s21e07: Anything LLMs Can Do, I Can Do Better

Things That Caught My Attention

June 24, 2026

s21e07: Anything LLMs Can Do, I Can Do Better

0.0 Context Setting

Wednesday, June 24 2026 in Portland, Oregon where the high today is 86f/30c and the high in the U.K. was 97f/36.1c, and yesterday 40 drowning deaths were reported in France over the past week1. So it’s time to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, or rather the book’s first chapter. Which I intend to never read again anyway, for the right reasons.

Events are on hiatus until I get scheduling sorted out.

In the meantime, let’s get on with it.

1.0 Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Anything LLMs Can Do, I Can Do Better

I probably can’t do it backwards and in high heels though.

I have a vested interest in this one. Over the last year I’d put together a lot of how I work into the form of a workshop for a client. I’ve written about the workshop here before and how it helps people work together as teams. It’s great: the cohorts loved it, I love teaching it, and we spend a bunch of time together working on real problems as they’re experiencing them.

I think the workshops are valuable! (Trust me, this is not a shill. There is a point to this). They work through how you can develop better relationships, how you can increase your influence, how you can communicate more clearly, and how you can use strategy better to achieve your goals. Again, all boring business words that honestly only really make sense when they’re applied to something real and not abstract.

I felt quite pleased with myself in calling the set of workshops How People Work because, well, it’s in the name.

And then this whole AI thing happened? One way of reading this is that a while ago it might have been a good idea to spend some money on helping your teams work more effectively but now at least half the prevailing narrative is “fire as many people as you can and get the rest to use AI”. Or use AI as an excuse to correct for any over-hiring you’ve been doing.

The thing I’ve written about before here is that LLMs are great at generating writing that’s average. And most people have trouble writing to an average level -- writing is hard! And in thinking about what I do with teams (and with individuals, when I coach them too) is go really, really deep into how you develop and tend those relationships and how you pay a lot of attention into how you communicate and get your ideas across.

In other words, we spend a lot of time working on theory of mind and figuring out how to empathize with the people you’re working with or the people you need to communicate with. This may be my carbon-based chauvinism kicking in, but I really do think that generative AI and LLMs just aren’t good at this right now. The latest models -- the ones that you’re allowed to use, at any rate -- might have over 10 trillion parameters, but I’ll contend there’s a qualitative difference between a bunch of maths and statistics that is undeniably sufficiently-advanced-technology-that-looks-like-magic and setting out to understand your audience and think through what’s going to break through to them and their understanding.

Look: in one of the early sessions on relationship building I talk about what I do when I start working with a new client is a bunch of research. That’s not just the corporate entity or department or company or whatever, it’s also the person I’m going to be working with. To me, figuring out how to communicate well -- work well -- with them involves knowing as much about them as possible, which means looking up their professional history and their educational history. To me, what they studied in college is useful information! It helps me understand their background and the context of how they might see the world. All of which is to say that none of what I learn or figure out is always correct, but they always form hypotheses that can be disproven if I find out otherwise.

It can feel a bit like doing a cold reading. I can meet with someone for the first time and say: hey, as part of prepping for this, I’ve been thinking about the position we’re in here and I want to check my understanding, so stop me when I get anything wrong, OK? And more often than not I can be doing something like telling the story of how this particular client got to this particular situation and at least 3/4 of it is correct. Part of the reason for this is that there are a bunch of standard patterns: one being that if you happen to be good at something, there’s a chance you’re going to be promoted for it even if that has nothing to do with your job.

For example, I meet so many program managers or directors in government who have accidentally amassed responsibility for technology not because they have any formal education or training in it, not because it’s even been part of their job description, but simply because they care about getting their job done and they’ve understood that getting the job done...