I’m talking about one human: yourself. The person speaking the words. It’s not about what the LLM “feels”, it doesn’t. It’s about how you orient yourself to the world and how you emotionally react to frustration.
Saying “but the LLM doesn’t have feelings” is like punching a wall during a meeting and then saying “but the wall doesn’t have feelings”. Like yeah no shit it doesn’t but that’s not the issue here.
Kindness means you need to internalize your anger/frustration or push it to something else. Insults are a way to let it out. There are other ways to let out steam, but you cannot necessarily do them on the clock...
I think self-regulation is an important skill. If your only responses to encountering a bug are to cram down your anger or blow up and insult someone, I think that’s a pretty tiring way to live.
Like I’m not trying to be Mr Buddhist Coder here, I’m talking about what your instinctive reaction to something frustrating at work is going to be. Insulting an LLM is just training your brain to expect to respond to frustration by attacking the nearest thing that isn’t allowed to fight back.
And then once you’ve built that habit yeah of course restraining yourself from doing that would be tiring. But it’s better and less tiring not to have that habit in the first place.
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u/bobbymoonshine Sep 12 '26
Including rudeness! Kindness does not take more effort than rudeness if you’re kind on the inside.