Preface
Now, we all know that LinkedIn has been a bountiful Lolcow for years and years, but this recent timeline that we’re in has seen it transform into a true hellscape. Nowhere else on the internet has in sloppification been more wholly embraced. It’s really hard to decide where to even begin with this platform.
But we can’t talk about this new era of LinkedIn cringe without talking a little bit about design. Now, I swear I hardly ever see this kind of stuff out in the wild, but on LinkedIn, it is thriving. And these designs are not just hard to look at. I think they’re also a fascinating insight into what’s happening to LinkedIn users brains right now. It’s like when the cops check a suspect’s journals and they find like this, it’s telling us something.
You see, these people have become so consumed with the ethos of hyper optimization and outproducing your competitors at all costs that when they make a flyer, diagram, or graphic, they need it to do the most. And they have clearly lost the cognitive capacity to consider anything else. They have apparently not even thought once about what it feels like to be a human being looking at this stuff. It reminds me of a great article I read in The Atlantic where a writer was describing his experience on board [a] cruise ship…and he remarks, “There is no visual mercy.” And that is precisely what is happening here. There is nowhere I can point my eyes where I am not facing an all out screaming assault. This is not just bad taste. We’re staring into the psychotic depths of hell, my friends. I guarantee you these guys are talking backwards and crawling on the ceiling when they post…
The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
We grouped GitHub PRs since 2025 into 10 clusters of vocabulary using KL-divergence k-means.
One of the clusters appeared in 2026 and represented 40% of all human-attributed pull requests last month.
Its most representative words should look familiar to anyone who uses coding agents.
I was inspired to write this after reading some LinkedIn posts from a prominent CEO here in Dallas. Every post is transparently written by Claude. There is no attempt by this CEO’s handlers to tweak the content to make it less sloppy. The actual content is often good, but the actual “writing” has that slop stink and makes it indigestible.
Then the two links above crossed my desk.
Caring
My working hypothesis for this slop age we’re living in is this: these people never cared. I don’t have the expectation that everyone on the internet care about what they publish there, lord knows that ship has sailed. Online marketers haven’t cared about their craft since the first time someone breathed “SEO”.
But I have assumed that executives and other professionals representing their intellectual abilities on the internet would care. I now think that assumption was wrong all along.
But they care about something, right? Otherwise why post?
Over a year ago I said:
LLMs aren’t good writers if you’re trying to actually sound smart or original. Conversely, LLMs are good at navigating scenarios where business theater has replaced actual truth and meaning, like security audits. LLMs are great bullshit machines.
About a month ago I gave a presentation that included this:
Capital, Again?
We’re in an age where much of the labor required by capital is bullshit work. So much of the work required to maintain software has been pushed onto the customers of that software. I don’t need to review that landscape. But that simple observation brings us back to LinkedIn and CEOs’ Claude-generated posts.
Business leaders are, and have always been, half business and half theater. Some excel at both (Steve Jobs comes to mind). Some lean more towards one or the other. But neither necessarily rewards creative craft. Both modes are simply checkpoints on the way to greater profitability.
So if you feel obligated to post to LinkedIn to fulfill your duties, but don’t have anything to say, don’t have the time to say something you thought and wrote yourself, or simply don’t care about writing and posting…well, Claude to the rescue.
There is a lot of bullshit in my life that I’d love to outsource to Claude. Despite my best efforts, the level of bullshit has only grown since I observed it and began attempts at fighting it. AI promises to remove that bullshit, yet somehow…unbelievably, I know…has only multiplied the stinky piles.
After writing, I realized this is another version of When Machines Make the Incompetent More Confident.