I got it wrong the first time and probably the second time too. I’ll likely get it wrong again, so here I am writing a reminder to future me. A beloved colleague died unexpectedly. The email came the same day, evening for me, direct, no euphemisms. The video call was set for the next afternoon, late enough that people had a night to sit with it before they had to be on camera together.

Someone asks you a question. You don’t know the answer off the top of your head, so you paste it into Claude, copy the response, and send it back. That’s not a human interaction. That’s a very slow API call with extra steps. I keep seeing this pattern, at work, on forums, in social communities, and it makes me wonder if we’ve completely missed the point. Not of AI. Of ourselves.