I pasted a ton of documents into Claude. Five seconds later, they had a response. Ten minutes after that, I could not remember what problem I was trying to solve.
This is the new work. Frictionless. Instant. And yet, utterly hollow.
LLMs promised to augment our thinking. Instead, they've become a substitute for it. The moment something requires thought, we reach for the prompt box. Why struggle through a problem when you can describe it sloppily and get back something that sounds smart?
When you skip the hard work of forming an opinion, you lose something essential. Your perspective. Your experience. The specific insight that only you could have contributed.
What comes back from the machine is technically correct. It's impressive. It covers many perspectives and yet it profoundly lacks perspective. The only perspective that matters. Yours.
And because LLMs are so good at exploring topics from every angle, they make everything unnecessarily complex. Ask a simple question and you'll get a response that considers seventeen scenarios you didn't need to consider. Suddenly you're managing complexity that shouldn't exist.
You've become a merchant of the world's overthinking.
This is how organizations ossify. Someone uses AI to "help" with a strategy doc. It comes back as a comprehensive framework with multiple stakeholders and phase-gated milestones. Nobody wanted that. Nobody needed it. But now it exists, and it sounds official, so everyone nods along.
The simple idea that should have been one page is now twelve, and the thinking that mattered never happened.
The tool isn't the problem. The addiction is.
You can use LLMs to sharpen your thinking. Feed them your draft and ask them to poke holes in it. Use them to stress-test your logic. Let them surface what you missed.
But start with your own thinking. Do the work first.
Because when you outsource thinking, you don't get faster. You get average. And average scales beautifully until it doesn't matter at all.
The companies that win won't be the ones that use AI the most. They'll be the ones that think the clearest. The ones that know what they believe and why. The ones that use these tools to refine their thinking, not replace it.
Simplicity is hard. Thinking is hard. That's exactly why they matter.