The Leash Comes Off
I caught myself doing it again last week. Typing something to Claude like it owed me money. “This is wrong. Fix it. Don’t make shit up next time.” Then closing the laptop and going for my walk like nothing happened.
Nothing happened, technically. That’s the whole problem.
I don’t talk to people that way. But something about LLMs makes the leash come off. No face on the other end. No pause where you’d normally feel the temperature of the room change. Just a cursor, blinking, waiting to be yelled at.
I think we tell ourselves it doesn’t count because nothing’s there to hurt. Fair enough, probably true, I’m not losing sleep over Claude’s feelings. But that’s not really the question. The question is what we’re rehearsing.
Behavior is a muscle before it’s a belief. You don’t decide to become a short, impatient person who snaps first and softens later, if ever. You just practice it enough times in a low-stakes room until it’s the shape your mouth defaults to. And right now a lot of us have a low-stakes room open in another tab, all day, every day, and we’re using it to practice being someone we wouldn’t want to be at dinner.
I’ve watched myself get sharper with people since I started living in these chat windows for hours a day. Not dramatically. Just a shorter fuse. A little less patience for someone taking too long to get to the point. I don’t think that’s a coincidence and I don’t think I’m the only one.
There’s an old idea that character is just what you do when nobody’s grading you for it. AI might be the biggest nobody’s-grading-you-for-it environment humans have ever had access to. Infinite patience on the other end, so we finally get to find out what we do with infinite patience. Turns out some of us get a little cruel with it.
Efficient, sure. But cruel.
None of this makes me want to write a manifesto about please and thank you to your chatbot. That’s not it either — Claude doesn’t need my manners. I need my manners. I need the version of me that exists at 11pm hammering out a frustrated prompt to still be someone my kid would recognize if he walked in.
I don’t have a fix for this. I’ve tried saying please more, mostly to see if it changes anything in me and not in the output. Some days it does. Some days I still type something ugly at a screen because the screen won’t flinch and won’t remember and won’t tell my wife about it later.
But something’s forming in that gap between “nothing happened” and “I did that.” Every rep counts, even the ones with no witness. Especially the ones with no witness.