No LLM was harmed in the writing of this message

July 24, 2026

~3 min read

I have for you a promise and a manifesto today.

The Promise: no LLM was used at any point in the writing of this email.

No outline generation. No "let me have it double check x". Nope, not even a typo review of this email.

Using LLMs to check for typos is not a bad application, btw. It's just what I'm choosing to do for this email series, and I'll be sticking it at the bottom of this email from now on that this was written by me.

This means you'll get more than typos.

You'll get run ons, digressions, badly chosen words, awkward phrasing, weird punctuation—yes, I do know how to make an EM dash by myself—no—you can't make me stop—I do what I want. But srsly, it's just option + shift + - on Mac folks. It's not that crazy.

The Manifesto

I will use LLMs to reduce drudgery in my life or others. Such as to doo 100 similar boring tasks that are easy to verify.
I won't use LLMs to "think" for me or do any creative work.
I won't use LLMs to communicate to other people individually or even small group. Any thing that would have been a form letter even 5 years ago, though, is totally fair game. See point 1.

I'm not "anti-AI". I'm just anti-slop talk and anti-slop thought.

I use LLMs all day for work. I use it for reducing repetitive work. And yes, that does include writing code, because at a mid-zied company, there's a lot of repetitive crap that only exists because we're a mid sized company.

So yes, I will happily use LLMs to suck down all the random stuff generated each day at work now to attempt to get some signal out of the noise.

This entire message was inspired by Van Neitstat. (The lesser known brother of Casey.) He made the following video which inspired me to write this for you all.

By the way, you may ask, how was "No LLM was harmed in the writing of this email?" I don't view LLMs as thinking or feeling. I view them as a big bag of dice that I shake text out of. So I dunno. Felt good in the moment, and I didn't ask an LLM to post hoc rationalize it for me either once I settled on it.

— Robert

This message is 100% organic human effort, so it will have typos. No, I didn't send it through an LLM to typo check it. It was made with just my fingers and my eyes.