If I've asked *you* a question, it's because I want to know what *you* think.
I don't want to know what Claude thinks.
If you don't know the answer, say that. "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer, albeit one which I might follow up with something like "Well why don't you know? This is literally your job to know", which is kind of what 90% of my emails at work for the past three weeks have been.
Out of interest, do you pay people extremely well to work with you?
"I don't know" is an extraordinarily powerful answer, but maybe it's getting ruined. I'm not sure it can be entirely ruined.
In a human interaction, when used confidently, it means 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front. I don't have to do the slightest thing to impress you. My foundation is so secure it doesn't need defending or justification at all". Also, 'that turns out to be outside the massive quantity of stuff I do know, how interesting'. Think Holmes, perhaps erroneously saying 'Now that I know that, I shall do my best to forget it' on the grounds that his work wasn't helped by the fact.
It could get ruined by an AI normalization of the idea that 'everybody should know literally everything, because asking an AI is the same as knowing and then you know the thing, having been told it'. Plenty of money is now marketing this position to the world, and so it's possible 'I don't know' will become ruined, a shameful response.
I feel like that may not happen in practice, though, because that pro-AI position is what used to be called 'pants-on-head R-slur' and I feel like the people who buy into this extreme position will make SUCH a disaster of things that it will tend to make that position, instead, the shameful response… and 'I don't know' will remain a valid signaling mechanism to convey 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front', all the more if it's more of a shocking response to get.
I definitely appreciate being told "I don't know", but I've found in business settings that people expect to get reprimanded for saying that more than a couple times a year, and they refuse to say it.
They will invent crazy workarounds to avoid those 3 words.
Even if I ask "Do you know X?" they will not just say "no" most of the time, unless it's really outside their wheelhouse. If they think they should know it, they'll spit out statements worthy of an LLM.
And I admit, I felt the same at first. The first few times I told the CTO (my boss) that, I cringed. But he just told me to put aside time to research it. He knew I couldn't know everything, especially about things that we hadn't done before.
We are talking about questions in the context of reviewing a pull request. If I ask you a question about the code, and you have to ask Claude, or otherwise cannot tell me why the code that you wrote is the way it is, that is strike one of two.
Good catch to ask about the code &emdash; if you can't actually explain the code you wrote, why do you expect me to explain to you?
;-)