A computer can never be held accountable

IBM training manual from 1979 When LLMs were really hitting their stride I started experimenting with them, like many others, to see where they could help me. I wanted to see how I could leverage them at work and in my free time. I’ve learned a lot since then, but I especially remember something I started doing, and that I’ve seen other people do as well: push responsibility onto the LLM. I would say things like “here’s some research Claude did” or “the agent added this function”. Also variations on: “disclaimer, this was written by Claude”, or “I didn’t find the solution, Claude did”. Looking back at it it's pretty fascinating. It’s like saying “oh I didn’t toast the bread, the toaster did”. Did I clean the floor? No, the vacuum did. Oh, I can’t take responsibility for this code, I just wrote the high level code, the compiler did all of the work. LLMs are just another tool that we can use to do things (although few compiler developers end up having to pay $1.5B for copyright…