"Ask Claude" Is Replacing Genuine Human Expertise
Original: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
Why This Matters
Signals a growing tension between AI tool adoption and the erosion of expert knowledge-sharing culture.
Tech writer Yael argues that redirecting hard questions to LLMs like Claude has become a socially acceptable way to avoid sharing hard-won expertise. When someone has already spent hours with an AI and still has an unanswered question, "ask Claude" withholds exactly the lived experience they were seeking.
In a short essay published on her personal blog, writer Yael describes a recurring frustration: when she brings a difficult, unresolved question to experienced professionals — people she knows personally and trusts — the response is increasingly "Ask Claude." The problem, she notes, is that she already has. Her process involves spending significant time with an LLM before reaching out to humans, specifically because the AI couldn't resolve the question. She draws a parallel to the old "LMGTFY" phenomenon, but argues this is categorically different. Asking a friend for a restaurant recommendation isn't about finding a top-10 list; it's about accessing their specific taste, judgment, and the ways they know the consensus is wrong. Similarly, calling a senior professional isn't about getting a textbook answer — it's about the 30 years of scar tissue that no model has ingested. Yael acknowledges the real cost of being someone others call on: it demands attention and thought that not everyone can spare. She says "I'm busy" or "I can't think of anything new" would be more honest and more useful responses than the LLM redirect, which she suspects has become a polite way to decline engaging. Her core argument: when a question has already survived the model, deferring back to it doesn't save a step — it just withholds the one thing AI cannot replicate: specific, lived human experience.