About Me
My name is Marc Brooker. I like to build things that work, and do cool stuff. I like building big things. I also dabble in machining, welding, cooking, and skiing.I am an engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Seattle, where I work on agentic AI, especially safety and policy for agentic AI. Before that, I worked on EC2, EBS, databases, serverless, and serverless databases.
All opinions are my own.
Links
My Publications and Videos@marcbrooker on Mastodon @MarcJBrooker on Twitter
Is this blog written by AI?
Is this blog written by AI?
None of the human-readable text on this blog is written by AI, and I have no plans to change that. The weird grammar, incorrect assumptions, spelling errors, and annoying tics are all mine. Including the em dashes.
I don’t use LLMs for writing. On this blog, or in my professional life.
I use agents extensively for brainstorming, research, summarizing, checking facts, handling markup, finding references, analyzing data, and so on.
But I think that asking people to read LLM-generated text breaks a kind of social contract. When I publish a piece of writing under my name (e.g. in my blog, or a document at work), I want the reader to know that I deeply understand and own what I wrote. That I respect their time and effort. In exchange, I want them to be fully and deeply engaged with reading.
If I’m going to generate a doc from a prompt, then send it to somebody who summarizes it with an LLM and reads the summary, what have I achieved? I could have sent them the prompt, and let them explore the topic with their agent. A better use of their time!
As an organization leader, I emphasize function over form. If you have half a page of thoughts, give me half a page. Don’t fill up another five pages with Claude’s thoughts. If I want Claude’s opinion (which I often do), I’ll ask for it. And get a custom version with my context!
I feel completely differently about code. I am 100% comfortable heading to a world where code is opaque to humans, and all I care about are the properties of that code. Almost all the code on this blog over the last two years is 100% AI generated. Mostly vibe-coded slop, to be honest.
Even three years ago, I deeply believed that code primarily exists to share ideas between people. I no longer believe that. I believe that sharing ideas between people is super important, but there are better ways free of the accidental complexity of a code base.
Finally, I do use LLMs for editing and critiquing my writing. But less than I used to, because I worry that over-use leads to a super defensive “block every exit” style of writing that obscures good communication. I feel the same way about writing to avoid bad comments on Twitter, reddit, or Hacker News. Defensive writing, especially defensive writing aimed to defend against malicious misreadings, obscures good communication.
Marc Brooker
The opinions on this site are my own. They do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
marcbrooker@gmail.com
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