Thies Lindenthal

Research and teaching, mostly real estate finance, a bit of Big Data, ML, domain names, and a careful dose of proptech. University of Cambridge, Department of Land Economy.

less than 1 minute read

One pitfall of using Claude Code and other AI tools is that they make me lazy. The output is slick, useful, and smoothly integrated. The machines tries to give me exactly what I need. They try to please me. And I catch myself getting sloppy about checking. Proper due diligence takes surprisingly much effort when something already looks polished and fits seamlessly.

A small writing change makes the necessary quality checks a bit easier for me:

In academic writing, it is uncommon to say “I”. The convention is “we”, even in sole-authored papers. In the age of AI-enabled research, I think that should change to “I”. When the text says, I did this. I tested that. I find this, it becomes clear who is responsible. The author, alone. No “we”. No hiding behind “Claude wrote this”. It is my text. When I claim authorship, I also own the errors and that’s why I cannot be complacent.

Yes, the text above sounds like AI slob. The short sentences. One line paragraphs. A good example of the indirect AI effect on our communication, as documented by Yakura et al. (2025).

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