# LLMs ## Guard Rails aka personal LLM veganism ### I will not use LLMs for >I will not use LLMs for anything with a face - Writing. Writing is useful as a thinking tool and outsourcing thought to a machine is to my hurt. - [Code reviews](https://dd.slack.com/archives/CNF2V6Z4J/p1754925426990149?thread_ts=1754921217.509859&cid=CNF2V6Z4J) (slack link) - Software systems are theory building and comprehending teammates code is critical to that process. Outsourcing that to a machine hurts my team and feels wrong. - [Automated PRs](https://bauer.codes/post/2025/07/ai-pull-requests/) ### I will use LLMs for - summarizing walls of text, especially walls of text others used AI to generate - researching topics - I've found LLMs freakishly good at taking an english language description of some problem and suggesting an obscure algorithm Knuth catalogued in TAOCP. - Have to be careful though and verify everything.  I once asked claude and chatgpt the same question about a drug interaction and they both gave opposite, equally persuasive answers.  Seems ... bad. - Pair programming.  It's hit and miss, but on balance, Claude's better at boilerplate construction than I am copy-and-pasting from stack overflow.  Just like SO, it's a mixed bag, but relatively straightforward to verify.  I seldom accept its solutions as-is as I find its design sense verbose and mostly awful.