Want some bad advice? Show up as a single golfer, join some strangers to make a foursome on the first tee, and then ask them about their equipment. Golfers, especially the worst ones, like me, are perpetually tempted to blame their equipment. Sometimes this is specific, like when I shelved my driver for half the season; other times it's general, like when I vaguely thought about swapping every club for something newer (or older). Either way, we're very often focused on the club being swung, not the person swinging it. I'm guilty of a decades-long tendency to hit manic slices. While I could change my swing, the gearheads ask, why don't you just replace your driver and three wood with the all-new "thriver"?Equipment manufacturers and salespeople play right into this tendency, focusing our attention on the latest technology, whether it's a new driver or precious metal-faced putter. While champion golfers may make very slight adjustments to their technology once or twice a year and see good results; mediocre-to-bad golfers, like me, are tempting to always be tinkering and trying, and then blame inconsistent results on the tools. In the last few years, I've shortened my driver shaft, switched driver for three wood, switched putters, switched back, worn a glove, not worn a glove, played with older and then newer middle woods (often week-to-week!). When I make the change, I expect immediate results. That rarely happens. What usually happens is that I get frustrated with the new and then revert back to the normal, non-adjusted way, and see a slight improvement in performance. One wonders if a persimmon club from the 1980s, the first club I swung, is where I should've stayed.
Knowledge worker software discussion sounds a lot like golfer equipment discussions. In software land, titanium is a brand word, not an actual metal in the tool. Both tend to focus on the newness, robustness, or capability of the tool, almost completely disregarding the worker using the tool. Whether it's a person excited about the application they just found or the person who wants you to stop whining about some bit of work you have to do, the refrain is the same, "why don't you just use this new tool?"
Internet people are probably worse than golfers on the "why don't you just" scale because we both know that our tools are really the answer and have almost zero commitment to the tools. We almost have reverse commitment: right when a tool becomes popular, something in our genetic code triggers a desperate hunt for a new one. Everyone's finally emailing? You'll find us on Slack. When faced with a knowledge problem, we're at our worse. In the early 2000s, it was "why don't you just Google it?" In the 2010s, it shifted to "why don't you just ask Twitter?" Now, we've moved to "why don't you just ask Claude?" Whether I'm trying to read a difficult book, evaluate a car purchase, or stop the crabgrass from growing in my lawn, anything that requires a little mental effort can be accomplished with "why don't you just ask Claude." (The "why don't you just" people are very opinionated on which of the giant tech firms one can trust—and, right now, it's definitely not OpenAI.)
A lot of our problems are knowledge problems. Claude is probably a decent tool for them. But doesn't it rub you the wrong way? When you're trying to figure out how to do something at work: why don't you just ask Claude how to do it? When you're trying to get through the difficult the book club book: why don't you just ask Claude for a summary? When you're figuring out what's up with your bonsai trees: why don't you just ask Claude? I'm wondering why an incessant referring to this somewhat reliable chat interface is so frustrating. A few reasons come to mind.
It's hard, at least for me, to be told about a better way of doing something. First, if the way is better, then I feel dumb for not already having thought of it. It is for this reason I tend to send thank you notes to anyone who's job has been to teach, mentor, or manage me. Second, if I've already looked at the new "why don't you just" way and decided I didn't want to go with it, I'm a little too much of a joiner to explain why—as much as I'll argue, afterwards, with the conversation I just finished, I hate telling people they're wrong. (This could be an inverse of my bristling at being told the way I'm doing something is wrong.) Most of this is more about the person being told about a new tool than about the tool itself and most of it goes away when you embrace a more humble attitude of being teachable and coachable. The slicing golfer showing up to a golf lesson, not equipment demo, will get much further than the slicing golfer will by swapping out clubs.
There's a deeper reason we're frustrated by the "why don't you just ask Claude" people. Sometimes we don't ask Claude because the thing is worth doing ourselves. We don't want an easier way. You can make it through college on Cliffnotes or book club on Claude, but by taking the easy way out, you're robbing yourself of the experience. Sure, you could take a ski lift or auto road to the top of some mountains, but mountain climbing persists for a reason. The summiting of a peak under your own power makes the view all the sweeter: you've earned it. The result is worth a real effort.
A last source of "why don't you just ask Claude" frustration is that some things are important enough to actually get right. At the bottom of the Claude interface it tells us, "Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses." Almost no one does this. We've all seen the emails, pasted from Claude, that end with "Does this capture the tone you were going for?" A sad percentage of my incoming inquiries are people asking for a doublecheck of whatever their AI tool told them. It's frustrating to be told to just use Claude when the answer is important enough to actually get right.
The vague sense of frustration at delegating to a robot isn't only Luddism and middle aged crankiness, although I'll admit they are partially both. I'm no Luddite: as a young office worker, I was the guy who, when asked a question, snarkily sent my boss links to lmgtfy.com/thing-he-asked-for; I posted to social media incessantly between 2008 and '15, and since am all over LinkedIn; most of my life's memories are scattered across cloud services, devices, and hard drives. While I do have a middle-aged man's recalcitrance at trying new things, a reticence to just delegate my thinking and writing to a robot indicates more than that: it's about the nature of the thing's newness. Put simply, relying on computer programs to read and to write ensures firstly that I won't be a reliable reader or writer—that I won't be a reliable thinker.
If I have value as a knowledge worker (or as your humble emailer), then it comes not just from the power of the software I wield, it's from an internalized ability honed over experience that's worth conveying to others. I'm only worth reading if I actually know something enough to write and talk about it myself.
Why don't you just ask Claude? Because a thing worth doing is worth doing directly; a thing worth knowing is worth learning directly; a thing worth reading is worth reading because of its writer.
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