Sands: Manual writing forces first-principles reasoning that LLMs dangerously bypass
Emily Glassberg Sands · The Agents Economy Backbone - with Emily Glassberg Sands, Head of Data & AI at Stripe · Oct 30, 2025 · at 55:42
Emily Glassberg Sands (Head of Data & AI at Stripe) discusses the cognitive value of manual writing versus AI document generation.
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“It forces you to think deeply. It forces you to structure your reasoning. I don't know about you guys, but when I read a doc, when I write a doc, I've like read the doc like 50 times and thought about like, Does this logic track? Are there gotchas I'm not considering? Like, is that the right train of thought? Like, how might somebody else look at this? And it's not like that I wrote the doc to be performative and the bullets would have been better. It's that the careful, thoughtful, arduous, time-consuming construction of the doc forced me to appropriately reason from first principles. And I think LLMs do the opposite.”
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