The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool

LLMs are exhausting because they require spending precious social energy to operate them. Energy that might be better spent on people.

When you use a good tool, your brain pretends that the tool is a part of your body: when you drive a car, when you type on a keyboard or when you hit that key chord to do that thing in Vim or VSCode. In contrast, when you talk to somebody, you are participating in a social ritual: share a fire, tell a story, help me close this ticket so we don’t have to drag it to the next quarter because my manager will chew me out. Obviously, the social brainwork is harder and requires much more of you.

When you use an LLM, you don’t get the tool magic: (almost) nobody will claim that Claude or Cursor feel like an extension of their body - they are not consistent or fast enough to trick the brain like a keyboard or a car can. Instead, you get to pay the social tax: you converse and negotiate and convince and sometimes even get angry¹ at the so-called tool.

But the social tax is only worth paying because people give you so much more in return: they teach you something new, or challenge you, or inspire you, or tell you to GTFO if you are trying to BS them - or you might teach someone something, challenge them, or even inspire them! On days when I have these interactions I might be tired at the end of the day, but it was worth it.

With LLMs, you mostly just get more of the same: more code, more tests, more excuses. Sometimes you get more bug reports which I do appreciate.

Is it worth the social brainwork? IDK, for some tasks maybe - there are things a single person can do now that would have been impossible a year ago. But for all tasks? And wouldn’t that social brainwork do more good if it was directed at the real people you are working with?

LLMs ask us to talk to them, but rarely reward that effort in kind.

Carpentry tools recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose, a 16th-century sailing ship By the Mary Rose Trust, CC BY-SA 3.0