Isaac Su

Lately, an odd habit seems to have caught on among my peers when they’ve done something with an LLM.

When asked “how many support requests have we received about the new Feature X?”, they answer “according to [LLM tool], we’ve received 17 requests since it was released.” When posting a pitch document or a pull request, they volunteer “I asked [LLM tool] to write this for me” or “[LLM tool] wrote the unit tests”.

Odd. Like a writer disclosing the spellchecker they used alongside every piece, or a pilot announcing their version of avionics software over the PA while taxiing to the runway.

Why did I need to know that?

At first, I put it down to a bit of novelty and excitement. But as this wore on, I started to wonder why someone might feel the need to declare their use of an LLM.

Perhaps:

1. You believe in ascribing credit where credit is due. Using an LLM feels like cheating so disclosing it makes you feel less like an imposter for having produced something amazing.
2. The LLM’s performance exceeded your wildest expectations, ergo the work is impressive by association. Never mind that it is only 80 percent complete and no one knows which 20 percent is missing.
3. You outsourced the work to an LLM and didn’t bother to review it before hitting send. There may be mistakes but spotting them is left as an exercise for your recipients.
4. LLM use has been mandated by Up Above. Claiming you’ve used one (even if you haven’t) buys you a higher tolerance for sloppiness since you are presumably facilitating your own eventual redundancy.

For 2 to 4, all I can say is I’m sorry and I hope things work out for you.

But for the first reason, I’d challenge the notion of sharing credit with a tool, let alone feeling like a cheat for using one. Credit and accountability are two sides of the same coin. A tool can only take as much credit as it can be held accountable for, so crediting it inadvertently dilutes your own accountability for the work.

If you’ve created something profound or remarkable, take complete credit for it. If it misses the mark or turns out to be utter slop, also take full responsibility and improve from there. This is how every meaningful or valuable thing was ever created long before the advent of “AI can make mistakes” and will remain so long after, with or without LLMs.

HN discussion

Instead of writing tonight, I added ❤️ buttons to the end of my posts that mimic the neat little toast buttons that Bear blogs have. It’s Solid Post Likes but with six inches of CSS overrides because I’m dangerous like that. I also turned off comments because it’s 2026 and email (from 1971) is cool again.

If you’re just passing through, test the button out for me so I know it works?

Robert blogged about the power of asking “what do you think?”

It brought up memories from my formative years when grown-ups had also given me the gift of this question. I don’t know how children elsewhere had it, but these were rare departures from the “grown-ups know best” norm that prevailed in my corner of the world at the time.

Mind you, these weren’t the “let’s see what the silly kids think” routines that inevitably come up at family gatherings. We would have been discussing a topic in earnest, or solving a problem, or mulling over a decision. The stakes may not have been high, but they were real, and that made all the difference.

“What do you think?” invited me to participate rather than to merely observe. It showed me that I could contribute meaningfully. Instead of striving to be heard, the challenge was to form an opinion that was worthy of the hearing. Imagine what a rush it would have been, as a child, for your view to be acknowledged; more so, for it to be tested and sharpened on its merits; to say nothing of seeing a sliver of it in the final outcome, however small.

Every one of these interactions built my confidence and shaped the life I have today. I’m grateful to the people who gave me these gifts, and take this as a reminder to pass it on to those around me.

The shower in my bathroom is enclosed in a clear glass cubicle. The nice thing about the clear glass panels is how light and spacious they look. The not-so-nice thing about them is how quickly and obviously the dried up droplet marks accumulate and stand out.

And boy are they stubborn. They don’t wipe off with Windex. The “leave on then rinse” soap scum removers don’t work on them. Neither does dish washing liquid, nor rubbing alcohol nor WD-40. The only thing that worked (up till now) was copious amounts of JIF and intense scrubbing with a rotary scour pad on a cordless drill. Even then, it was like scraping gum off the bottom of a sneaker.

Then, just this weekend, I discovered vinegar!

As it turns out, these stains are carbonate mineral deposits left behind after the shower droplets evaporate; and the only way to break them down is with an acid like vinegar. So I bought a bottle of cleaning vinegar from the local supermarket, sprayed it (undiluted) on the panels with a spray bottle and left it to soak. After fifteen minutes, I used a microfiber cloth to loosen the stains and hosed the panels down with the handheld shower.

The panels were spotless. It was like a miracle. For so long I’d been brute-forcing it mechanically, when a chemical solution (ha!) had been sitting in the pantry this whole time. With vinegar and a bit of time, these stains clear up as easily as your phone screen with an alcohol wipe.

My mind was so blown by how well this worked, I had to write about it. Hopefully it helps someone out there!

What we mean by silence is usually an environment that allows us to attend selectively to whatever quiet means to us – the birds chirping in the garden, rather than the lawnmower next door – or to our own thoughts.

Came across this gem on an episode of The Intelligence (23:35). The long-read that the segment is based on: Tinnitus nearly drove me mad.