is in a for a big disruption when people realize they can prompt an LLM "Make me a simple app for tracking employee payroll for my small business. Just like lotus 1-2-3 was more than capable of doing 40 years ago."

TL;DR: AI summaries and bullet points for everything will change human communication to that format.

The problem with this post is that, despite mentioning programming languages in the title, the examples are about writing emails. The author forgets to address programming at all, which is very much a use case and will remain one as processors only run compiled machine code and not bullet points.

Cory Doctorow just wrote about the bullet-point thing yesterday, in the context of referral letters:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/

While there is more talk about emails, programming is addressed toward the end: "[…] this will affect computer programming languages as well. Right now I can open a codebase, […]"

I'm not so sure that's a missing point or just an actual point.

I'm not convinced myself AI will have much impact on the developers landscape, beyond better autocompletion and doc generation.

All these fancy AI developers are cute, but we have had the cheaper vs lower quality trade-off available for quite some time now with outsourcing to emerging countries. When I was in my studies, we heard all the predictions of the destruction of software engineers because of outsourcing, the need to become an architect instead of a developer or you'll be replaced, etc.

I've seen none of that happen over the years, except for very low skilled automation / CRUD jobs.

> When I was in my studies, we heard all the predictions of the destruction of software engineers because of outsourcing, the need to become an architect instead of a developer or you'll be replaced, etc.

A lot of low level stuff has been outsourced to India over the last decades, and more if you count second or even third level support (won't even include first level support that's not required to be on-site).

C-levels only see the expenses savings, but how their employees feel about internal support being utter dogshit can't be quantified in a language that beancounters speak...