Most intellectual labour is proof of work
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Most intellectual labour is proof of work
Haven't you heard? You don't need to write things any longer
2026-07-13
I think the idea that LLMs represent meaningful progress in the field of intellectual<br>work purely for their ability to generate textual documents is a category error.
You see, the production of most documents - financial records, contract bids, licenses,<br>documentation, progress reports, interface control documents, etc. - has very little to<br>do with the document itself. Instead, their existence acts as a form of intellectual<br>proof of work, evidence that the author has taken the time and energy to carefully<br>consider their subject matter. The quality of the final document is nothing but a<br>signal that exists solely for the purpose of distinguishing the author’s efforts from<br>background noise.
Why do we need to do this? Because the quality of intellectual work is extremely<br>difficult to measure. A layman can evaluate the craftmanship and care with which a<br>builder constructs a house without much effort: but evaluating intellectual work usually<br>requires the eye of a subject matter expert, and yet decisions about quality must be<br>made by managers who are - by definition - not subject matter experts. So, the document<br>becomes the proxy by which the work of a subordinate expert might be measured.
The age of LLMs has ended the ability for document quality to act as a proxy for<br>intellectual quality. It’s now trivial to kick out a passable document for any given<br>subject, and the document need not attest to any underlying intellectual labour being<br>performed at all. The irony is that by leaning into LLMs so heavily, many organisations<br>have managed to demolish the very signalling system that allowed them to measure their<br>own progress and promote talent.
This is, I believe, why this so-called revolution doesn’t seem to have made a midge’s<br>armpit of difference to the growth, well-being, stability, or capability of the<br>organisations that have leaned into it: because it was never the production of documents<br>that was the true source of value, but the intellectual labour that document-writing<br>requires along the way.
Enter the tarpit 🤖
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© Joshua Barretto