Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Degradation of Human Requirements in the LLM Era
The longer we use LLM services, the more I see a specific kind of "psychosis" spreading in the workplace. LLMs are so good at hallucinating a coherent answer from a vague prompt that people have started to believe their vague prompts were actually coherent.
LLMs Are Not Humans It sounds obvious, but we are losing our grip on this fact. People are beginning to treat their colleagues like a black-box LLM. They’ve forgotten that human communication requires precision, shared context, and accountability. In the pre-LLM era, "make it pop" was a phrase reserved for clueless clients. Now, it’s becoming the standard operating procedure inside engineering teams.
The "Do It Well, You Figure It Out" Fallacy I see managers—even those with engineering backgrounds—who are terrified of being held accountable for their own bad ideas. They hide behind vagueness. They use tools like Claude Code as a shield to bypass technical debt discussions.
When an engineer spends days fixing a half-baked requirement and managing technical constraints, the feedback isn't "Thank you for the due diligence." Instead, it’s: "See? It was possible after all. Why did you push back so hard? LLMs could've done it in seconds." This is gaslighting. They want the output of a senior engineer while providing the input of a garbage prompt.
The Death of Articulation LLMs accept "garbage in" and provide "plausible out." This has become a drug. People are losing the ability to articulate their own thoughts. They throw a mess of words at you and expect a miracle. If this continues, we aren't just looking at bad software; we’re looking at a breakdown of professional sanity.
I’ve felt the symptoms myself. Lately, I’ve caught myself thinking, "Explaining this to my team is a waste of 'communication cost.' I’d rather just pay for more API tokens and do it myself."
But we must remember: A high-functioning team is not a collection of prompt engineers. True teamwork is exponentially more efficient than a lone developer with an LLM. We cannot afford to lose the art of talking to each other.