13th April 2026
The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.
As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don't want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.
— Bryan Cantrill, The peril of laziness lost
Recent articles
- Claude Opus 4.8: "a modest but tangible improvement" - 28th May 2026
- I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit - 27th May 2026
- Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI - 25th May 2026