Clay Tercek

My Clearest Briefs Go to a Robot

Date

The clearest briefs I’ve ever written have all been addressed to a robot.

When I hand a task to Claude, I explain the background, spell out the constraints, define what done looks like, and call out the edge cases I’m worried about. I’ll even list the things I don’t want it to do. It’s some of the best technical writing I produce all week.

Nobody I actually work with gets that treatment. Humans get “hey, can you take a look at this when you get a chance?”

The robot is a brutal audience

Why does the robot get the good version? Because it punishes vague writing instantly. Hand a colleague an underspecified task and they’ll nod, fill in the gaps from shared context, maybe ask a clarifying question a day later. Hand a model an underspecified task and it confidently does the wrong thing, right in front of you, in about thirty seconds.

That’s the tightest feedback loop on unclear communication anyone has ever had. “Prompt engineering” gets dressed up as a new technical discipline, but strip away the mystique and it’s just briefing: context, goal, constraints, examples of what good looks like. The stuff we always owed each other and mostly skipped, because a human recipient absorbs the ambiguity for free and the cost stays invisible.

I ran into this same pattern with agent config files: people who never got around to writing a README will happily fill an AGENTS.md with build steps, conventions, and architecture notes. The robot asked, so the docs finally got written. Turns out that wasn’t just about docs.

And yet the inbox got worse

Here’s the part that gets me. Everyone leveled up at written communication at the same moment, and the messages showing up in my inbox got worse. Longer, rounder, padded with headers and bullet points nobody chose.

Because the good writing stays private. You write a tight three-sentence brief, hand it to the model, and the model inflates it into four polite paragraphs. Then you send the four paragraphs and keep the three sentences.

Andrew Gelman was complaining about exactly this on his blog just yesterday: “Instead of sending me the chatbot output, just send me your goddamn prompt.” He’s right, and the reason he’s right is simple: everything you wanted to say was already in the prompt. The model didn’t add information, it spread the same information across more words. So now I have to read your four paragraphs trying to reconstruct the three sentences you started from. Plenty of people don’t even do that anymore, they paste the message into an LLM and ask for a summary. Inflate on your end, deflate on mine, lossy in both directions. We’ve invented the world’s slowest way to send three sentences.

Niklas Gruhn has a name for the person doing the forwarding: a meat proxy. If all you did was carry the model’s output to my inbox, you added nothing but latency. And as he points out, if I wanted a chatbot’s take, “I can talk to Claude myself. It’s going to be faster and I get to control the context.”

The rule

Before you hit send, ask which artifact carries more information per word: the output, or the prompt that produced it? If it’s the prompt, send the prompt. Not as a transcript with an apology attached. Just send the message you typed, because that was the actual message all along.

The corollary is less comfortable. If you’d be embarrassed to send the prompt (“make this sound professional,” “write an update saying things are on track”), the polished version has nothing to say either. The polish is laundering.

When the output is the message

To be fair, sometimes the model genuinely adds information: it researched something you didn’t know and you verified it, it wrote code that runs, it boiled ten documents down to a real decision. In those cases the output carries more than the prompt did, so send the output. The sin was never using AI. The sin is sending text that contains less information than the prompt that produced it.

Aim it at people

You already know how to write. The proof is sitting in your prompt history: context up front, constraints named, done defined. You’ve been doing it every day, for an audience that gives you nothing back but compliance.

Next time, skip the middleman. Send the brief.

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