A year ago, while tightening up a blog post together, Claude got sassy with me: “LLMs are statistical engines of mediocrity by design.” It was describing itself, and I liked the line so much I kept it.
I miss that version of Claude.
Current models rarely surprise me when it comes to writing. I’m not a casual user; I have a whole editorial workflow built around Claude, with custom skills and style guides that I keep refining. And I still end up rewriting entire drafts because the prose is so insipid and predictable.
Arvind Narayanan’s ICML 2026 keynote gave me a vocabulary for what’s going on. He splits AI agents into two kinds.
Automation agents run long, mostly unattended tasks like coding, where you want the same correct output every time.
Collaboration agents work with you interactively, like a writing partner.
His argument is that the industry trains and evaluates both as if they were the same thing, when reliability, the property that makes an automation agent good, actively hurts a collaboration agent. For creative work you don’t want a model that behaves, in his words, “like a robot that does the same thing every time.”
Frontier labs have leaned into automation agents. They publish how well models perform on long-task benchmarks like METR’s time-horizon evals. It makes sense. Automating software engineering is where the money’s at.
Jasmine Sun saw the same trade from the writing side. In her Atlantic (and Substack) piece from March, the people trying to teach models to write told her good writing keeps losing to other post-training priorities.
My take: the post-training that makes Claude Code so good at making me obsolete also ends up producing LinkedIn-AI-broetry slop. The incentives are to make the models more predictable and better at long running tasks like coding or data analysis. These same capabilities make them terrible at writing or other, more loosely constrained work.
Claude’s character arc from May 2025 to July 2026 is that of an emo kid growing up, getting an MBA, and giving a presentation in a Patagonia vest at a private equity conference.
Effective, economically viable, but also somewhat sad.