Stop Telling Me To Ask An LLM

I'm a million times more likely to send an email or a text than to pick up the phone. But I had a question I thought was worth an actual call, so I scheduled one with someone senior enough to have real scar tissue, the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom. 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.

"Honestly? Ask Claude."

That stung a little, but it wasn't the first time I'd heard it. Once it was a data problem I'd been stuck on. I'd approached it a half dozen different ways and could explain in some detail why none of them had worked. I reached out to a few people who do this kind of thing for a living, people I text with regularly, trading questions and working through whatever we're stuck on. All but one gave me the same redirect.

Each time this happened, I had already asked Claude. That wasn't the step I'd skipped. Before I ever reached out to a person, I'd spent a couple of hours (and sometimes way too many tokens) going back and forth with a large language model, and I still had a question that had survived all of that.

I'm old enough to remember people sending LMGTFY links to folks who didn't seem to know how to use a search engine and expected strangers to do unpaid research for them. But this isn't that. It's closer to what happens when I ask a friend for a food recommendation and get a top-10 list back. I'm not asking what Eater thinks is the best kind-of-quiet spot for late-night drinks, or for a great coffee shop in the city where they used to live. I'm asking what they think, because we have similar taste and a shared history, and because I know they have opinions about where the lists go wrong. I trust their experience over the expert consensus.

It's possible "ask the model" has become the polite version of "I don't know," or "I don't have time for this right now," or "I'd have to think about it." Maybe it's an easy way to decline giving an answer. But I'd take almost anything over the redirect. "I'm busy" is a real answer. "I can't think of anything you haven't already tried" is an answer too. What "ask Claude" doesn't give me is the person's specific, lived experience. That's the thing that's hard to write down and even harder to search for.

There's a real cost to being the person other people call, and it's not fair to expect everyone to bear it. It takes close attention and actual thought, and not everyone has that to spare on a day full of deadlines and fires to put out. Plenty of questions really can be answered by an LLM or a search engine. But when the question is one that already survived the model, "ask Claude" doesn't save anyone a step. It just withholds the thoughtful answer decades of experience could have given.