Do You Even Write Anymore?
I’ve been using Claude and Gemini a lot lately. Like, a lot.
I’m using Claude at work daily, and Gemini is there to either do some deep research or be a backup for me when Claude is down yet again.
And I have to say, both these systems are saving me significant amounts of time. They didn’t at first, frustratingly, but I’m getting better at using them and understanding their strengths.
In fact, writing this post myself (with a human editor) is becoming a somewhat foreign process.
Here’s my normal process these days:
Dictate my thoughts on my phone
Generate a (good enough) transcript
Have Claude do the hard work of sorting everything out into a coherent flow
Hopefully, writing without all the synthesized polish gives you confidence that this is coming from me, Michael the human.
Below are a couple of related thoughts on this topic. I’m not driving at a major lesson or conclusion here. I’ll leave those to you, but here’s what I’m noticing as I’m using the tools.
Information Retrieval & Thinking without LLMs
When you realize you can ask complex questions and get targeted responses, it shifts your expectations.
Why should you use a search engine to find a webpage only to have to sift through unrelated information and hopefully find the answer you need?
Silly example… I was walking through the grocery store trying to figure out where they keep jars of minced garlic. I asked Claude, and it suggested I look in the fresh produce section.
(5 points for you if you already knew that answer!)
Sure enough, there it was.
I didn’t want to read an entire article on the topic. I just wanted the answer. Google or DuckDuckGo probably could have given me the answer in a summarized format above the rest of the results, but I had the Claude app handy.
Mark Schaefer, whose excellent book How AI Changes Your Customers goes deep in to this topic, shared the below video link with the RISE community as an eerie joke that could become too true. Will we outsource our thinking into oblivion?
From a marketing context, there is a current trend around GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) which works to ensure your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini answers. It is becoming incredibly useful…essential, even. You start thinking differently.
Working a Technical SEO Issue & Using Jargon
Chris Penn just shared a piece on how important it is to use jargon in your prompts when you’re ready to get to work as it helps ground a conversation in a specific context.
And that piece and the whole concept of finding the right answer leads me to an exchange I had with Gemini just recently. I actually went through the process of running a few “traditional” online searches to try and get more answers about a particular scenario with setting up hreflang tags for international SEO. Lots of sources had written about it, but I couldn’t get exactly the answer I needed from what I was finding.
I described the problem in detail to Gemini, and it provided an answer of how I could handle the problem. It provided solutions I wasn’t tracking at all, meaning it reframed how I thought of the question. When I went back regular ol’ searching to verify Gemini’s answers, I found the support I needed.
Now, maybe the client could have arrived at the same answer, but that person would have to share my experience and vocabulary. They don’t share my experience, and I don’t share theirs. We’re going to interact with these tools in different ways.
How Are You Changing?
Are you up to the point of noticing a shift in your work?
You may be so far past where I am with this change that you’re surprised it took me this long to get here.
You may not have adopted these tools in a consistent way yet. (Despite all the best attempts of every app you use.)
I’m still on the optimistic side that these tools will enable us in crazy cool new ways, but we are certainly seeing growing pains along the way as companies shed jobs and look for their new direction.
Having these kinds of discussions—especially ones grounded in specific examples and jobs—has been helpful in wrestling through the implications of the day-to-day impact.
So, how are these advancements changing the way you work? Are you feeling optimistic or skeptical?