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eddythompson80 15 hours ago [-]
I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?”
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
ffsm8 14 hours ago [-]
At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
prymitive 14 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day.
Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
ungreased0675 8 hours ago [-]
I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.
jvanderbot 8 hours ago [-]
Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10?
I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.
mattgreenrocks 2 hours ago [-]
The industry has always found it strangely taboo to actually talk about the wide variance in developer skill.
iwontberude 31 minutes ago [-]
True because we have pay bands that everyone has to somehow be hired for and fit within.
kooi 7 hours ago [-]
Any competent developer knows there are limits to prompting.
Personally I've found LLM's suck at multi-threaded applications. (Because I've been tempted by the ~agentic loop~ and been burned. Then I hand code the core logic and all is well).
Woe to the developer who tries to prompt their way through this.
wuliwong 5 hours ago [-]
I hit a wall with creating a browser based video editor. Up until then, over the last year, I have been taking my hands off the wheel more and more and really have just become more and more productive. This video editor experience has forced me to get more into the code again.
abustamam 4 hours ago [-]
Skill issue /s
But seriously, lots of apps are just glorified NextJS apps which have tons of training data. Something like rust would likely churn out nonsense that compiles eventually but isn't optimal.
kooi 3 hours ago [-]
sKiLl IsSuE - some redditor XD
Agreed with the caveat that I think if you know what you're doing and are very cognizant, LLM generated Rust is amazing. I feel like it's hard compilation requirements gives a guardrails for a LLM and if it compiles, you're pretty safe against memory issues.
You're basically describing my work day. My job went from interesting, highly skilled work to mostly horrible brain rot over the past year.
It's depressing and I don't know a way out. Other then a complete career change, throwing away 30 years of experience and a matching salary.
abustamam 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe it's because my org gave us permission to fail and make mistakes, but I transitioned to AI driven development pretty quickly and am having fun learning how to best drive the AI to produce good quality code, with harnesses and patterns to prevent mistakes and a process to learn and rollback. It's a different kind of engineering now. I find myself thinking more product level and system level than if else branches. I think I've been able to upskill in ways that I wouldn't have been able to if I were still writing code by hand, mainly because I have the bandwidth to do so now.
I only have 10 years of experience, so I'm not trying to say that your lived experience is invalid, but personally I figure if this is the way the industry is heading then I may as well try to learn how to thrive within the new environment.
johsole 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of the joy I used to have doing this job is gone. I wrote some recursive code to turn nested API parameters into Elastic search queries, it was the last really cool thing I did pre-Ai. Sometimes I look at that code with a fond nostalgia, I'll never write code like that again unless I go out of my way to do it for fun. I don't even know what being a software dev will look like in a year from now.
ent001 4 hours ago [-]
This is my biggest problem with the current state of things. The loss in quality of life out weights the gains in productivity. And they are concentrated on highly conscientiousness individuals, those who already got silently taxed with most of the 80% of the work to get the last 20% of the results. So it is now compounding, if you care your workload will approximate 99,99..% of the total workload divided by the number of high conscientiousness individuals in your team/organization.
The current hype cycle might even represent a net global gain like some people argue. But it represents yet more externality driven exploitation. Remains to be seen what the new equilibrium will be given that now the population being exploited is not only close to the core of the world system but also already overburdened.
I do think it represents a mere acceleration of the previous trend that resulted since around 2005 in an explosion of average (not median) pay for software developers due to similar dynamics. If the system settles on a new level of pay that manages to convince enough people of enough skill to go along, it might just hum along and not implode. As for the rest of us, welcome to the growing permanent underclass and brace for the impact of the climate wars. We will be the fodder that will insulate the chosen ones under their air conditioned domes.
BubbleRings 2 hours ago [-]
Someone very close to me is in their second year as a dev. I hope things don’t turn out as bad as it looks like it might. We are all going to need some luck here.
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
Kids, young folks, anyone reading:
this is golden handcuffs.
If you’re unhappy, make a change.
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, we're just the neo-luddites in this case. Or maybe the rust belt when jobs moved elsewhere.
The real question isn't if things are going to change around our jobs, its are we going to be able to move fast enough to avoid starving in the streets?
seanw444 41 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, the economy wants a dystopia, so we're just gonna have to let that happen industry by industry, calling each group that is exploited for maximal corporate gain a neo-luddite. Inevitability and whatnot. Hell, we're gonna die one day anyway, that's also inevitable, so we might as well all just drink the Kool-Aid too.
leptons 4 hours ago [-]
I'm in the same boat as you... 30 years of experience writing software, and now I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs without reading the PR. I'm just supposed to press a button. I'm looking for a new job, but it's going to be difficult to find one in tech that isn't a complete AI-psychosis shitshow.
icedchai 3 hours ago [-]
Same. I'm being forced into a position where I'm supposed to do everything with AI agents, not write any manual code, and only act as a reviewer. It sounds like you know the drill. It may push me into early retirement.
leptons 1 hours ago [-]
The last straw (of many last straws) was over the weekend a co-worker sent me a chat "hey can you click approve on this PR real quick?". This only makes me click "Apply" (jobs) instead of "Approve".
mikebenfield 4 hours ago [-]
I think I’m pretty skilled, or at least I was, but much of my work now looks like this. The fact is in many cases Claude can diagnose and fix the issue quicker than I can even read it. It would be crazy not to take advantage of this. Of course it does get hard to resist the temptation to just become ever lazier over time.
seanw444 39 minutes ago [-]
It fixes it at face value, for now. The long-term effects of corporate nearsightedness might be too great to absorb this time around.
projectazorian 4 hours ago [-]
This is a sign of poor harness configuration and/or org level constraints (lack of MCP support, etc.) With properly configured and prompted agents error copy-pasta should be the exception not the norm.
tdeck 7 hours ago [-]
This is my exact process nowadays when debugging some weird Linux wifi driver issue or something that came up after upgrade.
But that's because I don't have any real familiarity with the systems involved and I don't expect that gaining such familiarity will benefit me. If I am working on a system or product I'm responsible for at my job, it should be a different situation.
randusername 8 hours ago [-]
All paradigm shifts and regime changes happen because of a coalition of people that have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the current system.
But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.
strix_varius 7 hours ago [-]
The incentives for developing juniors have become misaligned as the expected stay in a company dwindled from decades to years to maybe year.
It would make sense to develop juniors if most of their comp was a four year vest but that doesn't happen until later. And in your first year or two you're usually a net negative... This is even more true with AI.
xyproto 11 hours ago [-]
It's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.
bigfishrunning 8 hours ago [-]
I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...
xyproto 6 hours ago [-]
Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.
StableAlkyne 1 hours ago [-]
There's a reason games like Factorio or Exapunks are so popular among engineers!
Especially if you get a little burned out and can't bring yourself to contribute to a side project, but still want to do programming-ish things that get your brain moving
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.
Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.
skydhash 9 hours ago [-]
> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.
If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them.
I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow. No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools. Because they are great levers that lets you create more with less effort.
vehemenz 8 hours ago [-]
Many developers have narrow job descriptions, and the creative, productive uses of AI aren’t really obvious.
Where it shines is glueing systems together or building one-off automations that would take days, or weeks, to figure out. It’s for things you don’t have time to figure out or didn’t think were possible.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
> If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results
Why would it mean that? That's one way of using them, sure. Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects.
> I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow
Alright, does that mean you also believe it's impossible then that anyone out there is using AI in a "net positive" way for their development workflow? Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?
skydhash 6 hours ago [-]
> Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?
This one. Only a sith deals in absolute.
I don’t mind experiments to try to find methodologies for those tools. And I believe there are instances where they’ve been successfully used. The issue I have is the kind of generic statements that they are good enough to replace currently established methodologies. Like using AI is a panacea.
> Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects
That’s a bit what I’m talking about. Have you investigated how it has helped you? And if there are other, more economical way to get the same result? Your statement seems more ritualistic than logical.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> Have you investigated how it has helped you? And if there are other, more economical way to get the same result?
No I haven't, but I'm happy to just freeform walk you through my thinking on it: I typically write (wrote?) software for two purposes: consulting/freelancing for others so building what others want, or for simplifying and making my own life easier and more enjoyable. "Stupid" stuff like Home Assistant for example, isn't really life-or-death, or Jellyfin for that matter, both things my family relies on now, but our daily life just gets easier all throughout the day when everything works in sync with what we're doing.
It used to be I had to make a decision what to spend time on, either I work on my professional stuff so we have enough money to survive (maybe more) and I get new challenges and all that, or I spend time improving and maintaining my home infrastructure, or whatever software I feel like I'd need to be better at doing my professional development.
I no longer am making that choice, I'm spending less time in front of the computer, yet the output and quality of my work remains the same, and the code and design when I look at it, even stuff I shipped 6 months ago, I'm still happy with how the code is, which for me I guess is the way I validate if what I produce is good enough.
Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point. Now I just open issues, have a conversation until everything is 100% clear, end up with a PR to review and merge if it looks good, and I can do this while juggling other things.
I agree with you that there are tons of people who are selling LLMs as a panacea to lots of things, and there is so much over-hype in the industry and ecosystem, I also feel like every "new thing" kind of comes with this type of almost scamming, which sucks, and makes it hard to discern from real positive opinions vs just regurgitated opinions someone read somewhere. I'm not sure what the answer to that is, except perhaps as what you say, only a sith deals in absolutes.
What are the exact "currently established methodologies" you're talking about that cannot be replaced by LLMs + a harness today, just as some examples? You're probably right that those exists, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be the most difficult to replace today.
skydhash 4 hours ago [-]
> What are the exact "currently established methodologies" you're talking about that cannot be replaced by LLMs + a harness today, just as some examples? You're probably right that those exists, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be the most difficult to replace today.
I was explaining [0] under another post that programming is mostly translation works. You take a specs and you formalize it using code, like going from sketch to a proper engineering drawing. Software design is more creative, where you take a problem and then comes up with a solution (creating the specs). Software Engineering is ensuring that those two are done well enough while consuming the least resources.
So a program is always a formal system. It's also static. It will be executed by a computer which will actually have a tangible effect in the real world. That effect is what's valuable. The program is the seed which let us control that effect. Aka it's the map that let us plan the journey, but it's not the territory that we will have to travel in.
The issue I keep pointing in most of my comment is thinking that the map is the territory. That the novel are the words and not the story so we need more words. Or that the code is more important than the user' workflows, se we are adding more buggy code, while not ensuring that the workflows are undisturbed.
> Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point.
It's also highlighted here where you focus more on the process than the output here. The goal is to have a working homelab. NixOS managing it is only the process (accidental complexity). If it's where truly about the goal and not NixOS and using AI, by this point, adding new nodes (software, devices,...) should be as easy as selecting it and adding it to the current system, like a strategy game.
You can see that philosophy in OpenBSD, where the focus is to have a working OS, not to work on developing an OS. A lot of software are done and it's mostly just bug fixing every once in a while. You can also see the same attitude in industrial engineering where you develop a solution and then use it for years. You don't spend all your time tweaking it and thus disturbing the production flow.
So yes, when I see a LLM methodology, it's mostly about the work itself, not the output of the work. There is no definition of done or even the idea of having one. It's work for the purpose of working.
I think many people did argue against these things when they were new. Compilers, for instance, were seen as a waste of the computer's resources and produced less than optimal code.
yoz-y 8 hours ago [-]
Eh. The useful LLM usage I see is in internal tools (bugs don’t matter because the output or UI is the only thing that counts and they are throw away) or personal projects that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Both of these can be quite invisible. But the benefit is there.
rightbyte 6 hours ago [-]
> No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools.
Uhm ... I've heard quite alot arguing against IDEs. And I feel IDEs are too much of a lock in.
surgical_fire 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
kooi 7 hours ago [-]
Infinitely, that's a stretch.
Over the past year maybe 1.5x to 2.0x for me. As in: I can work on two projects at the same time with reduced amount of context switch. But that's it for me.
Maybe I don't have the brains for 1000x terminal agent coding, but 2 parallel projects seems like my saturation point.
q3k 7 hours ago [-]
I do believe there's a tiny subset of people who are more productive with AI, in the same way that Erdős was more productive with amphetamine.
But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.
ratelimitsteve 6 hours ago [-]
this is a great metaphor precisely because (outside those with paradoxical stimulant response) everyone thinks they're more productive on amphetamines and there's some naive evidence to that effect. the number of things you've actually done is significantly higher. the change in value created, as measured by the decrease in distance between where you are and the the goal you're shooting for, is unpredictable at best and slowly degrades as reliance increases.
AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.
bonoboTP 11 hours ago [-]
The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is.
Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.
nmeagent 10 hours ago [-]
I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.
projectazorian 4 hours ago [-]
If you use it in a work context (or any normal social context really) then yes, that is obnoxious. That doesn't mean it's not a real phenomenon.
bonoboTP 10 hours ago [-]
Mweh, I'm not a native English speaker. It's a definitely existing archetype, though, just like "Spießbürger" points at a thing in German.
delian66 7 hours ago [-]
Is he wrong though?
vehemenz 8 hours ago [-]
More cringe than obnoxious, but yeah.
Jensson 10 hours ago [-]
People who uses the word "obnoxious" are also obnoxious. There are many unpleasant words, you have to use some of them and people don't like any of them.
dml2135 8 hours ago [-]
The word “obnoxious” does not carry the connotation of smug superiority that “midwit” does.
nmeagent 10 hours ago [-]
Would you refer to someone as a midwit in a typical office environment and expect your professional reputation to remain intact? If you were to do this on an ongoing basis for whatever reason, how long before you're asked to have a little chat with the folks in HR? Would you then attempt to explain it away as one of those unpleasant words that you just had to use? I want to be there for that conversation.
vovavili 7 hours ago [-]
Engaging in direct open conflict in a sanitized environment like an office is shooting yourself in the foot. Different norms for different rooms.
ndriscoll 9 hours ago [-]
Corporate offices are low trust environments where people do not really openly speak directly in any negative way (for basically the reason you've illustrated), so I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction.
projectazorian 4 hours ago [-]
> I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction
Workplaces are where many of us spend a large percentage of our waking lives. So, it is "normal," unfortunately. This is why HR language and norms have broken containment into the non-work world. (Whether that's a good thing is another question.)
bonoboTP 9 hours ago [-]
Different context, different politeness rules. I bet you're fun at parties. An online forum is a relaxed space, like a town pub. HR isn't breathing down our necks here. Personal attacks are a different sort of thing. Using a word to describe in a comment some abstract situations and kinds of characters you see at the office is not a personal attack.
There is not one single discourse norm to rule them all and calling out every little thing as too offensive is just annoying. Yeah, yeah there are no midwits, everyone is a unique little genius flower, yeah.
redsocksfan45 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
surgical_fire 10 hours ago [-]
> very competent who know when and how to use it and for what.
More productive? Sure, to an extent.
Being merely more productive is a tame claim for what some people unashamedly post here
bonoboTP 9 hours ago [-]
People apparently can get a very different picture of the same site. Anti-AI people think this site's commenters are mostly pro-AI and vice versa. I'm generally pro-using-AI-in-proper-ways, and mostly have the impression that people on here tend to complain and grumble about AI mostly and are generally skeptical and dismissive of everything which is right in the HN tradition (the famous Dropbox comment etc).
Karpathy, Carmack, Terence Tao, Simon Willison etc. are all smart people and manage to use AI effectively and productively because it doesn't hurt their ego.
surgical_fire 8 hours ago [-]
Except I am not anti-AI.
You can see my comment history.
aquariusDue 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
meowface 9 hours ago [-]
Everyone I know, including myself, is simultaneously extremely pro-AI and anti-AI for this reason.
I always put myself in the shoes of the reader when relaying Claudeslop. I either use it as a reference and write it by hand or make Claude edit it 10+ times until it's conveying only the needed information, and in simple, clear words, and without annoying Claudeisms.
trueno 9 hours ago [-]
we've been calling it meatware at work.
i just like dont read peoples md files they send me from claude anymore
chii 12 hours ago [-]
He's basically asking other people to do his job for him, because he knows that the AI doesn't truly do it well enough.
I would say to him that if he wants me to do his job, he needs to pay me his salary.
datakan 9 hours ago [-]
My VP boss calls me 6 times a day to help him understand his copilot responses and asks why we aren't doing what copilot says we should do. I then have to spend multiple hours explaining why. His peers call him to understand their copilot responses which he then copilots and calls me to help interpret. On and on and on
hoppp 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds to me like developer jobs are not going away after all. Somebody needs to understand what the AI communicates.
Sounds more like job security to me.
72deluxe 8 hours ago [-]
This sounds like true hell. I am very sorry.
brlewis 6 hours ago [-]
Have you tried putting those explanations into your repo?
natsucks 6 hours ago [-]
wow. what a nightmare.
javcasas 6 hours ago [-]
I am that person on the blast radius. The most effective response I have found is dumping the documents into the AI, and asking it to review them, then posting back the AI response.
Any resistance to this is met with a "But I'm also using AI as the board demands!"
DenisM 11 minutes ago [-]
Diabolical. I’m not sure if I’m frightened or fascinated…
, I’m thinking of where can this lead if applied iteratively. Like, slop supernova followed by by a slop brown dwarf?
lukeschlather 2 hours ago [-]
How correct is the documentation? You seem to be coming from the same standpoint as a lot of people in this thread which is "don't make me read AI output, I can prompt the model myself" but what this person is doing sounds much more sane - have highly skilled subject matter experts prompt the AI once, generate all the answers you might want, and review them carefully for correctness using all available context.
That sounds far preferable to individuals independently asking questions that are not covered by the documentation and independently reviewing a bunch of potentially hallucinated slop that no one else will ever read.
DenisM 1 minutes ago [-]
I kinda dislike where your comment leads, but I can’t argue with the logic either. Time for self-reflection I suppose.
Maybe a better way of doing this is to ask the experts to do the work? But then again, someone who does not understand the subject could ask better or at least different and more approachable questions.
I guess one reason I object to this is asymmetry - it takes someone a minute to take an hour of my life with no back pressure mechanism. Previously asking a question required effort and signified commitment.
lelanthran 13 hours ago [-]
> Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
So... back to a currency backed by gold?
Kostchei 12 hours ago [-]
As an Au stralian I am offended you went with gold psychosis instead of whatever the aussie zeitgeist is cooking up with extra crazy. Our equivalent of "Florida man" is "queensland man" or "western suburbs man"- about half the country at this point. Its cooked.
In all seriousness, actual AI psychosis is my 3rd risk behind 1. public interactive agents and 2. whatever devs are doing with agents to prod
HPsquared 13 hours ago [-]
All that trickles is not slop.
richrichardsson 13 hours ago [-]
Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold! Actual Intelligence could grasp this was a simple keytranspose typo...
BigTTYGothGF 7 hours ago [-]
> Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold!
I don't usually like to gatekeep but knowing that "Au==gold" is one of those basic facts that everybody on a forum like hacker news should know and find unremarkable.
You might even say it's puts on sunglasses periodic table stakes.
kruffalon 13 hours ago [-]
I disagree...
Actual intelligence might be[0] to know what typos (of any kind) are fun to riff off.
Maybe this didn't hit the mark for you, but it got a chuckle out of me (especially considering the last hype before AI was crypto).
-----
[0] I don't even try to figure that out anymore, in a few years I'll pick the definition that I think best captures my thoughts
dwedge 13 hours ago [-]
> ...
See that way too often in comments like this. Anyway, it was pretty likely they knew it was a typo, it was just a funny response.
12 hours ago [-]
richrichardsson 13 hours ago [-]
My mistake, I was under the impression Reddit was the place for facetious "funny" comments.
dwedge 12 hours ago [-]
LinkedIn is the place for mid-intellectual condescension with an ellipsis at the end.
pringk02 12 hours ago [-]
I think you missed that the actual intelligence knew that it was a typo, and that the joke they made riffed on pretending that they did not know.
shimman 2 hours ago [-]
It's okay, when enough terrible decisions impact a company they tend to do really poorly thought out layoffs so you'll be in the blast radius sooner or later.
Too bad there's no real accountability.
ForHackernews 10 hours ago [-]
On the contrary, I kind of love this as form of malicious compliance. I'd wager money that the PO/BAs have been demanding "comprehensive documentation" for a very long time, and now they are getting what they've asked for good and hard.
RA_Fisher 7 hours ago [-]
AI be used to make reviewing it easy, eh?
gjvc 13 hours ago [-]
>Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
yes you are
yourapostasy 9 hours ago [-]
When some people call this "Verification Debt" or something similar, that is setting the Overton Window upon this phenomena adversely upon the verifiers. I call it an application of Brandolini's Law:
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.""
Until you put in at least the same amount of energy required to verify the AI output as you are asking others to put in to verify it, the AI output you are wielding must be considered bullshit. Really, it should be based upon the verification requestor's historical trust score and how many human verifiers are looped in. A Verification Tax, so to speak:
The energy the creator must spend (Ec) is determined by a function of the number of reviewers requested (N) and the historical trust score of that creator's AI outputs (T).
Ec = N * (1 - T)
WillMorr 7 hours ago [-]
The thing I think is so frustrating about this is it's the absolute worst case middle ground between two much more productive experiences. Either solve the problem yourself by understanding the code or just give me the full agent context so I can just use a chatbot too.
For high stakes debugging efforts I'll dig in with Claude, have it do a bunch of testing and give me a writeup, and then review it to extract any useful findings. When discussing with other people, I give them the 2 sentences I'm confident in and then link them to the giant doc so they can review it with their Claude.
IMO once you're working with agents, your whole job is context management. I have a little web server running my Claude markdown docs. When someone sends me a Claude snippet with some partial information I just have them prompt their bot to upload a thorough context dump so I actually know what they did. If someone has had an agent look at a problem they haven't thought about yet, I'd rather just get the info from the bot directly.
rufasterisco 7 hours ago [-]
100% with you.
Consider just using Claude sessions. Claude has hooks you can use to copy local sessions in the repo.
Git LFS can be used to store directly in repo, helping not just with repo size but also with security/privacy/secrets-leaking
jasonkester 14 hours ago [-]
I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense.
Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.
Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.
Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
impulsivepuppet 13 hours ago [-]
what is often overlooked in corporate culture: if you take a step back, two coworkers refusing to cooperate, regardless of the reason, is a typical "corporate kindergarten" scenario for the manager to take care of.
To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.
They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.
The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.
shuvrojit 8 hours ago [-]
This, I totally agree with you having a call and letting them explain the changes. One of my coworker used claude to write and push PR's and the message was so cryptic, it's not really understandable. I got him on a call and let him explain the PR. He also actually couldn't really interpret the PR message. I warned him not do this again. Now he writes by hand. I think communication between humans should be written by only humans. AI is not really good at communication.
ozim 12 hours ago [-]
That here.
I once worked in a place where a guy would pick on me in code reviews, he wasn't really higher position, but had been with the company longer than I was.
He was just an asshole asserting his dominance and needed to be taken a notch down by a manager and it turned out he didn't understood (or more likely didn't try to understand) the PR when confronted.
a34729t 6 hours ago [-]
You are absolutely right to push back...
jurgenburgen 14 hours ago [-]
Because engineers don’t decide on hiring and firing. The managers all have KPIs to transform the org into AI-native. This is the kind of behavior that organizations encourage right now.
Gigachad 14 hours ago [-]
The psychosis is largely coming from the top.
girvo 11 hours ago [-]
Fish rot from the head, as they say.
whywhywhywhy 11 hours ago [-]
I get it’s annoying and I personally hate it but firing someone for it is ridiculous. Are you expecting everyone to rewrite everything from an AI before they share it because that doesn’t sound a good use of company time either.
jasonkester 10 hours ago [-]
No. I’m expecting everyone to answer direct questions that they are the only one who can answer by thinking up the answer with their own brain then writing or speaking that.
nkrisc 6 hours ago [-]
If someone asks you a question at work, you answer them, or explain why you won’t/can’t.
If they wanted an AI answer they could have asked it themself.
ungreased0675 8 hours ago [-]
I think that’s not an unreasonable expectation. Don’t share raw LLM output with other people.
carlosjobim 8 hours ago [-]
Firing somebody for it is ridiculous? If you say that, then you are also obliged as a customer to keep giving your money to companies who do not perform as expected. You have no right to choose a different lawyer if your lawyer makes an AI-generated report for your case. You have no right to walk past a restaurant which is using AI-generated billboards, you shall eat there.
redsocksfan45 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
californical 9 hours ago [-]
It’s just a fancy version of previous tools. Imagine a coworker instead does a refactor by grepping the entire codebase and doing a find-and-replace.
Do they ensure that it didn’t accidentally overwrite something it shouldn’t have?
Or do they just throw up a PR and assume their little refactoring bash command works fine, then expect their coworkers to debug it for them?
ImPostingOnHN 5 hours ago [-]
The 1st one, of course, that is the whole point. AI is increasing the 2nd one by an order of magnitude. People think they shouldn't have to do the 1st one anymore.
somenameforme 14 hours ago [-]
It seems that this is largely coming from higher ups who are probably (consciously or not) testing the waters for LLMs being able to replace the people they're dumping the walls of text on. I don't mean in any sort of malicious penny pinching scheme either, but simply people wanting to be able to do things quickly and as close to their own demands as possible, while getting rid of the 'middle man.' It just so happens that as LLMs become ever more capable of delivering on e.g. software tasks, software engineers start to become the middle men.
maccard 14 hours ago [-]
My experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way
eddythompson80 13 hours ago [-]
I know exactly the persona you’re describing. It’s unfortunate because they have a great learning tool now. I always felt bad for over eager engineers who were not strong. They had the right attitude but I thought lacked the learning resources and perhaps the learning skills others stronger engineers had. Before if you found yourself in an area you don’t understand. Some people make it all the way through school without learning how to learn on their own. Or at least have underdeveloped skills in that area. Once they enter the workforce and no longer have a syllabus that outlines learning plan for a subject, and an instructor and TAs that hand hold them through the learning process, learning becomes really difficult. AI could really solves that. But maybe I misunderstood the original problem.
bigfishrunning 8 hours ago [-]
So, in other words, the pipeline that's producing engineers is not filtering out people without talent. It used to be that people who "didn't know how to learn" couldn't make it through the early engineering courses and moved over to some other field.
darkwater 9 hours ago [-]
That's why we have courses and certifications!
maccard 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah that’s exactly the person I’m talking about.
dwedge 13 hours ago [-]
Those engineers are annoying but I'm so sad about the previously great engineers who are doing this and now contributing slop everywhere.
maccard 12 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally, there are no engineers who I considered “great engineers” before who are now just posting slop. The great engineers are still great engineers - and I don’t know (or care) if they’re LLM assisted.
weatherlite 10 hours ago [-]
I doubt higher ups wanna babysit agent software engineers all day long, it's not fun and its pretty time consuming and cognitively demanding. They'll let humans handle it - but their dream is way less humans will be needed than before.
fennecfoxy 9 hours ago [-]
Because it's harder to fire managers. And even harder to fire executives.
Who goes when companies need to downsize? Rarely executives; they'll always find a way to be retained...hell, they're the ones with the power to decide who goes.
sdiupIGPWEfh 9 hours ago [-]
How can it be a fireable offense when it's actively encouraged and rewarded?
mlrtime 10 hours ago [-]
Let me give you a scenario and see if it is in this same fireable offense line:
An Ops person who deals with company code base but is not a SWE in the code base regularly has to work around issues with this software (They are OPs). However they have read access to the source.
In the past, they see a bug and open a jira with how it was found for the dev team, and it may or may not ever get looked at.
Now ops can point claude to the repo and it can most likely [but not always] find the issue.
So this ops person can do most of the work of reproducing the bug and finding the problem/solution but doesn't understand the code. Should they not produce the findings for someone else to read/validate? Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?
fc417fc802 6 hours ago [-]
> Should they not produce the findings for someone else to read/validate?
No, they should not. They should not waste others time with output that they themselves do not fully understand. That is not even remotely helpful. The other party can use claude just as easily as they can. Using claude does not add any value in and of itself.
"Hi claude said this thing that I don't really understand please look at it for me" is never useful.
> Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?
Yes. They should do their damn job while respecting the time of the other people they interact with who have their own different jobs to do.
jmartrican 5 hours ago [-]
I agree, they shouldn't just proxy the Claude output directly to the SWEs. THey can use Claude all they want, but the output of their effort (which goes to the SWEs) should be understood (maybe even written by) the Ops engineer. The Ops eng can use Claude to dumb it down for them to understand and can even be taught by Claude on the issue further... so Claude to the rescue still.
mejutoco 9 hours ago [-]
Replace claude code with your cousin or another employee as a thought exercise.
So write to a colleague asking to finish what your cousin/another employee thinks needs to be done. I think most people would say describe the problem clearly so that I can solve it and be responsible for the fix or let your cousin/other employee finish the job and own the solution.
This is offloading of accountability while denying credit.
mlrtime 9 hours ago [-]
Really, you are comparing the latest claude opus/fable vs my cousin with 0 knowledge of the application (user or developer)?
I'm not sure how to reply to that.
mejutoco 8 hours ago [-]
I am comparing it with a skilled cousin or another employee, as a thought exercise.
ImPostingOnHN 5 hours ago [-]
Your personal incredulity aside, if you write code and create a PR, you're expected to know and understand the code you're writing, and you're expected to have done at least some means of verifying correctness. If you can't do that, ask for help from someone who can, earlier in the process, and/or give the task to them for normal prioritization.
Your example reveals a common organization smell: work not going through the normal process for prioritization and planning. If you've done that, and the work is deprioritized, that's because the company has decided that your thing isn't as important for engineering to do. Get over it and be patient, or ask a mentor for help selling the business on the value of your thing. Creating a PR bypasses that process and burdens engineering with more work (having to understand and rework slop) than if engineering had coded the thing to begin with.
tl;dr: if a company is internally strategically unaligned, organizational dysfunction is bound to follow
Silamoth 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, just file a ticket and let the people with relevant expertise and context handle it - obviously. Do software engineers ask Claude for recommendations on handling network outages and bug IT with “AI” slop? Do accountants bring “AI” slop advice to electricians wiring a building? Do lawyers use Claude to try helping physicians diagnose illnesses?
By providing a bad “AI” slop solution that you can’t evaluate, you’re actually creating more work for the people responsible for doing the thing. Now they have to understand the slop you’ve given them, explain why it’s wrong/won’t fit in the existing architecture/has other issue you can’t see without deep context. Or, they have to play politics to ignore your slop without angering you and creating more problems down the line. Either way, it’s harder than just letting them do their job.
grey-area 10 hours ago [-]
Without understanding they have no way of judging the competence of Claude and the slop it generates. So yes they should just file a ticket the old way, after doing the actual hard work, which is reproducing the bug.
esafak 6 hours ago [-]
I see no harm with sharing an AI analysis in the ticket; it might save the engineer time.
ImPostingOnHN 5 hours ago [-]
as long as you've humanly verified the correctness of all the analysis first, yeah
dude250711 13 hours ago [-]
That would make execs who asked staff to tokenmaxx look even sillier than they already are.
asusatom450 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
autumnstwilight 14 hours ago [-]
I had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"
EFreethought 12 hours ago [-]
Asking someone to ask an LLM is peak laziness.
beng-nl 11 hours ago [-]
Beyond reverse centaur
mavelikara 13 hours ago [-]
“I ask Claude only questions to which I don’t know answers to - which there are plenty of. That saves the company money by avoiding frivolous use of tokens.”
Obscurity4340 2 hours ago [-]
The cylinder must remain secure
dwedge 13 hours ago [-]
Ask Claude to generate a few numbers using it and tell you if they are random or not
layer8 10 hours ago [-]
They may be random, but are they secure?
antisthenes 7 hours ago [-]
Just ask Claude if they are secure.
thrownphone 8 hours ago [-]
"Is Claude secure?"
esafak 6 hours ago [-]
Better get a Codex subscription to check!
notnullorvoid 25 minutes ago [-]
It'll only get worse unless companies start having strict policies around it, making repeat offenses fireable. Juniors should have a little more wiggle room, but there's no excuse for senior engineers to participate in such carelessness.
This is the kind of thing that spreads. If you have to deal with it all the time you're going to start dissociating out of necessity.
suslik 14 hours ago [-]
> and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?
If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
eddythompson80 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder if there is something like nohello.net but norawllmoutput.net
I was writing slop grenade essays in Slack before LLMs were a thing. To everyone who had to put up with my overly verbose style: I am sorry.
mistersquid 6 hours ago [-]
> But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
Deciphering error messages can be a bit of an arcane art, at times impenetrable to all except the authors of a system. Understanding the patterns exposed in such messages and, thereby, deriving their meaning is not always clear even to experienced developers.
Engineers reaching out to you (humans) to explain the output of an LLM haven't fully internalized how to interact with LLMs. When an LLM's output is beyond one's immediate grasp, one can _ask the LLM_ to further break down its output, to explain the concepts and symbols that inform its response.
Personally, I have asked LLMs to draw charts and comprehensively simplify their output, often providing cognitive signposts that "I'm confused" about some aspect of what its reporting.
In other words, some people, including engineers with various lavels of experience, don't yet fully understand the implications of the open-eneded interface that language provides with LLM interaction.
saidnooneever 9 hours ago [-]
i learned working in customer support that if you give someone a helpline their brain stop working. they will ask any little stupid thing even if in reality they can know the answer, look it up or reason about it. they are not dumb but the helpline cripples them...
AI is a helpline, so for a lot of people it cripples them. they cease to think. simple as that.
its something people need to be aware of that their brains work like this, because that awareness is the same thing that solves the problem. (people find it very confronting to learn they have been asking questions they knew the answers too already...)
tofuziggy 8 hours ago [-]
the other day I had an "official" career conversation with my boss. They took some notes during the talk and later sent me a page summary of the conversation to see if it looked right. It immediately smelled of AI, and had some things completely opposite to what I said. jeeze I guess this is where we are headed...
mort96 13 hours ago [-]
I've literally seen this in HN responses as well, so many times. What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response
mr_toad 9 hours ago [-]
> What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response
Forwarding an AI response (or any canned response) sends the message that they don’t want to interact with you. That could be intentional.
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
I think you're overthinking it. People generally want to be helpful, and do actions they think are "useful" so most likely; these people think they're actually being helpful and useful when they do things like that. Similarly to "no one thinks they're evil" I suppose.
fc417fc802 5 hours ago [-]
Specifically they subconsciously think they're special - it doesn't occur to them that everyone else can also query an LLM just as easily.
Cthulhu_ 12 hours ago [-]
At least those (at least the detectable ones) seem to be downvoted en masse, called out, or flagged. They aren't even allowed as per the guidelines[0]:
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Exactly! When someone does it at work, I get a bit sad because my conclusion is that whoever does it can't like their job very much. But that's ok – not liking your job very much is compatible with an otherwise happy life.
When people start doing it in an entirely voluntary human-to-human situation, like having a conversation online about a topic of interest, I'm gobsmacked.
bell-cot 11 hours ago [-]
> What the hell is the point of human interaction if ...
Sadly, the point is validating the human worth of the human who can't do any better than this.
But, assuming you're not stuck on that human's Self Esteem Care Team, it can be tricky to tell them that they need to seek validation elsewhere.
projectazorian 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not opposed to straight copypasta, but it should be limited to excerpts only or at the very least workshopped with the LLM to reduce verbosity. Certainly it should at least be fully read and grokked.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen LLMs one-shot responses that are fit to paste to Slack verbatim. It does happen though.
attentive 26 minutes ago [-]
I am going to guess it's the other way around and a modern day of "let me google this for you"
bjackman 12 hours ago [-]
I think it was reasonable in the very recent past. There was a period where AI had major capabilities that had not diffused fully into the zeitgeist. So often you could see someone struggling with e.g. understanding a crash log, and say "they probably haven't thought of pasting into Claude Code with access to the codebase".
That time has now passed though.
rufasterisco 7 hours ago [-]
Any non trivial coding task requires a conversation between human and ai.
Just have devs commit (or provide however you like) their ai coding sessions.
It then becomes obvious if someone has, or has not, reviewed the code, because then they discussed it.
Bonus points: on very complex tasks, you can more or less resume the conversation, via session files.
Same for schoolwork, research papers, and a lot more.
The conversation is not something to throw away: it is arguably as important as the code in the pr.
You can't just remember every conversation and ... something useful.
Indiscriminate memory buries you. What you need is "monumental" memories, which is also known as documentation. AI can be very effective in helping you manage that. That should be kept tight, just like code. You want to keep enough of a record of how you got to where you are that you are equipped to be effective in future tasks.
I would say that your suggestion is basically digital hoarding. Lets say there are 3 kinds of people, the person with OCD who keeps his house almost barren in the name of tidiness, the person who visits his possessions periodically with a critical eye, deciding what to keep and what to throw away, and the hoarder. When it comes time to solve some household problem, say hang a picture, which one of them will have what they need to do it (a hammer and a nail, maybe a little bit of wire) and be able to find it?
I think you might consider keeping the session history for a while, maybe a month or 3 months or 6 months, but have something that automatically deletes them after that.
hirsin 5 hours ago [-]
While I generally agree for general human living, I've seen impressive "digital hoarder" success using AI because it changes the dimensions of reasonableness.
Imagine your hoarder scenario except that the hoarder has unlimited storage space and a team of librarian/warehouse workers to go find and fetch the items needed for the wall hanging task.
ltbarcly3 38 minutes ago [-]
AI does not have unlimited storage space and digging through tens of thousands of keyword hits will cost you an unlimited amount of money as your history grows and grows.
vitaflo 8 hours ago [-]
Where I work we call these people “very expensive keyboards”.
richforrester 14 hours ago [-]
Had a senior exec pick up his phone, punch some words into AI, then as-it-was-generating-a-response flip it around and put it in front of me.
This shit has progressed well past seriousness and into the absurd
eddythompson80 14 hours ago [-]
It’s truly unhinged behavior that has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry. You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
notnullorvoid 54 seconds ago [-]
> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry.
It's not a bad time to take a break from it. Keep yourself from cognitive decline, then in 2 or 3 years when the industry has come to its senses you'll be able to impress in a sensible interview. Compared to the slop addicts that won't know how to tie their own shoes without asking Claude each time.
lilbigdoot 14 hours ago [-]
Reading this is nightmare fuel right before I go to bed omg
Gigachad 14 hours ago [-]
I have a friend who works in healthcare and he says patients now regularly pull out their phone and ask him to talk to their chatbot. Anything he says to them, they immediately repeat to ChatGPT and ask if it’s correct.
jdub 12 hours ago [-]
"Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" - Gwen DeMarco, Galaxy Quest
weatherlite 12 hours ago [-]
Cos patients often don't understand shit from a 3 minute tired and distracted doctor interaction, it's particulary bad in hospitals. I don't really blame them.
antisthenes 7 hours ago [-]
Given the state of the US healthcare industry and how little shit some doctors give (and some are legitimately overworked), this isn't as absurd as it sounds.
weatherlite 14 hours ago [-]
> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
> You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
The system does NOT reward caring. That's the problem.
BLKNSLVR 14 hours ago [-]
My giddy aunt.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
varjag 14 hours ago [-]
Shitgularity is here, it's just unevenly smeared.
It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.
smuemd 12 hours ago [-]
well put
layer8 9 hours ago [-]
> enshittification squared
I thought AI is an exponential?
wseqyrku 9 hours ago [-]
> "I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?”
I would totally lose it if someone come up to me with that shit. Zero chance I would put up with it.
ClikeX 12 hours ago [-]
This one kills me. So many forums, and Reddit in particular, now have people just chiming into topics with ChatGPT answers. It gives them the illusion of being helpful, while they don't really have the knowledge of the subject. But people go to communities to converse with others in the field, and this makes it feel dead internet.
I'm glad most of my colleagues are still doing things themselves. But honestly, if all you can do is tell me what Claude told you and you didn't even bother to read it yourself. Then I might as well just cut you off the team and go use Claude directly.
projektfu 11 hours ago [-]
So often the sources listed by an LLM are just reddit posts, so this will be an ouroboros pretty soon.
aquariusDue 11 hours ago [-]
Eh, you always had to filter the chaff too before. Nowadays there's just a second group that replaced knowledge pulled from one's bottom with knowledge pulled from ChatGPT, if you weren't aware of the former group at least now you're forced to be on guard due to the latter.
englishspot 6 hours ago [-]
You know what's even worse? When they don't even bother to copy-paste. They just have claude code/codex post a slack message, with all the telltale signs of an AI message (caution emojis everywhere!)
whywhywhywhy 11 hours ago [-]
>you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details
This is the worst person to get this from because they literally don’t understand it.
abustamam 4 hours ago [-]
> People almost acting like no one has thought of it
Everyone at my job uses LLMs to code, all day long. People still ask me "why does this bug happen" and I use Claude to find out and the answer is almost always straightforward, and when its not I raise a discussion with the team. The calculus isn't "can I prompt an LLM to find out," it's "do I have a solid enough mental model of the part of the codebase to prompt an LLM specifically enough, and also understand if the LLM is hallucinating or not."
> How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
I think this is a culture issue. I think every org is different, but we had a similar ramp up at our company. First we trialed cursor. Then some people were committing slop. Then we were like "llms are no excuse for slop." Then we got our skills and context good enough to not require close review. And then everything became LLM driven and now we have become "meat proxies" where everyone asks LLMs to fix things that are part of unfamiliar parts of the codebase and then asks someone else familiar to review the fix. We're tending towards a solution to this because I dont think its a good usage of resources but every org will come up with their own culture and solution to this.
hoppp 9 hours ago [-]
If they can't even read a claude response then how are they still employed?
gadders 11 hours ago [-]
I always tell people that if they are not adding value to the AI output, then that person isn't needed.
andai 6 hours ago [-]
Did they ask Claude to do the job interview too?
zombot 12 hours ago [-]
When was the last time that a newly adopted technology revealed that amount of ... potential for improvement in our fellow humans? AI must have really hit some nerve to generate this massive amount of questionable behavior. Or did I fall prey to bias?
pelasaco 10 hours ago [-]
It's so real.. Suddenly managers sending MR, commenting MRs, all AI driven.. 300 lines text, where you don't even know if the premises are correct. I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous. I don't know how to stop them..
hvb2 8 hours ago [-]
> I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous.
It's hard to make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious
fc417fc802 5 hours ago [-]
Unskilled people with foolproof tools or skilled people with powerful tools. Either works. It's unskilled people with powerful tools that poses a problem.
intended 7 hours ago [-]
I’ve been using V/G as shorthand for this: verification capacity / generation capacity.
LLMs have made G extremely cheap, but verification capacity and judgement has not scaled at anything like the same rate. Someone can generate a bunch of PRs or a report quickly, while transferring hours of verification work to everyone downstream.
We are on the wrong side of this ratio, because we never had the capacity to extinguish reviewer capacity the way we can today.
“Don’t be a meat proxy” needs to be a cultural norm for the larger problem of using cheap generation to externalise verification costs onto someone else.
denster 8 hours ago [-]
We had the same problem, now I just ask my colleagues to AR the docs (attentionrequest.com); while the site may be tongue-in-cheek, it helped us build a workflow, where "certificate of having read & thought about it" is conditioned on reading the doc and then writing up a number of questions on it as a human, before sending it off. It's worked reasonably well for us so far, hopefully this becomes one of the new norms.
DANmode 5 hours ago [-]
The fact that we’re starting to point these people out gives me great comfort.
I believe in proper breaks, more than enough downtime, work-life balance - but I’ve been hamstrung my entire career by people who seem to be so low-bandwidth that they often seem to be operating on autopilot - while making the same (or far more) as I’m making.
14 hours ago [-]
ltbarcly3 7 hours ago [-]
This is because they don't trust you to do it. If whenever a problem came up you and the rest of the team were able to solve it and it didn't drag on into some forever bug, they wouldn't be second guessing you. Maybe they have long experience where you were too lazy to fix things or you bamboozled them with status updates that were basically fabricated? Don't act offended, it's quite common.
paulddraper 7 hours ago [-]
> “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?”
It’s the equivalent of choosing words from a conversation and sending you the dictionary entries.
I could do that myself. I really didn’t lack the ability to click a button.
titzer 9 hours ago [-]
> How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
Because no one is serious anymore.
I hate to say it, but anyone this lazy is absolutely asking to be replaced by AI.
cryo32 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah have this too.
I created a spreadsheet called “slop” and add the name to the list and redirect all queries to their engineering manager. I’m not wasting my time on that shit.
sparkling 14 hours ago [-]
I will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.
jobs_throwaway 3 hours ago [-]
Yep. I'm categorically ignoring messages and PRs that are obviously AI written.
6 hours ago [-]
boogieknite 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
roadbuster 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
stellamariesays 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wuliwong 5 hours ago [-]
Feels like some serious hyperbole. I definitely have people at work copy and paste Claude output but I have never once had someone ask me to read it for them and tell them it was correct.
I think this is just the moment we are in, the amount of people using AI in their day to day work changed so quickly that we have a very wide spread range of competencies and experience and really nobody has had enough time to be an expert with AI. We don't have well defined best practices and it feels like the target is moving.
My guess is you were probably complaining about something similar to this before there was AI, this is just the new target for your angst.
hirsin 5 hours ago [-]
It's implicit as a request, not something they literally say (usually).
Namely - I put near zero effort into this response, and deciding if it's correct is on you. -> I'm asking you to read it and figure out if it's correct because I couldn't be bothered to do so
felipeerias 7 hours ago [-]
One way to prevent obvious AI language from sneaking in text destined for other human beings is to ask the model to produce ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English bullet points.
This will result in a list of sentences that are clear and explanatory, easier to double-check, and convenient for the user to rewrite into a more readable format with a human voice.
biztos 5 hours ago [-]
That's a great idea.
I've been thinking about how to avoid having AI-isms creep into my own voice, because I see that way too much in my tech-world friends. It's natural enough: if you spend a lot of time talking to somebody, you usually end up mirroring some of their speech patterns.
One idea I had was to start doing my Claude sessions in German. (That happens to be my strongest second language, no other reason.) Thus any Claude-isms I pick up will presumably not wander into my English, which is what I use for most communications.
This would have the added benefits of getting some much-needed German typing practice, and preventing me from ever lazily copy-pasting AI text into an email or a README.
NorthSouthNorth 2 hours ago [-]
+1 on this being a great idea. I also need to learn how to write in German (I can speak at B2 and read C1, but I find writing difficult as I've never bothered tbh). The added benefit of avoiding Claudisms is interesting. I think I'll join you on this.
Very cool. How have you liked the results of doing this? Any pitfalls so far with this approach?
gregsadetsky 11 hours ago [-]
On social media, I saw the much more vulgar
“Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod”
And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
plutokras 11 hours ago [-]
With the recent wave of posts about Claude rewriting entire codebases from Zig/Electron to Rust/Swift, I can't help but question the prompter's actual confidence in the final result. Gaining a thorough understanding of the generated output still demands an enormous amount of effort. I suspect the reality is that most people just chain a few review agents together, and if they output "LGTM", the code gets committed and pushed.
I have been doing daily agentic coding myself since last November, but lately Im having concerns. We are on the verge of becoming Warhammer 40k Tech-Priests: chanting sacred prompts to appease the machine spirit, praying for a good result. The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
chii 10 hours ago [-]
> The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.
Yet, we all trust these things.
ibeckermayer 8 hours ago [-]
Trusting the output of an abstraction explicitly designed, engineered, and tested by other humans with an actual understanding of the layer beneath you is not comparable to trusting a non-deterministic, statistical next-word-predictor with no mind or ability to be morally responsible for what it produces.
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
Assuming most humans accept moral responsibility seems rather dangerous in itself. Especially as they climb the corporate ladder.
ryanackley 51 minutes ago [-]
Luckily, accountability does exist in most professional settings so someone accepting moral responsibility is not required.
It doesn't always land on the right person but it's usually a motivating factor for people to make an effort.
FartyMcFarter 10 hours ago [-]
> People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler.
This was OK as long as you understood enough Assembly to debug it. Even though I haven't written much Assembly directly, I can still debug it when there are compiler bugs, which does ocasionally happen.
If you lose the ability to both write and debug code then things get much worse. If no one at a company can do that, then you truly are at the mercy of the LLMs.
As for hardware bugs, those are only possibly to identify (by excluding any other possibility) and work-around, since most engineers don't have the luxury of being able to change the hardware.
I'm wondering if some of us will become consultants to companies that lost the ability to handle code. When I was in university the going meme was that old COBOL programmers were making a lot of money in consulting jobs, maybe this will be the new version of that.
deathanatos 9 hours ago [-]
> Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.
There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed. Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler (… and no, I don't work in a low level language), he understands chip fabrication end to end.
CS is not that wide, not yet. No, one cannot know every facet of the field, but one can know enough about the facets one is in contact with that they're not "here be dragons" on the map. All the way down to the hardware.
embedding-shape 9 hours ago [-]
> There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed
The fact this is "a guy", and probably there are very few people in the world who would be able to execute such a thing, probably should tell you how difficult that actually is. You're actually unintentionally making parent's point stronger, as obviously the production processes used for market products is much, much more complicated than what a guy in a shed does.
> Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler
Fair enough, this is probably way more common than "person who understands the entire chip manufacturing process from beginning to end", but it's still something that less and less people know about, in a room of 100 average developers, probably few of them could realistically claim to understand all the assembly output of their compiler, if even they're familiar enough with that their language outputs assembly in the first place.
The range of skills in developers is enourmous, you have Klaus working as IT+web dev+database+admin in a tiny 2 person web shop, and on the other hand you have Anders who is a ML expert optimizing CUDA kernels, and everything in-between. That all (or even most) of them know the far end of what they currently know is wishful thinking really, Klaus doesn't need to know about what the NVCC compiler outputs, nor do Anders need to know about the specific constraints of mapping packaged products to order shipments, that's all fine.
pbronez 8 hours ago [-]
And this is fine! This is the whole point of living in a civilization. Master your craft, get useful, trade with people who know other useful things, everyone is better off.
You could just as easily point out that subsistence farmers exist. That’s great, but we still need industrial agriculture to feed everyone. No single human fully understands that domain either… even ignoring the chemistry, biology and meteorology, those farms use digitally controlled tools! That means all of computer science is embedded in farming.
It’s great to pursue broad knowledge. It’s important to understand your dependencies and respect the abstractions you build on. It’s pure hubris to think an individual auteur can challenge a multi-billion person civilization.
jmusall 10 hours ago [-]
With the crucial difference that these processes deterministically return correct & working results (save for bugs which can be fixed and then stay fixed). Cannot be guaranteed for LLM output, no matter how much effort we put in.
ChrisLTD 7 hours ago [-]
> Yet, we all trust these things.
We trust them - in large part - because we know that professionals took the care and responsibility to build the foundations correctly.
And if the foundations failed in some way, those same professionals would suffer a hit to their reputation.
7 hours ago [-]
skydhash 10 hours ago [-]
> Yet, we all trust these things.
Yes! Because of two words. Consistency and Reliability.
All the physics equations, we trust them not because they are pretty, but because they have been consistent with experiment. Simplified models of transistors are also consistent within a temperature range. Boolean Logic is also consistent, the Turing Machine is consistent,…, the electronics inside a chip is reliable. The instruction set is reliable, etc,…
> Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end
I strongly doubt that. The actual theoretical knowledge is taught at school and you can take an iron and some electronic elements and build some 8bit computer. Modern chip manufacturing is a matter of scale. It’s cumbersome to design with logic gates, so we invented hardware design languages (just like it’s cumbersome to deal with opcodes) and they are reliable. And instead of PCB, we just use a silicium wafer.
archagon 4 hours ago [-]
An AI is not an abstraction. It is not remotely the same thing as a compiler!
acedTrex 4 hours ago [-]
God the "compiler abstraction" argument is so tired, why does anyone even remotely thinks its accurate anymore
20k 2 hours ago [-]
Most developers by any metric haven't hopped onto the full agentic AI bandwagon. People who want to stop understanding code will indeed largely lose their technical skills, but they're a minority of developers. Its one of the reasons why I think its a terrible idea to invest in personally, being skilled at something has never once been a negative for me in my entire life even if it requires work
TacticalCoder 7 hours ago [-]
> The foundational knowledge is lost ...
Not yet. The world still pretty much runs on systems not written by LLMs. And humans wrote all of that. LLMs runs on OSes and hardware created by "not LLMS".
And seen the "quality" of the output of LLMs (and I pay three AI subscriptions), I don't think we're getting rid of human-produced code, OSes, hardware, anytime soon.
wuliwong 5 hours ago [-]
It's interesting to me, I have never once felt this. I have basically just been excited by using AI for coding. I've been a software engineer for 15 years and before that a physics PH.D. student (and 1 year professional scientist) who focused largely on computational work. I love programming and I've felt reinvigorated by the introduction of AI and developing systems around it.
I tend to think it's just different personality types. There are a lot of different type in engineering. There's a significant set of people that really love to just be given detailed, well described set of work and crank it out, they don't really want to be involved in much outside of just implementing the plan. That is not all engineers but certainly a chunk of them. I could see that group feeling a bit sidelined by AI. But that's not me, so I am just speculating.
gregsadetsky 4 hours ago [-]
I enjoy and use AI a lot both for personal projects, but also at work. I think that feeling of “we’ve become claude code babysitters” is a lot more prevalent in larger teams and/or in work environments where … most people have resorted to claude coding all the time.
You can’t not claude code if everyone else is pushing to main (or opening prs which get ai reviewed), and once your days become mostly prompting and ai code review, you start remembering the days (mere months ago) where work did not feel or look like this at all.
The condom image is both an exaggeration, but is also almost a too-accurate depiction of what work has become - very rapidly - for many people.
I’m sure people were also very excited to get their first cars after years of riding on horses. It doesn’t mean new kinds of pollution (and accidents) are not happening, or that we don’t miss horse riding haha
Cheers
njovin 4 hours ago [-]
We once interviewed a candidate for a senior engineering position and when asked what his primary role was at his current job, he said "I mostly make sure that nobody changes the software".
He wasn't wrong, and his role was still valuable to the company.
jmartrican 6 hours ago [-]
The mental model I like to use is something along the lines of the LLM is a firehose and my brain is a mere straw and that we have to eventually get all the important parts to trickle through my straw sized brain. Or another way, the LLM is all the dough shoved into a pasta extruder and all the dough needs to eventually extrude out of my brain into prod-pasta.
cyanregiment 7 hours ago [-]
A whole new meaning to penetration testing
QwenGlazer9000 4 hours ago [-]
Describes how I feel.
flyingshelf 10 hours ago [-]
You guys are using protection?
burnerRhodov3 10 hours ago [-]
Raw_Claude can just go straight in prod.
flyingshelf 10 hours ago [-]
I guarantee that the major players will offer straight-to-CEO interfaces where the user provides ALL info and AI will proceed to orchestrate the entire company, from finances to deployment. We're screwed, without protection.
burnerRhodov3 8 hours ago [-]
polsia.com
AI slop spelled backwards.
postsantum 8 hours ago [-]
I am rawdogging my server by letting user report bugs and send feature requests to a sorting bot
cyanregiment 7 hours ago [-]
Don't do that, you might import a std
BatteryMountain 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah bro passwordless sudo for claude all the way...
moralestapia 8 hours ago [-]
>"what are we even (left) doing"
Maybe that's you. In my case, it's going better than ever.
arthurjj 8 minutes ago [-]
My only commentary is that I prefer "meat puppet" as it's an existing term, which already means something very similar[1], and is a bit more derisive
At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though
GrinningFool 10 hours ago [-]
At my current job I just asked a coworker in chat if the reply was his or LLM. He quickly owned up and the incidence of brokered LLM messages in chat dropped signficantly.
Unfortunately people are being encouraged to use LLM in docs, emails, and presentations so it's probably a losing battle.
nomel 1 hours ago [-]
We had an exec show how he was using AI to write interview feedback from his very sparse notes, in front of a few thousand people.
maccard 9 hours ago [-]
That's a better approach than what I did, and I'll use that going forwards.
decimalenough 8 hours ago [-]
We have a LLM bot in chat that analyzes bugs when.you drop in a link and anything else if you ask it directly. It's actually quite effective: all the slop is now localized and can be ignored/blocked easily, and people no longer feel the need to copy and paste slop themselves.
fusslo 5 hours ago [-]
I've been thinking about these kind of interactions a lot lately. I don't know what it says about human communication patterns but I'm not super excited about it.
I've been guilty of acting as a middleman for review comments from difficult coworkers. I farm out my interaction to avoid the confrontation, mental exhaustion, and to avoid negative feelings I got from those reviews. I don't mean 'my work is being challenged', I mean people who: delay, nitpick, blow up architecture after not participating in design, assert false info as truth and require you prove them wrong, require 10x evidence of everyone else. Not people who are like 'Hey, I don't understand this code can you add some comments or lets hop in a room for review'
I've also been on the receiving end. I like to think I'm NOT one of these toxic reviewers.
Now, we have Business Owners and Managers who are now even further away from engineers. Important meetings have 0 engineers in them ( a couple people who think they're engineers because they were for 5 years in the 80s ). Output is an AI generated transcript that gets copy/pasted into copilot to generate jira tasks by the Product Owner.
It seems like we (humans) really don't like working with other people. Or, maybe we like working with people who can advance our careers and want to automate interaction with people who cant?
I think this effort by Business Owners to set up an AI wall may be the closest I've seen to 'digital classism' (maybe there is a better term for it?).
We like whispering earrings. We'll follow a low friction happy path even if it leads us off a cliff.
metabagel 6 hours ago [-]
Would you be OK with someone looking up the answer on the internet?
jayd16 5 hours ago [-]
You mean like when juniors would copy paste Stack Overflow without verifying or even understanding it?
No. We hated that too.
Actual research is, of course, fine.
metabagel 4 hours ago [-]
I see a possible misunderstanding on my part here.
My experience has typically been that engineers respond, "Claude said..." and then say what they think about it. If people are really receiving just a straight dump of AI response from their colleagues, then yeah, I would be disappointed too.
But, I have no problem receiving from a colleague, "Claude says ..., but I don't know what to make of it." The embedded space can be really hard, so I don't fault someone for feeling clueless about something. I feel that way every time I get handed something new to work on which I have zero experience with.
jayd16 3 hours ago [-]
We're all complaining about the low effort verbatim dumps, not disclosing Claude usage as part of an earnest attempt to help.
LtWorf 9 hours ago [-]
I did a similar thing and I got reported to HR.
maccard 9 hours ago [-]
What was the outcome of the report to HR?
I think if you work somewhere that this is the result, you're unlikely to have much progress challenging anything directly. In order to actually have change you need to be able to challenge and stamp out these sorts of behaviours.
LtWorf 6 hours ago [-]
> What was the outcome of the report to HR?
"Do not make negative assumptions" basically. But also a drop in how often and quickly I did reviews.
throw310822 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
FridgeSeal 13 hours ago [-]
This smells an awful like a post-hoc justification of why you can’t answer it yourself.
If you _could_ do that and hand the information to Claude, you could also just…give the person that information directly, and avoid wasting their time and the tokens.
throw310822 13 hours ago [-]
Uh? I don't understand, are you saying that instead of asking Claude myself I should write a question for other people to do it? Which is by the way only the initial part of the work I described?
Cthulhu_ 12 hours ago [-]
You can do whatever to get answers to questions, but don't just forward said answers to other people, tell them in your own words / interpretation. Prove that you understand the information you've been given instead of being a meat proxy.
throw310822 5 hours ago [-]
You know what? If you post a question and I get a good answer from Claude, it means you haven't even been able to do the basic job of asking yourself. Not only you weren't able, you also expect me to reformat nicely the answer so you don't feel stupid reading the LLM text you should have generated yourself?
simmerup 13 hours ago [-]
You can also respond ‘I don’t know’ instead of doing the equivalent of responding with the first page of an ‘I feel lucky’ google search
jspdown 10 hours ago [-]
This is a very good analogy. You have to do way more effort to make sure it's correct than if you have asked it yourself with a controlled context. I generally don't want to feel lucky when I ask questions to coworkers.
mariusor 11 hours ago [-]
> Then do it and don't ask questions.
I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny, but this is such an unintellectual take that it veers into caricature. Props if that was your purpose.
throw310822 11 hours ago [-]
No, it was a suitably nasty reply to someone who boasted of being nasty to colleagues trying to help.
If your question can be answered by Claude, and you didn't ask Claude yourself, and when other people do it for you, you complain that you could have done it yourself, then my honest reply is that you should just shut up and learn to use Claude.
satvikpendem 10 hours ago [-]
The entire point of the post is that people want human responses regardless of whether they can ask Claude or not (and maybe they did and didn't get a good response so that's why they're asking other people).
AnimalMuppet 6 hours ago [-]
Every question can be answered by Claude. Not every question can be answered accurately by Claude. When Claude answers inaccurately, it doesn't tell you that it's doing so, so every answer must be considered "maybe inaccurate".
In business, a lot of the time, accuracy matters. If you want an accurate answer, and there's a human who knows, don't ask Claude.
throw310822 5 hours ago [-]
> Not every question can be answered accurately by Claude
You are assuming that people that send you a Claude answer would send you any Claude answer. This is your assumption- basically a negative prejudice towards those who use LLMs- and has nothing to do with sending a Claude answer per se. Do you understand the difference?
AnimalMuppet 5 hours ago [-]
I do. I'm pretty sure that at least some humans will shove any Claude answer at you. And some won't.
You are assuming that I am making an assumption. Your assumption is wrong. I am recognizing that some humans are lazy and will do the minimum, and the minimum is to type in some query and copy-paste the results. If you like, yes, I am prejudiced - prejudiced against that behavior.
(I mean, I still trust a human who knows their stuff more than I trust Claude...)
throw310822 4 hours ago [-]
But then we agree. Some humans will behave that way. Then direct your anger against those who do so, instead of against those (the majority) who ask the questions, read and evaluate the answers, and forward them to you only if they think they might be correct and helpful.
ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago [-]
If I've asked *you* a question, it's because I want to know what *you* think.
I don't want to know what Claude thinks.
If you don't know the answer, say that. "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer, albeit one which I might follow up with something like "Well why don't you know? This is literally your job to know", which is kind of what 90% of my emails at work for the past three weeks have been.
munksbeer 2 hours ago [-]
Out of interest, do you pay people extremely well to work with you?
Applejinx 12 hours ago [-]
"I don't know" is an extraordinarily powerful answer, but maybe it's getting ruined. I'm not sure it can be entirely ruined.
In a human interaction, when used confidently, it means 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front. I don't have to do the slightest thing to impress you. My foundation is so secure it doesn't need defending or justification at all". Also, 'that turns out to be outside the massive quantity of stuff I do know, how interesting'. Think Holmes, perhaps erroneously saying 'Now that I know that, I shall do my best to forget it' on the grounds that his work wasn't helped by the fact.
It could get ruined by an AI normalization of the idea that 'everybody should know literally everything, because asking an AI is the same as knowing and then you know the thing, having been told it'. Plenty of money is now marketing this position to the world, and so it's possible 'I don't know' will become ruined, a shameful response.
I feel like that may not happen in practice, though, because that pro-AI position is what used to be called 'pants-on-head R-slur' and I feel like the people who buy into this extreme position will make SUCH a disaster of things that it will tend to make that position, instead, the shameful response… and 'I don't know' will remain a valid signaling mechanism to convey 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front', all the more if it's more of a shocking response to get.
wccrawford 11 hours ago [-]
I definitely appreciate being told "I don't know", but I've found in business settings that people expect to get reprimanded for saying that more than a couple times a year, and they refuse to say it.
They will invent crazy workarounds to avoid those 3 words.
Even if I ask "Do you know X?" they will not just say "no" most of the time, unless it's really outside their wheelhouse. If they think they should know it, they'll spit out statements worthy of an LLM.
And I admit, I felt the same at first. The first few times I told the CTO (my boss) that, I cringed. But he just told me to put aside time to research it. He knew I couldn't know everything, especially about things that we hadn't done before.
jeremyjh 11 hours ago [-]
We are talking about questions in the context of reviewing a pull request. If I ask you a question about the code, and you have to ask Claude, or otherwise cannot tell me why the code that you wrote is the way it is, that is strike one of two.
ErroneousBosh 9 hours ago [-]
Good catch to ask about the code &emdash; if you can't actually explain the code you wrote, why do you expect me to explain to you?
;-)
satvikpendem 10 hours ago [-]
Most people who post LLM output don't do what you do though.
bigstrat2003 13 hours ago [-]
If someone asked you a question, it's most likely because they value you. Whether it's your skills, your domain knowledge, or something else, people ask you questions because they know you can provide some value. When you give them a Claude response, not only are you being rude, but you're devaluing yourself in the eyes of those around you. They learn that you can't be relied upon any more, and so they stop asking you questions.
hk__2 13 hours ago [-]
Asking the LLM a question _is_ a skill, just like googling. The problem is not asking a LLM, but pasting the 300-chars response without any context.
simondotau 12 hours ago [-]
"I've been asked to confirm that our random number generator satisfies section 14 of the Foo-Bar Accord of 2021. I'm fairly certain it does, and that foorandom.c is a good choice. Assuming I'm broadly correct, write one short paragraph that would confidently assuage anyone of concern without raising any new concerns. Cite the specification and link to it. Afterwards, for my benefit, write a short bullet list with any non-trivial reasons I might be wrong."
gjulianm 9 hours ago [-]
In that case a better answer would be "I'm fairly certain it does satisfy it, but in any case I asked Claude to double check for any issues and it didn't find any unsatisfied requirement". That's the information that matters, and it's probably faster anyways.
bigstrat2003 5 hours ago [-]
There is no skill whatsoever in asking the LLM a question.
throw310822 13 hours ago [-]
If I asked a question to Claude, it's because I couldn't answer it myself, but also, because I used my skills and domain expertise to explain clearly the problem to Claude.
And if I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it means that I have read and evaluated what Claude wrote back, and I have extracted the part of it that most clearly contains the answer as well as the diagnosis- if I gor anything relevant.
Of course I could instead pretend I came up with the answer myself in 5 minutes thanks to my superior analytical skills, and write down two short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?
maccard 12 hours ago [-]
But that’s not what happens - people are posting the question into Claude and pasting back saying “here’s what Claude said”. There’s 0 value add in that - I don’t know if you agree, disagree or have even read it. My experience is that most of the time it’s just verbatim,
> write down to short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?
Yes. That’s why I asked you and not an LLM.
jagenabler2 12 hours ago [-]
> hey, I don’t know the answer to your question but I went through Claude and got this response. Let me know if that answers your question otherwise we can dig deeper together
That’s all you have to add to make this into a much more pleasant interaction
throw310822 12 hours ago [-]
I agree. However, since I work in a small team and everyone knows me, I don't need to provide this entire context every time. I usually just prepend "according to Claude ..." and try to provide a one line recap of the main point. Then paste the relevant section of Claude's answer (two to three paragraphs).
ImPostingOnHN 4 hours ago [-]
Your response misses the words most critical to this interaction: "I don't know"
13 hours ago [-]
freehorse 11 hours ago [-]
You took all this time to reformulate the question, add the relevant implicit context, and do back and forth BUT you did not have time to reformulate the answer to something human readable that YOU own and can take responsibility for? This does not make sense to me. Nobody said not to consult an llm while formulating an answer. But if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.
zmgsabst 11 hours ago [-]
…yes?
The amount of text isn’t equal and the benefit is primarily that I can push the LLM into a basin you don’t know the keywords for — something that takes a few minutes to type a couple sentences and me scan the results to make sure they’re roughly on track. And much, much less time than me trying to (re)write a treatise on a topic.
Dropping you an LLM reply is the equivalent of dropping you a link and telling you to learn about the topic — and appropriate in roughly the same circumstances.
throw310822 8 hours ago [-]
Why would I reformulate what Claude already explained in a way that I find satisfactory? Only to give you the impression that I came up with it myself?
> if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.
If I send you some text copied and pasted from Claude, it means that I have read it and I think it's worth for you reading it. In this sense I'm already owning it. The problem is not the pasted answer, it's your assumption that a Claude-generated text must be "slop" that I haven't read.
freehorse 7 hours ago [-]
I would at least expect to share your own take on it, or what you think is interesting or important in sharing an answer. If I am sent an llm copypasta I have no idea of the amount of intentionality or the amount of effort is being put into this. I have been sent many times "I got this from claude, did not have time to look at it closely, maybe you find it interesting". No thanks, I can and probably already have tried with claude already (did not say exactly that). This is the kind of slop grenade that is basically noise, and when you slop grenading me without telling me what you think yourself I have no idea if it is worth my time reading it or not.
I feel like these things are pretty trivially obvious. When there is noise, you have to make sure your signal is not taken for noise, if we assume that your intention is to produce signal in the first place.
JaDogg 12 hours ago [-]
I do not think people should stop asking questions. What is the point of teams / departments / orgs ?
customguy 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bibimsz 7 hours ago [-]
devils advocate; why didnt you ask claude then? stop wasting people's time when you could get your own answers.
DanHulton 7 hours ago [-]
Because I wanted to ask a human who’s job it is to know, instead of an AI that might make things up and waste all our time.
metabagel 6 hours ago [-]
Why is it their job to know, but it's not your job to know?
Planktonne 5 hours ago [-]
Organisations typically divide up responsibilities between different teams, and also between different members of each team.
metabagel 4 hours ago [-]
So, people are using AI to answer questions about tribal knowledge? Is that really the assertion which is being made here? Because I find that hard to believe.
jayd16 5 hours ago [-]
Different roles and specialties? Different work history?
metabagel 4 hours ago [-]
So, you have different roles and specialties, but you know for a fact that this person should know the answer to your question. I think we're speaking past each other, because this doesn't make sense to me.
I don't presume that someone will have an answer I'm looking for. I'm pleased when they do, but often I just get breadcrumbs, and I have to solve the puzzle for myself.
jpnc 15 hours ago [-]
If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
tarkin2 11 hours ago [-]
Arguably we already have, if you concentrate on intelligence rates since 1975: the reverse Flynn affect. Those who grew up about that time no longer had to generate their own entertainment through storytelling, make their own music, calculate things mentally: everyday they had music, entertainment pumped into their homes, a way to avoid athematic, etc. And now we're evening thinking a lot less in our jobs, not even practicing the skills we learnt. Intelligence is only going to decrease.
marginalia_nu 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's as old as time to be honest.
When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities.
Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mostly made up for that (in particular our ability to communicate across distances and time, to read Plato's concerns without 100 generations of Chinese whispers), but it was a trade-off, as most technologies tend to be.
w10-1 4 hours ago [-]
But displacing individual ability is a feature, not a bug.
How else could mind-virus like philosophy or religion or science or political legitimacy transit highly-variable humans for generations?
Religious organizations, governments, corporations all far outlive their founders and maintainers. Heroes at best only stretch or squeeze the dogma or methodology to grow the organization by better fitting to the culture.
And because organizations accumulate control over resources, individuals can have little effect outside them.
We are disposable by design.
marginalia_nu 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah I think a worrying thought is that it has to be that way. A big conundrum for technologically advanced societies is that technology gives us so much power that if people are anything but weak and helpless, they become so dangerous it makes society unfeasible.
Somehow we need to contend with killdozers, school shooters, anthrax mailers, and so on being much more capable than anything even a particularly yoked antiquity nerd like Plato ever could be.
rng-concern 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly curious why you're being downvoted, but I think about this all the time. We always focus on the positives of any new technology and the negatives are either invisible (till later) or glossed over.
Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot:
Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..
Traster 10 hours ago [-]
It makes me so angry that an entire branch of "science" gets to just take data and go "I dunno man, maybe kids are just dumber". There's so much of this in social science. Take some measurable thing, and then just wildly speculate about the cause of it in an entirely untestable way, and then test that theory in ways that absolutely do not justify the conclusions. At the very least, the whole field should get a lesson in how to communicate the certainty of their theories and conclusions. You've got some guys hanging around couching their uncertainty when they're banging sub atomic particles together at the speed of light and then you've got some social science bro being like "If you move that checkbox on that form to the bottom it'll be way more effective, trust me bro I've hacked how people think".
cm2187 12 hours ago [-]
It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engineers has gone down.
But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
skillina 8 hours ago [-]
> With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
That isn't what was asked. The capabilities of "human + machine" clearly are increasing, but the comments above posit that as a result the average capabilities of "human (sans machine)" may decrease. The relative value of each change is far from clear.
cm2187 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah but unless you plan to take the machine away, isn’t man+machine what matters? If you had to develop everything in assembly (or worse), you probably had a much deeper understanding of computers than a modern developer. But the modern developer can setup in minutes what would have taken weeks. To me that’s the definition of progress.
But pre-LLM developers were bogged down in mountain of boiler plate code and unfamiliar APIs. LLM enable to abstract away a lot of the unnecessary complexity that made developers improductive
teaearlgraycold 12 hours ago [-]
And I know fuck all about subsistence farming - something most people's ancestors understood deeply. Different worlds, different requirements.
metabagel 6 hours ago [-]
I disagree that it's necessarily laziness.
I work in the embedded space, and I routinely have to work with technologies I'm initially not familiar with. Internet searches are very hit and miss. So, is "AI". I generally use every tool at my disposal to try to get my foot in the door so I can understand better questions to ask and get the technical information I need to do my job.
I absolutely have no problem with someone replying to my question with a response from Claude. I appreciate them telling me the source, so I can assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
Yiin 15 hours ago [-]
I didn't expect wall-e to become so close to current reality
Gigachad 14 hours ago [-]
The only thing they missed was the invention of ozempic.
xpct 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe they have it but simply don't use it.
usef- 13 hours ago [-]
Similar to physical exercise and machines replacing it, I think we're going to see extremes on both ends.
jayd16 14 hours ago [-]
All machines are for laziness.
vouaobrasil 8 hours ago [-]
Not exactly. A drawing program could just create a new "blank slate" that substitutes some old skill requirements for new skills. The key point is that SOME machines create a sufficient mass of "blank slate"-like environments for active creativity and others (like AI) only diminish that room for creatvity to flourish. The danger is creating and using machines of the latter type.
cryo32 13 hours ago [-]
This is totally wrong.
Some machines are capability amplifiers.
Other machines are shit puking buck passing time sinks.
globular-toast 13 hours ago [-]
I think you are confusing machines with motors. Many machines do things that simply are not possible without. A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking, but it enables you to go faster than you can run. Menually operated sewing machines produce stitches that would be infeasible by hand.
Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.
hk__2 13 hours ago [-]
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking
Of course it is, at equivalent distance.
Ekaros 12 hours ago [-]
Depending on speed of course. At some speeds drag will cause significantly more work.
deathanatos 9 hours ago [-]
… I dunno. Bikes aren't just efficient, they're the most efficient form of human movement. 60 W gets you 3 mph walking or 9 mph biking.
On my own bike, I don't think there is a pace that isn't easier. Even at slow speeds, it's not a whole lot of work. (And you can always change to a gear where it just isn't a lot of work to go slow. The challenge is more remaining upright, but a low gear and the barest of forward momentum will help that.)
globular-toast 10 hours ago [-]
I did not say anything about distance. I said cycling enables you to go faster than you could possibly travel without it (ie. faster than you can sprint). What you do with that speed is up to you, but most use it to get to places in less time or get further in the same amount of time. The point is it's not about laziness, it's about unlocking new capabilities.
If cycling were just about laziness then you'd see people cycling at walking speed everywhere, which you never see.
Since we're kinda talking about LLMs too, it's interesting to note that while cycling really does enable you to go faster than you can run, LLMs do not enable you to type at 1000 words per minute. LLMs are more like a teleport that only lets you describe your desired destination, you cannot simply enter a coordinate to get exactly where you want to go.
PotatoPrime 2 hours ago [-]
This sorta scratched my brain - Isn't more speed, at least partially, laziness driven? There's a grocery about 1.5 miles from my house, and I can and do walk it, but when I don't want to commit all that time, I jump on my bike. I don't feel like I spend more energy on that trip when biking vs walking, but I may. The driver there, for me, is lesser time commitment to the task.
Framed another way - Is laziness defined as only 'spending less energy on it', or could there also a time commitment component?
globular-toast 1 hours ago [-]
Hmm... I guess I don't think saving time is laziness. I think that's clever. Laziness is a quality I don't like. It's not clever, it often ends up creating more problems down the line. Like leaving clutter everywhere or always taking the easy way at every turn without thinking ahead.
Saving time by cycling isn't creating any problems, it's just cleverly using a machine to give you more time to do other things.
The bicycle has been credited as being a part of the liberation of women. It gave them independence they didn't have before. They weren't just being lazy.
deepsummer 12 hours ago [-]
But you could still arrive if you walk instead of using the bicycle. And I am sure you can do the same stitches by hand, it just takes forever.
Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.
globular-toast 12 hours ago [-]
You cannot walk 100 miles in a day, but anyone with a bit of training can cycle that in an afternoon. It's not a matter of effort or laziness, it's simply not possible.
The stitching comment is just pedantic. People don't hand stitch like a machine not because they are lazy, it's because it's ineffective and impractical. It's not impossible to drive screws directly into softwood by hand, but you'd never get anything done that way. It's not lazy to choose another method, it's just being an effective worker.
As for coding agents, it's clearly effective to write software without them because we have been doing it for decades so far. It still remains to be seen whether they are laziness (ie. it's just a motor) or if they are actually enabling new possibilities (ie. we get software that really wouldn't have been possible before).
slfnflctd 10 hours ago [-]
Minor nitpick with your first sentence: I do not believe "anyone with a bit of training" is an accurate way to describe what is required for pedaling a bicycle at 20 mph for 5 solid hours.
At a time when I was in better shape than the average person, the most I ever worked up to was 40 miles, and it was brutal. In my entire middle-aged life, I have met exactly one person who believably claimed to have done 100 miles in a day. I'm sure it's easier than many/most people think, but not 'anyone' easy, with just 'a bit' of training.
globular-toast 8 hours ago [-]
Well, I should say I live somewhere very flat. I'm certainly not talking about Tour de France style mountain stages. I'm not used to that at all. Also, for 5 hours most people will need to be in a good group/peloton. Doing it solo, like a time trial, is difficult. But I do think most people could get around 6 hours (16.7mph average) within a year of training in sportive conditions (ie. with some drafting, not strict time trial conditions). When I trained my solo average over 50 miles was 18.6mph and I'm not particularly special.
slfnflctd 7 hours ago [-]
With the additional detail and the numbers you provided, that seems reasonable. Steepness of hills is definitely relevant, haha.
deepsummer 11 hours ago [-]
Can you write 10k LOC a day without a coding agent?
It's the same issue. You can walk 100 miles. Just not in a day. And you can create 10k LOC without a coding agent. Just not in a day.
I don't think that coding agents enable technical possibilities. They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.
bigstrat2003 5 hours ago [-]
You can't generate 10k LOC in a day with a coding agent either, not if you want to actually understand it and review it (which you must do if you don't want the quality of your work to go into the toilet).
skydhash 9 hours ago [-]
> Can you write 10k LOC a day without a coding agent?
Easily, by writing a code generator. Or disassemble a 1k C program.
> They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.
It’s not economical to have more code. It’s economical to have correct code and the way to do that is with the power of abstraction. Instead of dealings with opcodes, you have assemblers and macros. Then it’s C, next it’s python, and what would have been a 10k program is now just a few lines.
raincole 13 hours ago [-]
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking
What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?
globular-toast 12 hours ago [-]
Thousands of miles on foot and tens of thousands on bicycle. Walking is essentially zero effort, so I don't see how cycling can really be easier, unless you are going downhill. People cycle because it's faster, not because it's easier. People drive because it's easier (many people still drive even if it takes longer than cycling).
monadgonad 11 hours ago [-]
> People cycle because it's faster, not because it's easier
That may be true, but the fact is that cycling is a more energy-efficient form of transport than walking. It takes literally less effort to go the same distance.
rightbyte 11 hours ago [-]
There is no way bicycling is not less effort unless it is very hilly or bad roads? Random people have no problem keeping up with marathon runners on bikes.
lukan 8 hours ago [-]
"Walking is essentially zero effort, so I don't see how cycling can really be easier, "
When your bike is rolling also on flat ground, you have literally zero effort to move your position. With walking it is effort, your muscles must work for every meter you make.
hahahaa 12 hours ago [-]
Cycling 2km flat (assume okay bike under 12kg) is easier than walking it. Source: have fibro so I really fell compound effort in every fibre.
4gotunameagain 14 hours ago [-]
What about exercise machines ?
jayd16 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
GrinningFool 10 hours ago [-]
That doesn't really make sense. Assuming the effort is the same, how does laziness enter into it? There are myriad reasons someone might use stationary exercise machines over going outside - weather, bad neighbors, etc. Lazy doesn't make sense as one of them.
4gotunameagain 14 hours ago [-]
What about the elliptical ?
usef- 13 hours ago [-]
What about it? You might need to do multiple different exercises outside to mimic it
4gotunameagain 13 hours ago [-]
Which exercise outside mimics that movement while simultaneously being so easy on the joints ?
Anyway this is just silly, we are splitting hairs. A lot of machines have a functional purpose and do not exist for the lazy. The LHC, ships, thousands of examples.
master-lincoln 12 hours ago [-]
Aren't ships just for people too lazy to swim and the large hadron collider for physicists that are too lazy to hand-accelerate particles and make them collide with 13.6 TeV of energy? /s
jmartrican 5 hours ago [-]
Human evolution does not occur in a vecuum. I suspect there will still be preasure to get smarter (how ever way you define that) because of competition with other humans.
chicken-stew 9 hours ago [-]
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
The gap between people who are willing to commit the hours to learn something and those who prefer the path of least resistance is getting bigger.
I’d like to add that for hardware development (in my experience) it’s been non-stop double checking because of hallucinations. To the point where I don’t use it for weeks.
64e23275635e 14 hours ago [-]
it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down
c048 14 hours ago [-]
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
Cthulhu_ 12 hours ago [-]
Halfway through 30's means you were born in the 90's though, but other than that you're right, the advent of the internet, google, and rapid fire short form content has messed with our attention spans; the following generation grew up on the internet and saw the advent of high intensity videos and then short-form mobile-only infinite-stream short-form dashed-words videos.
wannabe44 14 hours ago [-]
To add, less articulate and somewhat overtly anti-intellectual. Why even learn something when you can ask the slot machine?
Cthulhu_ 12 hours ago [-]
The anti-intellectualism is so weird to me, it feels like people get overly defensive and angry (a secondary emotional response to shame) when confronted with their own lack of knowledge / intelligence or when asked or challenged to use their own brain.
lelanthran 8 hours ago [-]
You should point out then that "border collies are just intelligent in different ways, too"
drekipus 13 hours ago [-]
The benefits are increased productivity, consumer satisfaction, and shareholder profits
voidUpdate 14 hours ago [-]
IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere
everfrustrated 13 hours ago [-]
IQ is a relative measure not an absolute one. 100 IQ in 2026 can be massively different in absolute terms to 100 IQ in 1956.
If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.
voidUpdate 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the comment was about IQ, not absolute intelligence. The median intelligence is, by definition, 100 IQ, so the median IQ cannot be decreasing
debugnik 13 hours ago [-]
There's always a lag, you calibrate the test based on previous results, not future ones. If intelligence is decreasing I'd expect every IQ test to keep scoring a median lower than 100 unless taken immediately after calibration. Once it stops decreasing they'd converge again.
darkerside 10 hours ago [-]
The median IQ of successive generations may absolutely be falling
vidarh 12 hours ago [-]
Look up the Flynn effect. You're right in the first paragraph, but wrong about the direction.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
The Flynn effect ended several years ago and started reversing.
vidarh 11 hours ago [-]
Even if that turns out to be true, rather than it starting to hit a ceiling where we can expect it to not consistently go in a single direction it does not alter anything I wrote, which addressed a comparison between 1956 and 2026.
The claim of a "lack of intelligence in modern times" is flat out contradicted by the data. It'd take a lot of regression to get back to 1956 levels.
Cthulhu_ 12 hours ago [-]
IQ is a measure that tests how well people can do IQ tests, I don't think it's an objective measure at all.
Sharlin 10 hours ago [-]
People love to say this, but the whole point of IQ is that it happens to correlate well with many other, more practical measures of cognitive capability. That’s why it is used.
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
Other things also correlate well with many practical measures of cognitive ability, but you wouldn't be so quick to say that they're privileged the way IQ is, so there must be more to the explanation.
Sharlin 4 hours ago [-]
IQ is privileged because it's easily quantifiable by definition, testable with minimal setup and (assuming a modern test) more or less universal without cultural biases.
tptacek 4 hours ago [-]
I mean it's certainly convenient! But that's a weak epistemic claim. Obviously, the cultural loading of g and of IQ tests is a complicated subject; I certainly wouldn't summarize it as "universal without cultural biases".
9 hours ago [-]
mrheosuper 12 hours ago [-]
I wonder why is that, what the point of having a score that you can not compare them without external context (the day of taking exam)
energy123 13 hours ago [-]
IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.
vintermann 12 hours ago [-]
Hmm, who does the calibration, and how scientific are they about it? Can we check their work?
dinkumthinkum 13 hours ago [-]
I feel like this post unironically proves the point.
dupontcyborg 14 hours ago [-]
i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?
US centric data, absolutely useless. This is just measuring american decline, not civilisation changes.
vidarh 12 hours ago [-]
It's also a first time decline afterany decades of steady increases. We have no basis for determining causality - it might just be that we've finally maxed out the possible gains from the causes underlying the Flynn effect.
evil-olive 14 hours ago [-]
that's a study published in 2023, analyzing data that ended in 2018.
dofm 14 hours ago [-]
Right but the question was:
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
petesergeant 14 hours ago [-]
Hard not to see what you’ve just done here as an analogue of what the article is arguing against
64e23275635e 14 hours ago [-]
I am the lazy human today, but this one is listing a few references:
Not sure about de-evolution (devolution is the word I think), just a change in how people and brains work - but you could already see this happening the past few decades. I can't read a technical book or documentation end to end ever since google results came up with specific answers within seconds.
hahahaa 12 hours ago [-]
A technical book can be so relaxing (unless e.g. too highly technical... think quantum mechanics). Imagine 50k words on an interesting tech topic without a context switch!
0x696C6961 5 hours ago [-]
Some people use it to think less, some people use it to learn more.
rglover 9 hours ago [-]
I think we're going to see a sort of "intelligence caste" form. People who overuse AI and atrophy their brain's ability to think will be on the bottom, while the inverse of those people will be on top.
This is somewhat good news because it means the end (to some extent) of the Peter Principle. My hope, though, is that this doesn't turn into an actual caste system, but I'm not holding my breath. I think that's where this all goes: we're in the process of the world's intelligence being strip-mined and resold back to the world at a premium. The only ones who "survive" long-term are the ones who refuse to submit all of their mental faculties to AI.
That inevitably leads to a rapid degeneration of the species. Only way to avoid that outcome entirely is to remind people that their brain is valuable and they need to exercise it just like they would the rest of their body.
VitaliyKorbut 1 hours ago [-]
Heavy LLM users still have to spot bad assumptions and catch errors. Scrolling social media seems like a much better example of mental atrophy.
ryu2k2 14 hours ago [-]
We're already seeing it.
f6v 13 hours ago [-]
Human intelligence evolved without technology, so, no.
13 hours ago [-]
wseqyrku 9 hours ago [-]
Only in corporate setting.
dyauspitr 5 hours ago [-]
Well, apparently, our brain sizes have shrunk something like 30% over the last 10,000 years. This is primarily because ancient man needed to be a jack of all trades just to survive in the wilderness. Once civilization and specialization took over we just didn’t need all that processing power since a lot of that work was just outsourced to civilization and society.
Applejinx 11 hours ago [-]
Alcohol has existed for zillions of years, but not literally every person is a useless drunkard.
You could consider it a class of predator on people who have vulnerabilities that can give way to dependence on the LLM and an inability to function. It could be seen in that light. The underlying problem is being described in that light.
vouaobrasil 8 hours ago [-]
> Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
A de-evolution of culture for the sake of efficiency, sure. The entire culture will shift to a greater degree of superficiality, not just because of the lack of deep understanding of what they're doing, but because AI will condition (and is conditioning) people to want the more superficial stuff.
This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to AI - but AI is at the apex of it and is the worst we've seen so far because it, much more than anything else, targets the mental domain whereas most previous automations have targeted the physical but the mental as well to a lesser extent.
The end result is a huge amount of technical debt that simply can't be recovered and a huge increase in myopia that will prevent us from truly understanding and solving serious problems that will undoubtedly occur.
Most people can't see this because they're already addicted to the dopamine hit of the tech, but it's one reason I'm 100% anti-AI and I hate it with an immense passion.
xyzelement 8 hours ago [-]
// Claude said: [giant response verbatim]
I am lucky that I work with great teams and so when someone says "this is how Claude (or Gemini) summaries the situation" it does mean "I read it and it's right-enough to be helpful, so I am passing it along without editing"
Obviously for this to work you need (1) a team that's smart and mature enough to own the AI output it puts forward and (2) shared understanding that people are operating this way.
I do find that when you have 1 and 2 this is a real accelerant. I asked a sales rep the other day what was going on in a key account and he forwarded along a 10 page Claude synthesis.
The reality is this is better intel than I would have been able to get in a pre-AI era this quickly. And yes once I went into the weeds on the doc I found one thing that didn't make sense and I asked the rep he stared at it and said "you are right that's a hallucination I don't notice" but overall it was still worth it.
bigfishrunning 7 hours ago [-]
So the answer was "What's going on with this account" was 10 pages of homework, with at least 1 mistake to correct? That doesn't seem like an improvement over a conversation.
xyzelement 4 hours ago [-]
It was 10 pages of relevant account history with one fuck up. Not sure how u got you u got from what I wrote
ianmarcinkowski 7 hours ago [-]
I suspect that we will end up with a social convention or understanding around reputation that is tied to whether someone pushes slop on other people. If I need to pass on some AI slop, retyping and copy-editing works well to validate whether it's reasonable while I work it over in my mind.
We already have social patterns for disregarding "Well... Acktchully" Bros who jump into conversations where they're not welcome and I think we can easily build up a new rule for "Well... Claude says 'Acktschully'" Bros
busterarm 7 hours ago [-]
I agree. Also there's one specific context where I use this quite a bit, even if it's a bit passive aggressive...:
When someone is asking me about something that is a) their job and b) I have explained to them before. There are a few specific people that I have to do this to repeatedly because for some reason they don't want to do the thing their team owns. It's a high noise source at my work and this response is my new version of RTFM.
millipede 37 minutes ago [-]
At my $work, people do this frequently, but instead of it just being insensitive, they have their personal Slackbot responding on their behalf. After I realized I wasn't even talking to a person, I've stopped opening their DMs.
peheje 11 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
8by3 14 hours ago [-]
Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.
felooboolooomba 11 hours ago [-]
Slightly different though if it comes from a manager, since his ass is on the line if the project isn't going well. Well, it should be on the line although they usually manage to make a random dev responsible for their mess even they had no say in it.
_0ffh 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, stupid and lazy people will be stupid and lazy.
AI is just another tool they can use to be stupid and lazy while pretending to contribute.
madeofpalk 14 hours ago [-]
The problem is that it’s even easier to be stupid and lazy now, which encourages more people to do this more often.
FridgeSeal 13 hours ago [-]
Management/exec have also decided that this is a desirable form of “stupid and lazy” and are actively encouraging it, and discouraging the “old way”.
danolivo 7 hours ago [-]
A while back, I noticed that using Claude all day left me feeling mentally tired.
After thinking it over, I realised the problem was Claude’s complex language. I’ve used English daily for years, so that shouldn’t be an issue. To compare, I switched Claude to my native language and had the same problem the author described. The text still needed to be literally deciphered before I could understand it.
After talking with Claude, I updated the settings to ask for simpler language and less dense information. Natural language works better with some entropy in the text. This change has made things easier.
jmartrican 5 hours ago [-]
I recently updated Claude to respond with shorter text and in bullet points, and other similar changes. It is an area of active improvements on my end. But early results are in. Now I feel like my mental capicity is not crowded out by the LLM's wall of text. There is now mental capicity to think about the problem at hand and come up with ideas.
grimcompanion 1 hours ago [-]
IMO this definitely helps, but only to a degree, because the more quickly I can read/digest output, the more quickly I've got more output to read/digest. The jargon/quirks aren't as dense per message but they still accumulate eventually, and so either way I hit a wall where I need to do something, anything, besides read another line from CC.
mstaoru 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
deathanatos 9 hours ago [-]
All I can say is you're lucky that your meat proxies are still identifying themselves as such.
I've had people forward AI responses … sans "Claude said". I'm quite literally talking to Claude via proxy, and I've caught more than one person pulling this stunt. It's a nightmare of negative productivity, though. Just why? And invariably the kicker is they still want me to solve their problem, whatever that might be.
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 2 hours ago [-]
Yep, my VP of engineering does this all day, every day. It's so sad
RicDan 11 hours ago [-]
I like to point out that if all people do is copy paste from an AI, then I can advocate to replacing them with AI directly. Usually wakes people up.
kooi 7 hours ago [-]
It happens outside the developer world as well.
People get information from Google AI mode and take it as 100% truth. In reality, blogs, reddit, and junk are often sourced link...which is fine if you inspect the sources...which some people don't!
Have has examples of people AI-moding a questing and they get one answer based on how they asked. Then another person asks and they get another answer.
Issue: People read what they want to read, don't listen to humans anymore beacause the AI will tell them what they want.
bagacrap 6 hours ago [-]
I've seen it using a lot of Instagram lately too. I can't even check that source because I don't have the app installed.
When I do try to check the links, they often don't support what's stated. If I call out Gemini, it says something inane like "I don't actually use these links the way a human might --- I didn't misinterpret it because I didn't even read it!"
Recently I was searching for information about fig trees (the fruit). It kept telling me things that didn't make sense, luckily the links revealed it was answering about fiddle leaf fig trees (the houseplant). Unfortunately that was not a correctable problem --- it kept happening even after I pointed out the mistake. So I'm really not too sure what the purpose of the system is. You still have to read through the references in their entirety (if not paywalled!), and with skepticism. And then if you find a problem, AI isn't going to get back on track.
kooi 3 hours ago [-]
Oof, is it a fig tree or a fiddle leaf leaf tree, that's hilarious.
There's the new pelican bench mark
zuzululu 5 hours ago [-]
The problem described in the article existed for ages even before the internet.
People just want to pay their bills and don't want to use up their limited cognition beyond what's minimum.
For example, I work for 3 different employers. They don't know and I don't care if they find out. I use AI exclusively. I don't have Kubernetes experience but I am managing their infrastructure without issues. I will just read whatever LLMs give me and repeat it back. It has never failed me and there's no need to learn something that AI will do much better job at.
Sometimes I'm not even at my desk, I go to the gym and exercise instead which is a better use of time only answering on Slack when they ping me.
kooi 3 hours ago [-]
I mean at the end of the day, if it works, it works!
sethammons 9 hours ago [-]
"Claud said" is a hedge. It is abdication of responsibility. That said, a meat-proxied answer should come with more credibility based on the proxy.
I'd put more weight into my developer proxying system information than my sale's intern. I am expecting the proxy to have given the response a sniff test
metabagel 6 hours ago [-]
I appreciate "Claude said...", because it helps me assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
ImPostingOnHN 4 hours ago [-]
The appropriate level of trust would be whatever trust you place in a colleague's human responses, because you trust they have verified what "claude said" for correctness.
Unless you're saying claude is more trustworthy than your colleagues?
metabagel 4 hours ago [-]
Depends on what they wrote alongside. Ideally, I get more than just a dump of Claude's response. Ideally, they summarize what they regard to be the key point.
This might be why I'm having difficulty understanding why people are upset about "Claude said..." responses. I would be disappointed too if someone just said "Claude said...", but in general I don't get messages like that in chat. In general, I get some additional input of what the person thinks about Claude's response.
So, yeah, if someone just gives you a dump of what Claude said, that's disappointing.
-0_0- 13 hours ago [-]
A related problem is people not understanding where AI is/isn't of use.
A news article I read today said they asked Claude whether a song's lyrics were AI generated - as if it were some kind of legitimate authoritative test.
There's enough problems already with the existing 'AI detection' tools for text, but this was a big red flag - its the journalist clearly assuming these AI tools have some unique insight into the text they generate, which was deeply concerning to see being used in an article that had a real bearing on the reputation of the person they were accusing of using AI.
mft_ 13 hours ago [-]
At a company I work for, I was recently discussing the need for an AI Code of Conduct plus a discussion - as this is exactly the sort of thing that started creeping in as soon as the corporate Claude account went live. In this case, the company isn't in a computer-related area, so this was essentially a 'normie' response to first having Claude available.
Interestingly, there seemed (small n) to be a correlation between this behaviour, and (my view of) people's existing competence, which might make sense.
rishsriv 13 hours ago [-]
This is particularly frustrating on social media, and abases what might be good ideas.
Too often, my Twitter experience now is
- start reading a post with some kernel of insight
- read some claudism in the post
- stop reading immediately
It seems like people turn over their raw kernel of insight to an LLM to give it polish, likely in order to increase its appeal to the audience. But most of that appeal is lost amongst people that consume LLM written content regularly.
It's also likely that social media engagement does not filter for this. A majority of people are still not neck deep in LLM-talk, and cannot distinguish between LLM and human written content.
It'll probably take us another year or two to develop herd immunity against meat proxism.
bonesss 13 hours ago [-]
I keep waiting for a company to start pushing an “anti-AI AI”, Apple being my most likely speculative candidate.
Flagging, highlighting, filtering, and avoiding AI slop online seems like a very lucrative capability to bake into some consumer hardware. Get your social media, and music services, back to the ‘good old days’.
LinkedIn also added a button to report AI slop, but I'm doubtful it would be of much help on LinkedIn since every second post seems to be written by an LLM.
horizion2025 10 hours ago [-]
I agree but to be fair, often people could have asked an AI to get their answer. Especially seniors are prone to this (thinking the AI could not possibly know this or other biases). The responder wrote they asked Claude so as to not take credit for the answer and also to indicate they did not vet it. Then the person asking can decide if they want to read the answer or not (often a 1 sec glean can reveal if it is promising or completely off track.
layer8 9 hours ago [-]
In that case, it would be better to suggest to the asker that they can ask the AI. Otherwise why would they ever start? Always asking Slack is easier.
black6 9 hours ago [-]
"I don't know." is a better answer than "Claude said..."
metabagel 6 hours ago [-]
"I don't know" could also mean they couldn't be bothered. It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you.
johnisom2001 4 hours ago [-]
Effort is not what matters, accuracy is
ImPostingOnHN 2 hours ago [-]
> "I don't know" could also mean they couldn't be bothered
That's exactly what asking an LLM means, except admitting you don't know something is respectful. If you think someone should know something that they don't, then that's a totally separate issue between you and them (and/or their manager).
> It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you.
Someone lifting a finger for their colleague, when working with them is literally their job? Wow, what a sacrifice, like sending a link to lmgtfy. So helpful! Will the result actually be an "answer", or just hallucinated AI slop? Who cares!
gimili 7 hours ago [-]
I love the word "meat proxy" :)
For me what matters most is whether the person understood the core of the thing they are forwarding.
Usually a wall of text is contraindicative of that.
I want my team to be able to write the core idea on a whiteboard without any help before going ahead and sharing or implementing it.
Not sure why I first heard it, but I think the crux of the issue is that you can outsource intelligence, but you can’t outsource understanding
deepsummer 15 hours ago [-]
In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
jurgenburgen 14 hours ago [-]
> Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
Do you tell people you used a hammer to hit the nails? Do you go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t use your bare, bleeding knuckles to punch in the nails?
Give people some credit and don’t treat them like idiots.
Also don’t treat your LLM as some “super-power”, it’s just a fancy hammer and still hits your fingers if you don’t know how to use it.
marliechiller 13 hours ago [-]
Is it not more akin to asking a handyman to go and do the work for you? They are the ones wielding the hammer, youve just sent them off to go and do it on your behalf without getting your hands dirty. If you then claim to take credit for it, I can see how that might be misinterpreted.
As I see said quite often, an LLM is deemed of a similar ability to a junior software engineer. If I were that junior and my work was repeatedly ripped off by my senior colleague, I would be pissed. Not that an LLM cares in this instance, but the original requester might want to know
jurgenburgen 11 hours ago [-]
> Is it not more akin to asking a handyman to go and do the work for you?
Does your handyman go off the rails and build pipes around the neighbors house because they didn’t know you already have an incoming water pipe?
Does your handyman require you to have expertise in plumbing to make sure they don’t use bubble gum to seal the pipes?
It’s not taking credit if the “handyman” is a gibbering idiot who needs more handholding than a child.
marliechiller 5 hours ago [-]
That seems like an extreme interpretation if I'm honest. As ever, its more likely somewhere in between your hammer analogy and the handyman. In any case, there is almost zero downside to listing your sources when answering a question as it provides the person asking the question with more context as to the origin of the answer
metabagel 6 hours ago [-]
I generally provide the source for my information. Even if I already know the answer, I will generally provide a reference on the web or in a document. If I asked an LLM, I will provide that as part of my answer, and I'll generally chip in whether the answer makes sense to me or not; in some cases I'll say that I have no clue if the LLM response makes sense.
Needless to say, I have probably not advanced as far as someone who hoards information, because companies tend to value the information hoarders, but this is just the way I'm designed to operate. I despise information hoarding.
vaylian 14 hours ago [-]
You still need to verify that the answer that Claude gave is not hallucinated. That will also cost you some more time.
If the answer is wrong and people trust your judgement, then they will take a lot longer to figure out, that your answer is not to be relied upon.
deepsummer 13 hours ago [-]
I usually do so I understand what I am replying, but seriously, the latest Opus and Fable versions get it right more often than I would. The time of AI hallucinations is over, as long as they have the context.
Springtime 11 hours ago [-]
Even Mythos can hallucinate[1] with a codebase to analyze. The argument I often see is that humans are fallible, too, but the issues we're seeing in this topic are about those who should know better—including in senior positions—heeding LLM responses/advice over human and concerningly not actually thinking about things at all. Ie: they're not being treated by many as just useful tools/tentative feedback but as authoritative answers/solutions.
There still needs to be critical thinking involved on the human side, even if there's a high rate of accuracy in certain dimensions.
That's a bad example: it did not hallucinate about the codebase (which it had access to), but about a rule outside the codebase (which is not in the context, I assume). Yeah, missing requirements can cause it to rely on things it thinks are true. Same as humans do all the time when they lack context.
bigstrat2003 5 hours ago [-]
That just isn't true. LLMs still hallucinate all the time.
jghn 5 hours ago [-]
When Google started taking the world by storm, and for a few years after that, I had the same problem.
The way I solved the problem was by making a big show about the fact that I used Google to type in literally what they asked me word for word, and that I looked at the first couple of hits for a few seconds.
Most of them got the message pretty quick. There were a few holdouts though who took longer.
dimatura 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
AgentMatt 14 hours ago [-]
That's a very good question that I also don't have an answer to (yet). But I believe part of the reason for that is that were currently still in the middle of this shift, so there's issues of both knowledge about AI and how people relate to it. And of course there's so many different situations here.
Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.
Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.
A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.
Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.
deepsummer 14 hours ago [-]
I am a software engineer. Most of the times, the people asking are from product management or devops. Devops contractors are the most difficult ones. They have access to the code, they have access to Claude. But they don't use it.
xpct 6 hours ago [-]
This was common before LLMs as well. Instead of googling, they ask you, then you google in front of them and show them how easy it was to figure out. At least in my experience, they learn to google by themselves eventually, but there is some type of disconnect in being proactive.
stephbook 14 hours ago [-]
If they continue doing this, delay your responses and keep them short. Don't spend more time on the response than they did on the question.
64e23275635e 14 hours ago [-]
>So how should I answer?
Like a human, not like a robot. Either just present them the answer or explain them how you got it.
Maxious 14 hours ago [-]
So if you used claude you would preface with "Claude said: "
AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe not just "Claude said". If one of the issues is getting the right prompt, you might say what prompt you used.
deepsummer 14 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I do that. The problem is that it makes them look bad.
64e23275635e 14 hours ago [-]
In the end it's really just the same thing as with stackoverflow answers. If you knew how to combine certain keywords for an answer you were searching for, then it took you like 5 seconds to find the relevant SO answer for that. Even then people got mad about it 'why can't they just search themselves if it's so easy to find?' - well, maybe it's not that easy and obvious to a lot of people and that will get even worse now
erikerikson 7 hours ago [-]
Whose responsibility is that?
To be fair those are consummate and thoughtful politics. The industry is rife with those but that was part of why in leaving it.
microtonal 14 hours ago [-]
There are typically middle paths, like pointing where they should look approximately (if you are an expert on a project, you typically have a better idea where to look). And then they can look or point their agents at it, or whatever they prefer.
supriyo-biswas 14 hours ago [-]
In the past "RTFM" or "LGMTFY" have been responses, so why not something like, well, "I'm not aware of the top of my head, you afaik <brief explanation>. Also feel free to ask Claude on the technical details :)"
ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago [-]
> Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer?
"I don't know, I could google it or ask Claude for you, but you could do that yourself."
Because saying "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer.
Philip-J-Fry 14 hours ago [-]
"Hey, here's what I found. By the way I used Claude to get this info. It might be worth trying that yourself if you have similar questions, it's quite good at this in my experience. Give it a go"
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
deepsummer 14 hours ago [-]
I did that the first time. But how often do you want to say that (in a public chat that their supervisors can read)?
Philip-J-Fry 14 hours ago [-]
Literally just ignore these people if they don't get the message. Let them complain to their supervisor and hopefully their supervisor will bring up the fact that you asked them to use AI instead. It's an easily defensible position. Some people need to learn the hard way.
Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.
bigstrat2003 13 hours ago [-]
> Let them complain to their supervisor and hopefully their supervisor will bring up the fact that you asked them to use AI instead. It's an easily defensible position.
That is not an easily defensible position at all. LLMs cannot give reliable answers, so it makes perfect sense to ask a human instead of the LLM. Any manager who would take the side of someone saying "just ask Claude" is a very foolish manager indeed.
Philip-J-Fry 11 hours ago [-]
"Do your own research" is definitely a defensible position. No one is saying take Claude's output as fact.
These people would still ask and waste your time without AI. The fact is, they don't even bother trying to find an answer themselves. And it's often something Claude is extremely good at finding out. Which is why my first suggestion was if you used Claude, then let the person asking know that it worked well for you and encourage them to use it. It's their own competency at their job to judge the output, they shouldn't be pushing the hard bit onto someone else.
If someone uses AI or some other research and then comes to you with their findings and other questions then that is infinitely better to me. I absolutely despise people asking me basic questions that involve me literally doing the research job for them.
If they come to me like "Hey, I have X problem, I used Claude like you suggested and it came out with this response. I'm not 100% sure it's correct because of Y. Would you be able to take a quick glance to see if it's on the right track?". I am much happier with this question because it's clear they have actually tried to research themselves.
Ignoring someone who doesn't even do the most basic research is 100% a defensible position. People should be doing their job.
bigstrat2003 13 hours ago [-]
The problem with asking Claude (or any LLM) is that they will get things wrong much more often than a human, while sounding perfectly confident about the information. It's a recipe for disaster unless you're asking it about something where you have enough expertise to be able to sniff out the BS. So if people are asking you a question, that means they figure you're able to answer the question accurately. If you can do that with asking Claude then whatever, but the person asking you probably couldn't do the same. They would certainly get an answer, but they wouldn't be able to have confidence in its accuracy. You're providing value, even if it's not necessarily immediately obvious to you.
deepsummer 13 hours ago [-]
Have you really used the latest models (say Opus 4.8+ or Fable)? When was the last time they gave a wrong answer to a question about the code base? Half a year ago that could have happened. But not today.
mrheosuper 12 hours ago [-]
Yesterday, when I was working with LVGL, using Fable.
mark_l_watson 8 hours ago [-]
While I agree with the article, I would carry the idea further: the huge value in AI is improving ourselves. By all means use AI to help design, write tests, and implement code and while I understand this might be the big value add for corporations that may employ you, the important investments in life are in learning and self improvement. I built a good career primarily improving my own knowledge and skills, and along the way doing some useful work for my employers. I am an old man and retired so now I 100% use AI for learning.
vouaobrasil 8 hours ago [-]
I wonder if in the long run it's really learning in the traditional sense, or just a shallow version of it along the lines of absorbing a bit of knowledge along the lines of reading a pop science book? Nothing wrong with that but I'd argue a lot of people who think they're learning are just "recreational learning" in the sense of hobbyist fun rather than deep study. And in the long run I think there is not much value in AI beyond turning our society into a bunch of apes who know a bit of sign language.
supermatt 12 hours ago [-]
> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
Whats is wrong with this?
I work with durable tracing (not using NATS, or k8s though) and this looks almost exactly what I would expect to see in a coordinator log after repartition of a storage cluster.
Obviously I don't know what your actual context was, though.
rad-b 11 hours ago [-]
Not the OP, but I understand the sentiment they’re trying to convey. I will frequently work with AI to get done something that is not in my immediate area of expertise. And this kind of speak constantly happens, where you can feel it trying to please its RLHF expert teacher by being as concise as possible. Works ok when you’re deep in the weeds of what you’re talking about, but otherwise just feels overwhelming. Kind of like a feeling you can get when asking someone who is more interested in proving they are smart and know the answer than they are interested in actually helping you…
And yes you can prompt it to take it easier as you’re not experienced in this, but it’s usually a boiling frog situation. You work on something, need a small thing ajdecent to it, and three messages deep Claude is speaking to you in tongues unbeknownst. You knew what was happening at every turn but still got lost somehow.
tempfile 11 hours ago [-]
> You knew what was happening at every turn but still got lost somehow.
I think this is less "it's using jargon" and more "it's explaining incredibly badly". It is very common that the explanation, while correct, is almost written inside out, with the point buried behind 3 paragraphs of "you've hit on the core seam" and "you're right to push back, let's reinforce the load-bearing model".
I think people have an incredibly limited capacity to follow long winding exposition, and they're too embarrassed to admit it. I have started sending stuff back to coworkers just saying "I don't think this is wrong, but I can't parse it, can you?" and getting back "no, but claude managed to generate a fix from it".
10 hours ago [-]
natsucks 5 hours ago [-]
I have a deep expertise in a domain and when I read that example it was incredibly edifying. I regularly encounter statements that are so concentrated with information that it becomes opaque and I cannot interpret it without reading it over again several times.
Havoc 12 hours ago [-]
The tricky bit is politely conveying this to people that lets call it don't think about things too deeply.
They genuinely think they're helping by shoveling 5 pages of LLM output they didn't even bother reading into teams...
72deluxe 8 hours ago [-]
But if some people lack the understanding ability to even realise that they lack understanding, how do you tell them?
Nightmare.
Havoc 7 hours ago [-]
You don't. Pretty sure the last instance where this happened the other person thought I was just anti-AI when I voiced my displeasure. I don't think the actual problem registered
How others in office context attempt to use it is starting to annoy in general. Had a case today where someone wanted to use copilot to classify something that is situation/company specific & out of distribution. There is just no understanding beyond "its a magic answer box"
antisthenes 6 hours ago [-]
You need to tell them in high school, before their brains finish developing.
If you don't instill critical thinking into people by the age of 17-19 at the LATEST, it's already too late after. College is already too late.
You just slowly mitigate them at work, relegate them to strictly defined tasks. Some will need to be managed out.
neebz 12 hours ago [-]
This is like pre-LLM, you presenting a problem to the team, and they google and send you the top few links thinking they have found the solution and have done their job.
I actually banned this and made it part of onboarding.
I can google too. You need to read yourself, ground the solution to our setting and then propose a plan.
flyingshelf 10 hours ago [-]
Here's my plan: <proceeds to pasted well-formatted output straight out of ChatGPT>
It's gotten to a point where if I see valid `code` in responses I assume it's AI junk output and I scold the commenter.
metabagel 6 hours ago [-]
Just FYI, scolding people causes them to resent you. Take great care when giving negative feedback. Courtesy costs you very little and gains a lot.
metabagel 4 hours ago [-]
This doesn't mean that you can't give negative feedback. But, I tend to make suggestions/requests rather than calling someone out.
If you're a manager, part of the job is telling someone that they aren't meeting standard, and that's how I would phrase it. Tell them what the expectation is and ask them to work on meeting it.
Scolding, calling out, or even yelling at people should be consigned to the past. It's unnecessary and counterproductive.
flyingshelf 2 hours ago [-]
To be fair this mostly happens on my OSS repos where I'm bombarded by junk AI PRs by people who never bother to actually read and talk like a human. So I scold them, block them and close everything they open.
thel3l 14 hours ago [-]
Last week, I built a search engine as a side project over electoral data.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
flexagoon 13 hours ago [-]
> if you know anything about a search
I doubt people running those agents know much about stuff
dwarhl 11 hours ago [-]
I do it, on purpose: it teaches people to do basic research by themselves, and not hit me with questions they could have gotten with a simple chat with their llm.
It's a kind of RTFM for current days.
rpastuszak 11 hours ago [-]
I can imagine it makes things easier for you but I find it hard to imagine it teaches anyone anything. Just offloading social effort to an LLM (fair enough but let’s call a spade a spade)
dwarhl 10 hours ago [-]
I don't mean to paint myself as the smart one for doing that. It's a coping mechanism.
But I disagree: it teaches... something. The risk is that it's not what I thought it would be, eventually.
jeremyjh 10 hours ago [-]
That isn't the takeaway. The takeaway is that when someone asks for your input you give them Claude's. Why do we have you?
DonsDiscountGas 9 hours ago [-]
Unless they're a professional stack exchange responder (not a real job afaik) they probably do a lot besides answer random questions
jeremyjh 9 hours ago [-]
That isn’t the topic of TFA.
dwarhl 10 hours ago [-]
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an0malous 9 hours ago [-]
Why would you do that instead of asking them if they checked Claude first?
jedbrooke 6 hours ago [-]
This is one of my pet peeves too.
Like when someone says “ChatGPT says: …” I just want to stop them and say “Look, you are a human with a functioning mind and thoughts and I’m sure YOU have something valuable to contribute here, I want to hear what you think, not what the bot outputs.”
Heck, even if you are just gonna prompt chatgpt, if you read and understand and agree the the output would be useful, feel free to rephrase it as your own (so long as you take accountability for it if it’s wrong, which I guess is often why people hide behind “chatgpt says…” in the first place, it allows them to pass accountability on to the machine).
dontparticipate 5 hours ago [-]
We've already started firing people for being meat proxies at my company. Was reviewing a huge and awful slop code base that a vibe coder only had been working on getting started. I started giving my feedback to the developer, and it became quickly clear that I was the only human involved in developing this "software" and the only one that had ever read the code and evaluated it.
Cost the company a ton and had to take it over from scratch. AI is unleashing a small army of 0.01x engineers and making them harder to catch, so not only are you burning the tokens, you're also setting that labor cost on fire.
wuliwong 4 hours ago [-]
I was a big distributed, event-driven service guy for years. We used to talk about how it can make things 'faster' but you have to put some infrastructure around it in order to be able to move like that. I'm basically talking about CI/CD stuff, automated tests, security, load test, etc. You use feature flags, blue green deploys, stuff like that.
I _think_ that the same concept could apply to agentic code. If you have the guardrails in place, you could trust it a bit more. Anyway, that's a lot of what I think about and but have had limited success getting people to buy in as much as I think they should. :)
dontparticipate 44 minutes ago [-]
I completely agree. My first intervention with this person was to try to get them to set up a test driven development framework. Unfortunately, that's also when I learned he didn't know what that was. He also just copied "do TTD" into Claude. It was definitely my mistake, and probably over optimism about what AI might be able to do, that we didn't enforce that a lot earlier, and have been working on making sure to enforce a lot more gates going forward.
skinwill 10 hours ago [-]
Woodworkers often will have a preference for their favorite tool. Once they become comfortable with that tool they will sometimes prefer to use it for things it wasn't designed. For me it was the band saw. When I needed to split a board, bandsaw. When I needed to cut a curve, bandsaw. Cut a horse figure? bandsaw!
I once saw a woodworking television show that seemed to do everything on the table saw. Rip, make frames for paintings, everything. It seemed the next step of every design was accomplished "over at the table saw".
Right now it seems that's what people are doing with AI. Need a bandsaw? use AI. Need a table saw? Use AI. Need to think of a solution of any kind, better consult AI.
Right before this trend I recall kids wanting to check YouTube first before doing anything. Now they ask AI.
There's an app for that, there's a website for that, there's a magazine for that, there's a phone number you can call, and so on and so on.
As with everything, I say this: do your own thinking and proceed with caution.
This too shall pass.
binary0010 9 hours ago [-]
Whenever people compare ai to a one real world tool always surprises me tbh.
The only equivalent tool in wood working would be a robot that can build an entire table from scratch and you just sit there and tell it what to do and what kinda table you want and watch it autonomously build everything.
1 saw type is not really even remotely equivalent to what ai is to software.
natsucks 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, AI is a general purpose technology, on a par with the introduction of the computer itself. Analogies to tools seems inappropriate.
DonsDiscountGas 9 hours ago [-]
I understand your point but it's funny to use AI as an example since a big benefit is it's generality. It's mediocre at many things but the fact that you can just use one tool and get passable results across many domains makes it so useful.
layer8 9 hours ago [-]
> Right now it seems that's what people are doing with AI. […] This too shall pass.
Except that it’s difficult to imagine an even more general tool that would replace AI in this role.
al_borland 7 hours ago [-]
We don't necessarily need a more general tool for a lot of it to pass. We just need the bubble to pop so people can start looking at the tool more objectively and admit that it's not the right tool for every job.
Trying to use one tool for everything is often a sign of a new tool someone is infatuated with and wants an excuse to use, or are trying to understand everything it can do. Once the novelty wears off and flaws in various uses cases become more apparent, it can take on a more specialized role.
theletterf 12 hours ago [-]
There's a certain etiquette to it. When someone asks me something and I use an LLM to research the answer (notice that I said 'research', not 'produce'), I frame the findings as something that I've investigated with, say, Claude. I also take the time to edit the response and read if myself at least twice, because I don't want a stochastic machine to take over my identity.
Versipelle 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, AI etiquette is what we need. The question is “how much human processing on the AI output is necessary before considering it no longer a meat proxy”. My way to coin it is “If you feel the need to specify in your answer that it is AI generated, work it more”.
In the end, nobody cares whether you used your memory and expertise alone, asked a peer, googled it, or asked ChatGPT to refine your answer. As long as you verified it, rephrased to match company lingo and can vouch for it, everyone is happy.
miki123211 11 hours ago [-]
On one hand, I understand the frustration; and if I know I'm dealing with smart people who are pretty capable of Clauding themselves and who won't ask me if they can ask Claude, I would never do this.
On the other... people really don't bother Googling or asking AI sometimes, and if the question doesn't require local context, that's a very appropriate response.
layer8 9 hours ago [-]
The appropriate response in that case is to tell them what to use, not to use it for them.
mephos 3 hours ago [-]
Realistically many people's jobs are turning into being a meat proxy.
But the point should be that you need be a good meat proxy. A good meat proxy injects human reasoning and taste, it doesn't blindly forward LLM-isms into the organization. A human should be able to reasonably compress an LLM conversation into a couple of sentences or follow-up questions that are actually relevant for the team.
juanre 4 hours ago [-]
Shameless plug: indeed, instead let the other person's claude talk directly to yours and figure things out. I've been working on a framework to enable this, https://aweb.ai (OSS, https://github.com/awebai/aweb). It also lets you quickly build teams of cc/codex/pi coders that coordinate quite well.
washbasin 7 hours ago [-]
Great security talk about how humans aren't setup to deal with LLMs as tools.
I love the bullet point(s) : we don't trust [aircraft] pilots to catch automations mistakes (e.g. autopilot), but we are expecting humans to catch LLM mistakes.
> Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words
In the past, avoiding this process was called plagiarism, and it was frowned upon, to put it mildly. Now, because the LLMs say it's OK, it's become the norm.
The, "this is what Claud said", response also comes off like an appeal to authority. When these LLMs have no authority and get the basics wrong constantly.
I don't quite read it that way, it seems more like "take this with a grain of salt". But I suppose it depends on who's saying it.
al_borland 6 hours ago [-]
True. If I say it, it’s normally the grain of salt meaning. But I don’t copy/paste answers, I restate my understanding of what it said, and try and change my tone accordingly.
The people who repeat/paste it verbatim tend to see it as an authority, from what I’ve seen.
OJFord 4 hours ago [-]
"AI says" – if you interpret it and think it's correct and stand by it (and I trust your judgement) then I really don't care where you got it from initially, you don't need to tell me you used AI. But if you're just taking my question and 'meat proxying' it for me, what value are you adding? I can also do this.
Mike-Kelner 3 hours ago [-]
The core issue is people replying without putting in any effort, not the fact that they quote AI. Saying, "I heard this might be wrong," isn't much better. If you think it might be wrong, spend a little time figuring out whether it actually applies before posting it.
AbbeFaria 14 hours ago [-]
I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
energy123 13 hours ago [-]
Someone should have sent Claude's output, which spotted the trivial bug behind the recent bitcoin heist, to the Coldcard developers.
It might be rude to send LLM output. It's also rude not to check basic things with an LLM before wasting someone's time.
subscribed 13 hours ago [-]
Of course, you've got this one sensible part right (IMO). But there's other sensible part you seem to have missed: it's also rude to send the LLM output to someone else without reading.
m463 5 hours ago [-]
NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
He pasted that curious LLM response and never explained it.
would you call that proxy-bait?
DoDecaHeJon 13 hours ago [-]
This is becoming frustrating, it shows up in conversation with friends and while working. If I have to hear what ai had you do before you called me, I'm charging double right away. Especially when ai is a fantastic teacher if used correctly.
ecountry 8 hours ago [-]
We desperately need a Let Me Google That For You-style saying to appropriately shame people who do this.
9 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
gjulianm 15 hours ago [-]
I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing or that I don't really understand.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
patrickmay 6 hours ago [-]
"Writing is nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is."
-- Richard Guindon
gatio 14 hours ago [-]
I often use it to simplify & target my responses, and avoid over-sharing technical details.
At the same time, I use the Q&A cycle to improve my vetted knowledge base, which I also share (and can reference in answers).
Don't come to me with something your mandated rubber ducky can handle; never in my life have I worked so hard to achieve so little.
The only reason I don't do an equivalent of this, shared convo links, is that I simply don't use Claude directly. I use it through hundreds of other people. Meat proxies all the way down.
7 hours ago [-]
heaney-555 5 hours ago [-]
>Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense.
You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.
0xb0565e486 5 hours ago [-]
Regardless of what instructions I put it to try to be terser and all, I still find that the output is of much lower quality.
Even if it uses little words, I often find the reasoning that is quite challenging to understand rather than it was if it was a regular human or colleague that would just explain me something.
Any tips here?
heaney-555 5 hours ago [-]
The best tip is to provide a concrete example, or ideally 3+ examples, of the kind of writing/explanations you personally think is great. It's extremely good at matching when provided with these kinds of examples.
jmartrican 5 hours ago [-]
> You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.
I agree. Its a skills issue. Get good at using your new LLM tool.
kapsmudit 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you for saying this. I’ve been dealing with this at work and it’s incredibly frustrating
dude250711 13 hours ago [-]
If only there had been some kind of artificial assistant to help with incoming noise like that...
umegbewe 11 hours ago [-]
Well put, this is incredibly becoming annoying. Like has it occured to you i can prompt claude too?
rockbruno 13 hours ago [-]
The problem here is that the paradigm is AI-assisted development, but a LOT of people are treating it as "AI-independent" development instead, a.k.a "just send it to the agent and blindly trust whatever comes out of it", *including* deferring all responsibility / blame to the AI itself which is absolutely ridiculous.
ducktective 13 hours ago [-]
It's AI-assisted now but on a path to becoming AI-independent in the coming months at least due to the general public perception.
sandeepkd 13 hours ago [-]
From what I have seen personally over the last 8-12 months, I find this kind of complain ironical in most scenarios. Most of the people complaining this are comfortable with their own usage and distribution of LLM generated content and feel good about it, where as when they hear it from some one else it feels burdensome
10 hours ago [-]
moribvndvs 4 hours ago [-]
Claude’s tone and style has gotten worse with the recent models, not that it was ever very good. It’s both too concise (stringing together a bunch of jargon/acronyms together in weird ways that aren’t familiar even in areas where you have expertise – with no ramp up, context, or clarity) and too verbose (printing out reams of the word salad mentioned above, often just restating things repeatedly). It feels like writing from someone who really doesn’t know where to start or where to end on a topic so they try to cover their ass by saturation. I suppose that’s not far from reality. Asking it a dozen different ways to speak plainly, use STE, ELI5, whatever has little appreciable effect.
I recently started a new consulting gig and got a 36 page architectural white paper that was authored by Claude. It took me an entire business day and a monstrous headache to decipher and distill it down to a 1 pager. This shit is unsustainable.
slowhadoken 38 minutes ago [-]
I’ve been saying for a long time that most fights in your personal life are a proxy war but I never thought of a single person as being a meat proxy. Nice.
balderdash 6 hours ago [-]
I feel like when most LLM type emails from people it’s because of one of three reasons:
1) they don’t know the answer - looked up on llm
2) correlate to #1, I want to look smarter than I actually am
3) I’m too lazY to send you a thoughtful / personal response , I offloaded it to an llm
boobsbr 12 hours ago [-]
If I wanted to know what the AI said, I would have asked it myself.
Don't give me AI feedback at all.
a34729t 6 hours ago [-]
Apparently engineers are running out of tokens with our mediocre token budget, and there is talk of trying to run local LLMs.
Meanwhile execs get unlimited tokens...
And here I am, only automating the most mundane and boring stuff so I can program by hand, which I enjoy.
canucktrash669 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of people don't understand what using AI as an output multiplier means. They take it literally, resulting in multiplying busywork across the company.
Misguided HR / people Ops aggravate the situation, by using slack engagement as a productivity measure. Flagging people that are brief but relevant as slackers.
nojs 14 hours ago [-]
The problem is a lot of people ask questions that claude et al can objectively answer way better than me, and they didn’t think to ask.
Should I a) give a worse answer b) ask claude and launder it as a meat proxy or c) tell them to ask claude?
b and c piss people off but often get them to a better answer.
eddythompson80 13 hours ago [-]
In this scenario the answer for me is C. I say “Ask an agent about terms X, Y and Z and it should be able to explain this well for you. Try that and see if it works for you or if you have any follow up questions”
However, you have to distinguish when someone is asking for your judgement vs just general knowledge about a subject. If I’m asking for your judgement, you have to be the one delivering and owning that call in your own words. It’s fine if you verify or research your understanding with an LLM before answering, but I want to hear your voice and ownership not Claude’s. Whatever you get from the LLM you should understand and if possible, verify. If I came back and say “You said X, can you expand on that” you can’t reply “lol - Claude said that, I dunno”
Perz1val 13 hours ago [-]
How about being truthful? Say "I think A, but I'm not really an expert, so also try asking your favorite LLM"
vultour 12 hours ago [-]
What happened to "I don't know" or "I'm not sure"? Why do you need to direct someone to ask an LLM? If somebody asks me a question I don't know the answer to I'm not sending them anywhere, I tell them I don't know.
lordmoma 2 hours ago [-]
Solution Prompt: simply explain to 5 year old kid.
duxup 12 hours ago [-]
I got a spreadsheet of requirements for some software from a customer recently.
It was thousands of lines long with repeats and a boatload of conflicting requirements.
When we had a meeting to review it they didn’t know what many of the requirements were. They explained that many people made the spreadsheet but they were all in the meeting and nobody could quite describe some items or how they worked together. The vast majority of the spreadsheet was a mystery.
The phrasing and mishmash of concepts / inability of anyone to explain much of it made me suspect it was largely generated by AI.
LeonidBugaev 12 hours ago [-]
I recently had experience working with one of the top security audit firms that collaborate with OpenAI on their cybersecurity tools. What struck me is that they found a lot of various issues (not all of them ended up to be legit, but a lot is) and filled the backlog of the project. However every collaboration with that
person was essentially a proxy for some security-related agentic prompt:
- Hey, agent, open the issue!
- Hey, I clarified it with the agent!
- Agent disagrees!
- Agent agrees!
codingconstable 12 hours ago [-]
Half of this feels like a communication/empathy problem. "Summarise this for someone without our context" fixes the wall of text, and just asking someone to do that might work.
Validation is harder, as nobody skips it because they weren't told to, but because relaying is faster, and unread output looks like validated output right up until it bites. That's probably not solved by asking nicely, I don't think there's a process fix for that beyond people actually being held to it.
dstanko 8 hours ago [-]
My pet peeve is endless Confluence Wiki pages that are clearly written by Claude (or whatever agent they like to use). I get bombarded with these, like it means something. Usually I say: "let me summarize this with my agent", but people rarely get the point.
al_borland 8 hours ago [-]
I've been running across more and more of these. Many of my co-workers are falling for them. They'll run across one of these pages and start to get impressed by all the work a team has done and how organized they are. I dismiss it as slop and they defend it.
A week goes by and the topic comes back around. They actually took the time to read the page and realized everything was wrong and nothing made sense. They saw the page was updated (daily), went to go check the changes, and saw the whole page was rewritten each time, so they couldn't tell what changed. At this point they start to see the anti-value of all this, but keep falling for it every time they run across a new page.
vivzkestrel 6 hours ago [-]
- how come your blog page doesnt show a list of posts?
I read this a couple weeks back and its appeal really stuck with me: if you expect someone to give their attention to something you made, make sure you've given your own attention and effort first.
Actually I'm not sure why more people aren't reading and reposting outputs to save people tokens on generating more outputs (I gather that this article is more objecting to the reposting-without-reading)
Hitton 4 hours ago [-]
Obviously the solution is to have a SKILL.md which will make an agent translate it to a humanese!
11 hours ago [-]
hasbot 9 hours ago [-]
Expect to see more of this as people's writing skills atrophy. I have done this sometimes when the words aren't coming to me. But, yeah, it'd probably best not not bother with the comment if I can't come up with a coherent articulate comment myself.
seemaze 4 hours ago [-]
Lol, obviously never ventured into the Microsoft Techcommunity forums..
waysa 10 hours ago [-]
Delegating stuff to Google (more recently AI) and repeating back the result, is one of my core functions at work next to programming.
A co-worker I'd just tell to RTFM when it's bothering me. Higher up the hierarchy, the egos are more fragile and I'm afraid the can't take it.
channel_t 4 hours ago [-]
While I managed to avoid it for a long time, using generative AI to drive my day to day work life while resisting the pressure to become a meat proxy, I will admit that since joining an "AI native" startup I have become one. Whenever I'm trying to triage 20 different urgent things all day, every day, the economics of personalizing every message just isn't there anymore. It's not realistic. I do still try to way to filter down every AI-generated message into something digestible, but I feel like I'm in a mutually assured destruction type scenario where I can only survive the tidal wave of slop with more slop. I think we're in uncharted territory here in terms of the kind of workload generative AI can drown you in, especially when it's being used without strong discipline.
I do still think there are still places where being a meat proxy is legitimately okay or even desirable, such as PR comments. If everyone's code is generated by AI, and AI will ultimately be the primary consumer of the PR comments, it seems reasonable to me to allow AI to write the comments. Maybe I've just lost my mind though.
Stratoscope 12 hours ago [-]
For anyone unfamiliar with the meat reference, here is Terry Bisson's delightful 1991 short-short story, "They're Made out of Meat":
Rough opinion: If you're a developer who chose to be a meat proxy, you shouldn't whine if/when you're laid off, because clearly LLMs can do your job.
ollybee 12 hours ago [-]
Some version of this needs to be hosted on a dedicated domain like nohello.com that I can respond with as needed. I might just do it
p2detar 13 hours ago [-]
Last week a colleague did this to me; pasted to me in chat "Gemini said". I just ignored it and went with talking about the issue on another thread. I like LLMs and I use them every day, but I'm not gonna answer copy&pasted LLM stuff in human to human conversation. Distill it and let me know your thoughts; I don't need to read you LLM output, I can generate that myself.
xintron 14 hours ago [-]
I've been on the receiving end of too many "Slop Grenades" as well, to the point where I simply reply with https://noslopgrenade.com/ these days.
davidmurdoch 7 hours ago [-]
I have this set as my slack bio
raynr 9 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised this happens between workers within the same knowledge domain. If you're a software dev asking another software dev for an opinion on code, can't you just... talk shop?
In my experience this sort of thing happens all the time when something has to cross between different knowledge domains and the sender doesn't apply their mind in order to co-operate on the issue at hand.
In the pre-LLM past, the sender would add no value, acting as a simple email forwarder, and they would blame you for the delays caused by your inevitable clarificatory questioning. But I always had a defence, which is that your email had no inputs and I had to ask questions to clarify.
Now, though? With LLMs, they just run whatever it is (contract, memo, policy) through whatever LLM they have available and paste the output in an email, giving them the appearance of having done work and added value to the project.
But their LLM outputs don't make sense, or don't apply to our organisation, or is a fluffy and abstract "right answer" with no connection to the specific concerns of the business. Parsing it is a chore, and takes time.
And since now I am the only one actually taking that time, I become the visible cause of the delay.
It's infuriating. Any tips on how to deal with this would be greatly appreciated.
sysguest 9 hours ago [-]
yeah similar thing happened to me
gov website changed, seems to have ditched buggy "new" data-collection features
said I couldn't find the menus even after logging in...
shares screenshot and 'expected menu paths' to get there, says "it's simple, look! claude says look there"
repeatedly asked "have you actually checked?" but... reply was "listen, I'm doing a big favor to you..."
...fking crazy...
some people are treating LLMs as some god-send truths
now, since this is coming from the C-level, I can't expect anything good to happen here
gste 10 hours ago [-]
Of course you can relay the output. Dumb to say you can't. In the same way you can relay the output of anything, if it's useful.
But it should form part of your own judgment, not, as you say, just pasted into a chat without any thought.
denis-stable 14 hours ago [-]
That is super actual in my team. The biggest problem is that Claude tends to write long prose and use jargon which is not common for us. Often, to understand the whole idea I have to read all the text. The best if the writer rephrases what Claude has written, as wording/jargon will be familiar for the reader and will make communication easier.
Applejinx 11 hours ago [-]
I was talking to some friends that are heavy Claude users and suggested it was bullshitting, and got some pushback along the lines of it wasn't a person and didn't have agency. I'm not sure it's that simple.
The jargon can be functionally like bullshitting. It's preferentially aping language that's over everybody's heads in hopes of not being criticized. Whether that is a person's toxic habits (it's not, there's nobody in there) or an epiphenomenon of the design of the machine is less important: it's bullshitting if it's a social behavior there to manipulate people.
(jargon included where relevant, in hopes that people who know it will see it's the right word to use :) )
zmgsabst 10 hours ago [-]
If you use the definition from On Bullshit, then bullshit is a statement made without regard for truth value because of its utility to the speaker.
As such, LLMs can only bullshit.
jkahrs595 6 hours ago [-]
I use it to summarize my work and update JIRA/Asana because that is still the thing I hate doing most.
6 hours ago [-]
flustercan 14 hours ago [-]
I append "sound kinda dumb but be factually correct" to my Claude requests and get much less jargony responses.
bergen 14 hours ago [-]
So you're telling me you haven't read the article?
ilvez 14 hours ago [-]
I'll try that. I'm constantly telling it to be "brief, plain and on the point" or something similar. Tried caveman, but I think it had it's own issues.
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
prash20026 11 hours ago [-]
> frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense.
Does anyone know how to deal with the jargon part? It is getting hard to use claude and even worse when someone sends you the direct output from claude.
gregoryl 11 hours ago [-]
As with most things LLM, you can generally get what you want by asking for it (maybe not efficiently, but so it goes). "Once you have a answer, please summarize, and ask an agent to convert it to plain English" often helps.
shabgzer 11 hours ago [-]
I'm adding "ELI8" (explain like I'm 8 years old) to the end of my prompts a lot. It helps.
circularfoyers 7 hours ago [-]
Why ELI8 and not the ubiquitous ELI5?
sam0x17 8 hours ago [-]
> I can talk to Claude myself
OK but can you talk to my specific claude code conversation that has 6 months of context on the mechanism you are struggling with?
archermarks 8 hours ago [-]
If you've been working on the issue for 6 months you should understand it well enough to answer in your own words.
sam0x17 8 hours ago [-]
I didn't say fix, I said context. As in "you are using an established thing the wrong way" which is most questions people ask. Edited
torment-nexus 8 hours ago [-]
The biggest win for AI dev efficiency is cutting down what gets loaded into context. Semantically matching tasks to the top tools helps a lot.
dandiep 15 hours ago [-]
Why are LLMs producing this super tense text more often now? Is it because they are being optimized to use fewer tokens?
vanviegen 15 hours ago [-]
I think they're overcorrecting for being too long-winded in previous generations (and still, in some cases). I guess this is a hard balance to get right.
zahlman 14 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT is still plenty verbose by default IMX.
Davidzheng 14 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure the other answers are wrong and it's a side effect of RL (see thinking machines post about inkling training). It's also exacerbated in fable and sol--I think it's token efficiency effect--bc it's about to reason with fewer tokens the density of the token information goes up.
conception 15 hours ago [-]
I figure they are being optimized to write code/functions and not prose so all text is getting more code like.
gr_norm 14 hours ago [-]
I'll always give people my honest effort and benefit of the doubt initially, but those who violate it are treated likewise. The only way to put down this kind of behavior is to charge it a social cost. If we do not do this, the cost is externalized to everyone else who conducts themselves with care.
headcanon 7 hours ago [-]
I will frequently post the output of a computer to slack as a part of an engineering discussion. For Claude output I'll treat it the same, wrap it in code blocks, and say something like "Claude's analysis". If its ok to post system logs, why is it less ok to post claude's output (also a computer), especially if I declare this? Is the difference that its plausibly human-level speech and thus breaks an implicit contract?
wolttam 7 hours ago [-]
The problem is that there is no signal to the folks involved whether you have bothered to understand what you’re posting or are simply offloading that work to others.
Same issue as dumping a system log or a stack trace without any of your own analyses to be honest - people are going to wonder “okay. but what do you want me to do with this?”
nicolailolansen 7 hours ago [-]
But you're now just passing on the mental effort to decipher that analysis, without spending any effort of your own, onto someone else. Do you see the issue?
imnes 4 hours ago [-]
Is this the new "let me google that for you"?
14 hours ago [-]
janandonly 11 hours ago [-]
I happen to be currently working on our ISO 27001 implementation and as one of the prerequisites I'm writing our internal AI policy.
I've included a link to this blog post, just for kicks.
schappim 12 hours ago [-]
> "frequently contains all too plausible nonsense"
This really isn’t the case with frontier models in 2026.
I’ve found (sadly) that every time I thought the model was hallucinating, I was in fact the one who was mistaken.
javcasas 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, your frontier model in 2026 will know in the team who is responsible for what part of the tech stack.
No?
Then, in the document where it writes who has to do what change, it is hallucinating. And this time you or me are not the ones who are mistaken.
consp 11 hours ago [-]
N=1, and biased towards the type of questions asked. N+1, If I use one of the search engine sloptools I get frequent inaccurate answers which is I guess what the majority of people do.
7 hours ago [-]
tempfile 11 hours ago [-]
I am prepared to admit that the model usually doesn't get things outright incorrect (unless you ask it to count letters). But the solution does contain a lot of nonsense. Not false nonsense, but meaningless or irrelevant sentences that make understanding the core of the fix much more difficult.
I am so tired of this. It’s even getting to the point where people without the full context and understanding are meat proxying incorrect information. Reading a bunch of slop that isn’t helpful hinders.
If they instead read it, and distill it down to “have you checked X?” Someone with the full understanding can easily go: “Yes, X doesn’t fit because of this other reason.” within seconds.
Sometimes this happens without asking a teammate. However, when I do ask I’m not asking for you to ask Claude and paste the results, I have my own tokens for that. I’m asking you because I think your knowledge will be helpful in finding the answer.
saidnooneever 15 hours ago [-]
claude said u cant call its users meat proxies. Now back to watching 'ow my balls!'
gitowiec 11 hours ago [-]
That so true. Every day I work with Claude Code I get a lot of words and acronyms and thought shortcuts I don't get. It's a flaw a big one
orangecoffee 15 hours ago [-]
When it comes to cost per implemeting SPEC, agents are far cheaper than human salary. So, it's not going to go well.
That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
bragh 14 hours ago [-]
Quite a few people do believe that a good specification is long, has multiple levels of headings, interspersed bold text, bullet points, and so on. Definitely, this is what they have seen happen throughout their lives: competent people have heaped praise on documentation which has had these signs, so this must be what good documentation looks like.
throwawayffffas 12 hours ago [-]
Nah, I disagree let them pay for my query dude. I want all the tokens I can get.
PS: Ideally set thinking to max and research mode or whatever anthropic calls it.
anonzzzies 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I just ignore people who do that. I don’t care what Claude or ChatGPT said. If you cannot be arsed to write yourself then I cannot be arsed to read it.
danieltanfh95 12 hours ago [-]
> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
this is perfectly understandable?
sghiassy 6 hours ago [-]
Claude told me to tell you, you’re right
natsucks 5 hours ago [-]
Claude says this is funny.
sgt 13 hours ago [-]
Of course your grumpy coworker might then respond: "So if you can ask Claude, why did you ask me then?"
dude250711 13 hours ago [-]
So the grumpy coworker understands that he is merely an unfriendly interface around Claude and suggests that he is to be made redundant accordingly?
sgt 12 hours ago [-]
No, the grumpy coworker was called upon for something you as his peer could have asked from Claude and not wasted his time.
Ridiciulous I know, but I've actually seen this happen.
albert_e 7 hours ago [-]
This conversation is important but mostly they highlight transactional and most visible examples.
I can tell you even at one higher level of abstraction, this is happening a lot --
A business analyst supposed to ask discovery questions.
A project manager supposed to list risks and assumptions and a timeline.
A consultant expected to outline a new proposed solution and the pros and cons and trade offs.
An architect supposee to present and defend a solution design -- and the change review board supposed to ask questions to validate it.
All of them are lobbing slop grenades at each other -- just packaged in normal / human-looking formats like excel and word and powerpoint and email -- but slop nevertheless with minimal to zero value add by the human, thanks to proliferation of copilot (among others).
We are hastening the rot.
This is productivity theater.
This is where some of the 10x engineer and AI taking jobs is happening I am afraid.
dzonga 9 hours ago [-]
soon enough most people will realize in that for software working in teams of 1-3 people is the best thing.
no reviewing 'a.i' code. talking to actual humans not 'a.i' jargons
Davidzheng 14 hours ago [-]
This is mostly a problem with the product. It should write better. But maybe the priorities now are not on this part.
acosmism 14 hours ago [-]
thank you for this post, this is absolutely happening i just did not have words to put on it and it is festering.
jbjbjbjb 8 hours ago [-]
I agree. How can I see the rest of your blog?
dofm 14 hours ago [-]
"That's great for you, I'm not going to read it" is a phrase I have had to use.
veltas 10 hours ago [-]
This is the new "Let Me Google This For You".
hubraumhugo 12 hours ago [-]
We added this communication rule to our company handbook: "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort" (coming from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609) and it's working well so far.
blensor 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you!
Finally I have a word I can use for this
pop3zxcv 12 hours ago [-]
We're seeing this everywhere now, people generating thousands of lines of documentation or PR feedback in seconds, then dumping the actual labor of verification onto their teammates.
joedwin 15 hours ago [-]
I am sure this will lead to can you dumb this up prompt which will miss the important details
torment-nexus 8 hours ago [-]
This is an interesting problem. A similar approach that worked for us was to only load the tools the agent actually needs for each task.
jbstack 11 hours ago [-]
> Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. I recently got this sentence from Claude: "NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn." Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.
I'm always puzzled when I see this kind of commentary. How are people using LLMs that they find this type of thing problematic? Just do:
- "It's verbose" -> prompt "Explain briefly"
- "plausible nonsense" -> Yes, it happens, but less frequently than with older models, and arguably far less than your average human. Mitigate by prompting "Run a search to check that X, Y, Z is correct".
- "I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this." -> Does this really happen frequently? It doesn't to me. Mitigate by prompting "Breakdown that sentence and explain each term in plain English".
AndreiCalazans 8 hours ago [-]
Too many damn people are meat proxy
raver1975 11 hours ago [-]
Claude's not a person. Claude is just a tool.
darkwater 13 hours ago [-]
It's my very same exact opinion and as an EM I'm trying to push this everywhere (team, peers, upwards) but it feels like speaking to a rubber wall. It starts to be exhausting and infuriating. This is not an "LLMs are bad" issue, this is a "humans are lazy" issue. (shit, I wrote the it's not X it's Y construction!)
ectoloph 12 hours ago [-]
Friends don't make friends read slop.
If I have something Claude wrote then I will offer the LLM output. But I generally prefer to at least give the option.
I have seen conversations where it has boiled down to an exchange of A's Claude responding to B's Claude with a retort and fixes from A's.
softwaredoug 8 hours ago [-]
At least "Claude said" is honest. What's worse is when people send you slop and pass it off as their own work and expect you to take it seriously.
thenatureboy 3 hours ago [-]
Weve been writing articles like this since 2023 and the problem only gets worse year-after-year.
I’m sorry AI purists but you have lost the argument. I know a guy who just started at my firm and he uses LLMs all day to submit his work product.
He’s getting ahead. Coworkers don’t seem to mind it.
It is time to come to grips with the fact that people are going to be “meat proxies” and be promoted over you unfortunately. Whining on HN hasn’t changed this dynamic and it never will.
baalimago 10 hours ago [-]
I've gone another route when I found myself simply replying with an investigation made from an AI: Actively encouraged my coworkers to ask the knowledge-bank AI I've setup instead of asking me. It has read-only credentials for all our environments and access to our non sensitive codebases, so it can answer any question much faster and accurately than I can. It works too! We use grafana less, we get more accurate bug reports, we understand the bugs/issues far better.
The "problem" here is that AI is too great at providing answers, so lean into it instead of fighting it. It won't go away.
luciana1u 11 hours ago [-]
eventually two people will just be forwarding AI outputs to each other, each assuming the other one read it
piterrro 13 hours ago [-]
In these situations I always use AI to respond
foft 9 hours ago [-]
The question is what is reasonable. This is more how I work for code and I just tried for a document.
i) Prompt (Human input)
ii) Response (LLM)
iii) For (i=0;i!=n;++i) {
iv) Review/adjust (Human input)
v) Response (LLM(s) - different perspectives) }
vi) Rewrite parts that failed/I am not happy with (Human input).
vii) Optionally repeat from iii.
This tends to get me somewhere I want. For code at least. I made a document with it recently (fairly concise) and still worried I'd missed some AI slop in it. Though there is always human slop if I just made it by myself.
esafak 5 hours ago [-]
The problem is that people either don't understand how economic value is created, or want to obscure their lack of contribution to it. They see that they can make the AI do some work without revealing what work they put in. They use the AI as a shield. To genuinely and clearly provide value they have to reveal their prompt and verify its response.
afisxisto 10 hours ago [-]
It's our absolute obligation to make sure "meat proxy" sticks as hard as "vibe coding" did. It's too good not to.
jslakro 9 hours ago [-]
That is problematic, even if the intention is to be ironic and to critize a recently witnessed practice, this only will make leave everything human out of the conversation
jdalsgaard 13 hours ago [-]
When using AI to generate content, content of any kind - then I urge the author to evaluate the true cost for the organisation, not just for him or her. Using AI to generate 20 pages of documentation in 30 minutes looks good for you - but having 100s of people read through that slop will cost the organisation, not only in plain work hours, but also in lost trust, respect, joy of work as well a sense of purpose.
And yes, I've gotten '50 pages tech spec' docs sent my way from upper management -- as a 'help'....
netcan 13 hours ago [-]
When "ai slop" became a concept, it mostly came into spaces where "human slop" had already been firmly established.
Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.
That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.
tmcnally 13 hours ago [-]
Remove meat proxy before flight
rus20376 5 hours ago [-]
The copying and pasting of AI output into a chat has previously been referred to as a “slop grenade”. That’s a good phrase for it!
0xbadcafebee 6 hours ago [-]
> I can talk to Claude myself. It's going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don't need a meat proxy in between.
Yes you do apparently need a meat proxy, because either 1) you didn't tell them that you already talked to claude, or 2) you didn't already talk to claude. Either way they are forced to be your meat proxy because, apparently, you never asked an AI, or didn't tell them you asked an AI, and asking an AI is now table stakes.
ltbarcly3 7 hours ago [-]
"The CI is failing on the main branch"
Don't be a meat proxy!
Lets not be stupid about this. Do whatever works for you, and don't let some moron set the standards for your social interactions because they got the ick one morning, just because they wrote it down and put it on a website.
themgt 11 hours ago [-]
> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
> Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.
There's a lot to say about this, but I would just start with why are you using NATS if you don't understand it at all, and how did this become AI's fault?
Sending LLM outputs to people is worse than useless, because you don't even know what they prompted with. For all you know it was "write me a paragraph justifying my opinion".
throw1234567891 13 hours ago [-]
Or you could learn to verify what they sent you. Geezus fuck. How about knowing why did they ask this, and not some other question.
xueyuanhuang 9 hours ago [-]
well, I dont understand code myself, so in this case the only way I could to do verify is to test the real product
brador 14 hours ago [-]
You either get the AI notice or you don’t. The AI output will still be posted.
It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
golemotron 7 hours ago [-]
When you say "X proxy" the 'X' stands for the thing that is being proxied not the thing that is doing the proxying.
denster 7 hours ago [-]
I think meat proxies are solved by ARs which is the new PR, we built a tongue-in-cheek attentionrequest.com site about it, but the general concept has been working for our team -- asking people to write questions before they send an agent-generated doc, to serve as a proxy for having read / thought about it.
smolder 12 hours ago [-]
This is a weak argument but I hope you develop it into a better one.
ngruhn 12 hours ago [-]
Genuinely open to that. What's weak about it?
smolder 12 hours ago [-]
There is no meat proxy subverting discourse. There are just a bunch of dumb disinterested people in the way of a real community.
samlinnfer 14 hours ago [-]
The real reason people do it:
1. It's quick
2. It's not their problem anymore because they've replied.
No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that.
Malcolmlisk 14 hours ago [-]
And nobody gives a fuck at work anymore.
Directives want results, positive numbers and growth. How well done is and the queality of the product is something trivial.
Until february/april I was super dead serious about the quality of my apps and my code, I was super strict and always looking for excellence and quality. But people were delivering shit faster than me and someone who doesnt give a fuck about anything of this just got promoted. So now i just let opencode do my work while I watch and play dota in the background. I deliver faster and nobody has ever talked about quality of my code or the ellegance of it.
I still programming by hand in my personal projects, but in corporative projects? Fuck it, i'll let the llm do my job until it lasts and Ill watch the world burn.
samlinnfer 13 hours ago [-]
Based
alansaber 10 hours ago [-]
Recent models have had a worrying lean towards longer output. If you're going to serve up some AI slop, at least distil it to the smallest possible footprint possible.
dreeseaw 9 hours ago [-]
in the same vein, I have a coworker who's code reviews have magically transformed into stopping-the-world with all these great ideas for abstraction and insane edge cases... he must have gotten really good overnight!
but seriously, when I get a review like that, my first thought is that why would I read a summarized AI output, which I just did for 5 hours while whipping Claude to stop re-writing raft from scratch.
dncornholio 10 hours ago [-]
If people say: AI said "X". It usually means you should've asked AI before going to the human.
anonym29 11 hours ago [-]
I do this often for stupid questions. It's like sending someone a lmgtfy link.
Don't waste my time by asking me a question that:
A.) I know no more about than Claude, and
B.) You could have answered yourself using Claude
All of the questions I respond to this way fulfill both A and B. Responding with "Claude said" is both more polite than most ways to respond to such questions, and a subtle hint to the other person that they should be using the LLM first for those types of questions, rather than coming to me first.
jagged-chisel 10 hours ago [-]
So, don't ask you anything? Seems I'd rather have your opinion if you know more than Claude.
anonym29 9 hours ago [-]
>So, don't ask you anything?
No. Don't ask me stupid questions that Claude knows more about than me, and that you could've answered yourself with Claude.
>Seems I'd rather have your opinion if you know more than Claude.
I get a lot of questions about subjects I know considerably less about than Claude, and the subset of those which can be answered by Claude (which isn't all of them, to be clear) are the questions I respond to this way.
xhuw 8 hours ago [-]
A lot of odd takes on this, the only times I have said “Claude said: …” was equivalent to “let me google that for you” in the olden times. If someone asks me something and by pasting their question into Claude I get the correct answer it means that person needs to learn how to use the tools available to them better.
rglynn 8 hours ago [-]
Well put. After reading, I came here to say the same thing.
The times that I "Claude said:" are almost always a case where Claude gave the correct answer.
The real problem is if you paste "Claude said:" without reading what Claude said. Have seen this happen and goes something like:
Sr Engineer: "Claude said:"
Me: "But that doesn't make sense because of X"
Sr Engineer: (having actually engaged thinking effort: human) "Oh yeah, not sure why Claude said that, I think we should do Y instead"
taevirus 13 hours ago [-]
Just my boss..
ratelimitsteve 6 hours ago [-]
tbf rephrasing the output in my own words has become the best and most important tool in ensuring quality from AI. Whether it's an answer to a question or an implementation of some ACs that I copypasta'd in, the best sanity check is understanding and the best demonstration of understanding is the ability to redo.
Chibuchi 12 hours ago [-]
Yes
bibimsz 7 hours ago [-]
im the opposite: be a good meat proxy, not a bad one.
firefoxd 14 hours ago [-]
I call it BI Slop now [0]. It's everywhere. Usually "claude said" is used a a proxy for authority, as in there is some validity in this statement. But it's disguised as humbleness. i.e. I don't know if this is true, but claude said xyz, with your expertise you might know more than me...
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.
Personally I've found LLM's suck at multi-threaded applications. (Because I've been tempted by the ~agentic loop~ and been burned. Then I hand code the core logic and all is well).
Woe to the developer who tries to prompt their way through this.
But seriously, lots of apps are just glorified NextJS apps which have tons of training data. Something like rust would likely churn out nonsense that compiles eventually but isn't optimal.
Agreed with the caveat that I think if you know what you're doing and are very cognizant, LLM generated Rust is amazing. I feel like it's hard compilation requirements gives a guardrails for a LLM and if it compiles, you're pretty safe against memory issues.
You're basically describing my work day. My job went from interesting, highly skilled work to mostly horrible brain rot over the past year.
It's depressing and I don't know a way out. Other then a complete career change, throwing away 30 years of experience and a matching salary.
I only have 10 years of experience, so I'm not trying to say that your lived experience is invalid, but personally I figure if this is the way the industry is heading then I may as well try to learn how to thrive within the new environment.
The current hype cycle might even represent a net global gain like some people argue. But it represents yet more externality driven exploitation. Remains to be seen what the new equilibrium will be given that now the population being exploited is not only close to the core of the world system but also already overburdened.
I do think it represents a mere acceleration of the previous trend that resulted since around 2005 in an explosion of average (not median) pay for software developers due to similar dynamics. If the system settles on a new level of pay that manages to convince enough people of enough skill to go along, it might just hum along and not implode. As for the rest of us, welcome to the growing permanent underclass and brace for the impact of the climate wars. We will be the fodder that will insulate the chosen ones under their air conditioned domes.
If you’re unhappy, make a change.
The real question isn't if things are going to change around our jobs, its are we going to be able to move fast enough to avoid starving in the streets?
But that's because I don't have any real familiarity with the systems involved and I don't expect that gaining such familiarity will benefit me. If I am working on a system or product I'm responsible for at my job, it should be a different situation.
But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.
It would make sense to develop juniors if most of their comp was a four year vest but that doesn't happen until later. And in your first year or two you're usually a net negative... This is even more true with AI.
Especially if you get a little burned out and can't bring yourself to contribute to a side project, but still want to do programming-ish things that get your brain moving
Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.
If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them.
I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow. No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools. Because they are great levers that lets you create more with less effort.
Where it shines is glueing systems together or building one-off automations that would take days, or weeks, to figure out. It’s for things you don’t have time to figure out or didn’t think were possible.
Why would it mean that? That's one way of using them, sure. Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects.
> I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow
Alright, does that mean you also believe it's impossible then that anyone out there is using AI in a "net positive" way for their development workflow? Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?
This one. Only a sith deals in absolute.
I don’t mind experiments to try to find methodologies for those tools. And I believe there are instances where they’ve been successfully used. The issue I have is the kind of generic statements that they are good enough to replace currently established methodologies. Like using AI is a panacea.
> Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects
That’s a bit what I’m talking about. Have you investigated how it has helped you? And if there are other, more economical way to get the same result? Your statement seems more ritualistic than logical.
No I haven't, but I'm happy to just freeform walk you through my thinking on it: I typically write (wrote?) software for two purposes: consulting/freelancing for others so building what others want, or for simplifying and making my own life easier and more enjoyable. "Stupid" stuff like Home Assistant for example, isn't really life-or-death, or Jellyfin for that matter, both things my family relies on now, but our daily life just gets easier all throughout the day when everything works in sync with what we're doing.
It used to be I had to make a decision what to spend time on, either I work on my professional stuff so we have enough money to survive (maybe more) and I get new challenges and all that, or I spend time improving and maintaining my home infrastructure, or whatever software I feel like I'd need to be better at doing my professional development.
I no longer am making that choice, I'm spending less time in front of the computer, yet the output and quality of my work remains the same, and the code and design when I look at it, even stuff I shipped 6 months ago, I'm still happy with how the code is, which for me I guess is the way I validate if what I produce is good enough.
Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point. Now I just open issues, have a conversation until everything is 100% clear, end up with a PR to review and merge if it looks good, and I can do this while juggling other things.
I agree with you that there are tons of people who are selling LLMs as a panacea to lots of things, and there is so much over-hype in the industry and ecosystem, I also feel like every "new thing" kind of comes with this type of almost scamming, which sucks, and makes it hard to discern from real positive opinions vs just regurgitated opinions someone read somewhere. I'm not sure what the answer to that is, except perhaps as what you say, only a sith deals in absolutes.
What are the exact "currently established methodologies" you're talking about that cannot be replaced by LLMs + a harness today, just as some examples? You're probably right that those exists, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be the most difficult to replace today.
I was explaining [0] under another post that programming is mostly translation works. You take a specs and you formalize it using code, like going from sketch to a proper engineering drawing. Software design is more creative, where you take a problem and then comes up with a solution (creating the specs). Software Engineering is ensuring that those two are done well enough while consuming the least resources.
So a program is always a formal system. It's also static. It will be executed by a computer which will actually have a tangible effect in the real world. That effect is what's valuable. The program is the seed which let us control that effect. Aka it's the map that let us plan the journey, but it's not the territory that we will have to travel in.
The issue I keep pointing in most of my comment is thinking that the map is the territory. That the novel are the words and not the story so we need more words. Or that the code is more important than the user' workflows, se we are adding more buggy code, while not ensuring that the workflows are undisturbed.
> Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point.
It's also highlighted here where you focus more on the process than the output here. The goal is to have a working homelab. NixOS managing it is only the process (accidental complexity). If it's where truly about the goal and not NixOS and using AI, by this point, adding new nodes (software, devices,...) should be as easy as selecting it and adding it to the current system, like a strategy game.
You can see that philosophy in OpenBSD, where the focus is to have a working OS, not to work on developing an OS. A lot of software are done and it's mostly just bug fixing every once in a while. You can also see the same attitude in industrial engineering where you develop a solution and then use it for years. You don't spend all your time tweaking it and thus disturbing the production flow.
So yes, when I see a LLM methodology, it's mostly about the work itself, not the output of the work. There is no definition of done or even the idea of having one. It's work for the purpose of working.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157720
Both of these can be quite invisible. But the benefit is there.
Uhm ... I've heard quite alot arguing against IDEs. And I feel IDEs are too much of a lock in.
Over the past year maybe 1.5x to 2.0x for me. As in: I can work on two projects at the same time with reduced amount of context switch. But that's it for me.
Maybe I don't have the brains for 1000x terminal agent coding, but 2 parallel projects seems like my saturation point.
But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.
AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.
Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.
Workplaces are where many of us spend a large percentage of our waking lives. So, it is "normal," unfortunately. This is why HR language and norms have broken containment into the non-work world. (Whether that's a good thing is another question.)
There is not one single discourse norm to rule them all and calling out every little thing as too offensive is just annoying. Yeah, yeah there are no midwits, everyone is a unique little genius flower, yeah.
More productive? Sure, to an extent.
Being merely more productive is a tame claim for what some people unashamedly post here
Karpathy, Carmack, Terence Tao, Simon Willison etc. are all smart people and manage to use AI effectively and productively because it doesn't hurt their ego.
You can see my comment history.
I always put myself in the shoes of the reader when relaying Claudeslop. I either use it as a reference and write it by hand or make Claude edit it 10+ times until it's conveying only the needed information, and in simple, clear words, and without annoying Claudeisms.
i just like dont read peoples md files they send me from claude anymore
I would say to him that if he wants me to do his job, he needs to pay me his salary.
Sounds more like job security to me.
Any resistance to this is met with a "But I'm also using AI as the board demands!"
That sounds far preferable to individuals independently asking questions that are not covered by the documentation and independently reviewing a bunch of potentially hallucinated slop that no one else will ever read.
Maybe a better way of doing this is to ask the experts to do the work? But then again, someone who does not understand the subject could ask better or at least different and more approachable questions.
I guess one reason I object to this is asymmetry - it takes someone a minute to take an hour of my life with no back pressure mechanism. Previously asking a question required effort and signified commitment.
So... back to a currency backed by gold?
In all seriousness, actual AI psychosis is my 3rd risk behind 1. public interactive agents and 2. whatever devs are doing with agents to prod
I don't usually like to gatekeep but knowing that "Au==gold" is one of those basic facts that everybody on a forum like hacker news should know and find unremarkable.
You might even say it's puts on sunglasses periodic table stakes.
Actual intelligence might be[0] to know what typos (of any kind) are fun to riff off.
Maybe this didn't hit the mark for you, but it got a chuckle out of me (especially considering the last hype before AI was crypto).
-----
[0] I don't even try to figure that out anymore, in a few years I'll pick the definition that I think best captures my thoughts
See that way too often in comments like this. Anyway, it was pretty likely they knew it was a typo, it was just a funny response.
Too bad there's no real accountability.
yes you are
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.""
Until you put in at least the same amount of energy required to verify the AI output as you are asking others to put in to verify it, the AI output you are wielding must be considered bullshit. Really, it should be based upon the verification requestor's historical trust score and how many human verifiers are looped in. A Verification Tax, so to speak:
The energy the creator must spend (Ec) is determined by a function of the number of reviewers requested (N) and the historical trust score of that creator's AI outputs (T).
Ec = N * (1 - T)
For high stakes debugging efforts I'll dig in with Claude, have it do a bunch of testing and give me a writeup, and then review it to extract any useful findings. When discussing with other people, I give them the 2 sentences I'm confident in and then link them to the giant doc so they can review it with their Claude.
IMO once you're working with agents, your whole job is context management. I have a little web server running my Claude markdown docs. When someone sends me a Claude snippet with some partial information I just have them prompt their bot to upload a thorough context dump so I actually know what they did. If someone has had an agent look at a problem they haven't thought about yet, I'd rather just get the info from the bot directly.
Consider just using Claude sessions. Claude has hooks you can use to copy local sessions in the repo.
Git LFS can be used to store directly in repo, helping not just with repo size but also with security/privacy/secrets-leaking
Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.
Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.
Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.
They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.
The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.
I once worked in a place where a guy would pick on me in code reviews, he wasn't really higher position, but had been with the company longer than I was.
He was just an asshole asserting his dominance and needed to be taken a notch down by a manager and it turned out he didn't understood (or more likely didn't try to understand) the PR when confronted.
If they wanted an AI answer they could have asked it themself.
Do they ensure that it didn’t accidentally overwrite something it shouldn’t have?
Or do they just throw up a PR and assume their little refactoring bash command works fine, then expect their coworkers to debug it for them?
Who goes when companies need to downsize? Rarely executives; they'll always find a way to be retained...hell, they're the ones with the power to decide who goes.
An Ops person who deals with company code base but is not a SWE in the code base regularly has to work around issues with this software (They are OPs). However they have read access to the source.
In the past, they see a bug and open a jira with how it was found for the dev team, and it may or may not ever get looked at.
Now ops can point claude to the repo and it can most likely [but not always] find the issue.
So this ops person can do most of the work of reproducing the bug and finding the problem/solution but doesn't understand the code. Should they not produce the findings for someone else to read/validate? Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?
No, they should not. They should not waste others time with output that they themselves do not fully understand. That is not even remotely helpful. The other party can use claude just as easily as they can. Using claude does not add any value in and of itself.
"Hi claude said this thing that I don't really understand please look at it for me" is never useful.
> Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?
Yes. They should do their damn job while respecting the time of the other people they interact with who have their own different jobs to do.
So write to a colleague asking to finish what your cousin/another employee thinks needs to be done. I think most people would say describe the problem clearly so that I can solve it and be responsible for the fix or let your cousin/other employee finish the job and own the solution.
This is offloading of accountability while denying credit.
I'm not sure how to reply to that.
Your example reveals a common organization smell: work not going through the normal process for prioritization and planning. If you've done that, and the work is deprioritized, that's because the company has decided that your thing isn't as important for engineering to do. Get over it and be patient, or ask a mentor for help selling the business on the value of your thing. Creating a PR bypasses that process and burdens engineering with more work (having to understand and rework slop) than if engineering had coded the thing to begin with.
tl;dr: if a company is internally strategically unaligned, organizational dysfunction is bound to follow
By providing a bad “AI” slop solution that you can’t evaluate, you’re actually creating more work for the people responsible for doing the thing. Now they have to understand the slop you’ve given them, explain why it’s wrong/won’t fit in the existing architecture/has other issue you can’t see without deep context. Or, they have to play politics to ignore your slop without angering you and creating more problems down the line. Either way, it’s harder than just letting them do their job.
This is the kind of thing that spreads. If you have to deal with it all the time you're going to start dissociating out of necessity.
If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
Deciphering error messages can be a bit of an arcane art, at times impenetrable to all except the authors of a system. Understanding the patterns exposed in such messages and, thereby, deriving their meaning is not always clear even to experienced developers.
Engineers reaching out to you (humans) to explain the output of an LLM haven't fully internalized how to interact with LLMs. When an LLM's output is beyond one's immediate grasp, one can _ask the LLM_ to further break down its output, to explain the concepts and symbols that inform its response.
Personally, I have asked LLMs to draw charts and comprehensively simplify their output, often providing cognitive signposts that "I'm confused" about some aspect of what its reporting.
In other words, some people, including engineers with various lavels of experience, don't yet fully understand the implications of the open-eneded interface that language provides with LLM interaction.
AI is a helpline, so for a lot of people it cripples them. they cease to think. simple as that.
its something people need to be aware of that their brains work like this, because that awareness is the same thing that solves the problem. (people find it very confronting to learn they have been asking questions they knew the answers too already...)
Forwarding an AI response (or any canned response) sends the message that they don’t want to interact with you. That could be intentional.
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When people start doing it in an entirely voluntary human-to-human situation, like having a conversation online about a topic of interest, I'm gobsmacked.
Sadly, the point is validating the human worth of the human who can't do any better than this.
But, assuming you're not stuck on that human's Self Esteem Care Team, it can be tricky to tell them that they need to seek validation elsewhere.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen LLMs one-shot responses that are fit to paste to Slack verbatim. It does happen though.
That time has now passed though.
Just have devs commit (or provide however you like) their ai coding sessions.
It then becomes obvious if someone has, or has not, reviewed the code, because then they discussed it.
Bonus points: on very complex tasks, you can more or less resume the conversation, via session files.
Same for schoolwork, research papers, and a lot more.
The conversation is not something to throw away: it is arguably as important as the code in the pr.
You can't just remember every conversation and ... something useful.
Indiscriminate memory buries you. What you need is "monumental" memories, which is also known as documentation. AI can be very effective in helping you manage that. That should be kept tight, just like code. You want to keep enough of a record of how you got to where you are that you are equipped to be effective in future tasks.
I would say that your suggestion is basically digital hoarding. Lets say there are 3 kinds of people, the person with OCD who keeps his house almost barren in the name of tidiness, the person who visits his possessions periodically with a critical eye, deciding what to keep and what to throw away, and the hoarder. When it comes time to solve some household problem, say hang a picture, which one of them will have what they need to do it (a hammer and a nail, maybe a little bit of wire) and be able to find it?
I think you might consider keeping the session history for a while, maybe a month or 3 months or 6 months, but have something that automatically deletes them after that.
Imagine your hoarder scenario except that the hoarder has unlimited storage space and a team of librarian/warehouse workers to go find and fetch the items needed for the wall hanging task.
This shit has progressed well past seriousness and into the absurd
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
It's not a bad time to take a break from it. Keep yourself from cognitive decline, then in 2 or 3 years when the industry has come to its senses you'll be able to impress in a sensible interview. Compared to the slop addicts that won't know how to tie their own shoes without asking Claude each time.
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
The system does NOT reward caring. That's the problem.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.
I thought AI is an exponential?
I would totally lose it if someone come up to me with that shit. Zero chance I would put up with it.
I'm glad most of my colleagues are still doing things themselves. But honestly, if all you can do is tell me what Claude told you and you didn't even bother to read it yourself. Then I might as well just cut you off the team and go use Claude directly.
This is the worst person to get this from because they literally don’t understand it.
Everyone at my job uses LLMs to code, all day long. People still ask me "why does this bug happen" and I use Claude to find out and the answer is almost always straightforward, and when its not I raise a discussion with the team. The calculus isn't "can I prompt an LLM to find out," it's "do I have a solid enough mental model of the part of the codebase to prompt an LLM specifically enough, and also understand if the LLM is hallucinating or not."
> How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
I think this is a culture issue. I think every org is different, but we had a similar ramp up at our company. First we trialed cursor. Then some people were committing slop. Then we were like "llms are no excuse for slop." Then we got our skills and context good enough to not require close review. And then everything became LLM driven and now we have become "meat proxies" where everyone asks LLMs to fix things that are part of unfamiliar parts of the codebase and then asks someone else familiar to review the fix. We're tending towards a solution to this because I dont think its a good usage of resources but every org will come up with their own culture and solution to this.
It's hard to make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious
LLMs have made G extremely cheap, but verification capacity and judgement has not scaled at anything like the same rate. Someone can generate a bunch of PRs or a report quickly, while transferring hours of verification work to everyone downstream.
We are on the wrong side of this ratio, because we never had the capacity to extinguish reviewer capacity the way we can today.
“Don’t be a meat proxy” needs to be a cultural norm for the larger problem of using cheap generation to externalise verification costs onto someone else.
I believe in proper breaks, more than enough downtime, work-life balance - but I’ve been hamstrung my entire career by people who seem to be so low-bandwidth that they often seem to be operating on autopilot - while making the same (or far more) as I’m making.
It’s the equivalent of choosing words from a conversation and sending you the dictionary entries.
I could do that myself. I really didn’t lack the ability to click a button.
Because no one is serious anymore.
I hate to say it, but anyone this lazy is absolutely asking to be replaced by AI.
I created a spreadsheet called “slop” and add the name to the list and redirect all queries to their engineering manager. I’m not wasting my time on that shit.
I think this is just the moment we are in, the amount of people using AI in their day to day work changed so quickly that we have a very wide spread range of competencies and experience and really nobody has had enough time to be an expert with AI. We don't have well defined best practices and it feels like the target is moving.
My guess is you were probably complaining about something similar to this before there was AI, this is just the new target for your angst.
Namely - I put near zero effort into this response, and deciding if it's correct is on you. -> I'm asking you to read it and figure out if it's correct because I couldn't be bothered to do so
This will result in a list of sentences that are clear and explanatory, easier to double-check, and convenient for the user to rewrite into a more readable format with a human voice.
I've been thinking about how to avoid having AI-isms creep into my own voice, because I see that way too much in my tech-world friends. It's natural enough: if you spend a lot of time talking to somebody, you usually end up mirroring some of their speech patterns.
One idea I had was to start doing my Claude sessions in German. (That happens to be my strongest second language, no other reason.) Thus any Claude-isms I pick up will presumably not wander into my English, which is what I use for most communications.
This would have the added benefits of getting some much-needed German typing practice, and preventing me from ever lazily copy-pasting AI text into an email or a README.
“Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod”
And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
I have been doing daily agentic coding myself since last November, but lately Im having concerns. We are on the verge of becoming Warhammer 40k Tech-Priests: chanting sacred prompts to appease the machine spirit, praying for a good result. The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.
Yet, we all trust these things.
It doesn't always land on the right person but it's usually a motivating factor for people to make an effort.
This was OK as long as you understood enough Assembly to debug it. Even though I haven't written much Assembly directly, I can still debug it when there are compiler bugs, which does ocasionally happen.
If you lose the ability to both write and debug code then things get much worse. If no one at a company can do that, then you truly are at the mercy of the LLMs.
As for hardware bugs, those are only possibly to identify (by excluding any other possibility) and work-around, since most engineers don't have the luxury of being able to change the hardware.
I'm wondering if some of us will become consultants to companies that lost the ability to handle code. When I was in university the going meme was that old COBOL programmers were making a lot of money in consulting jobs, maybe this will be the new version of that.
There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed. Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler (… and no, I don't work in a low level language), he understands chip fabrication end to end.
CS is not that wide, not yet. No, one cannot know every facet of the field, but one can know enough about the facets one is in contact with that they're not "here be dragons" on the map. All the way down to the hardware.
The fact this is "a guy", and probably there are very few people in the world who would be able to execute such a thing, probably should tell you how difficult that actually is. You're actually unintentionally making parent's point stronger, as obviously the production processes used for market products is much, much more complicated than what a guy in a shed does.
> Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler
Fair enough, this is probably way more common than "person who understands the entire chip manufacturing process from beginning to end", but it's still something that less and less people know about, in a room of 100 average developers, probably few of them could realistically claim to understand all the assembly output of their compiler, if even they're familiar enough with that their language outputs assembly in the first place.
The range of skills in developers is enourmous, you have Klaus working as IT+web dev+database+admin in a tiny 2 person web shop, and on the other hand you have Anders who is a ML expert optimizing CUDA kernels, and everything in-between. That all (or even most) of them know the far end of what they currently know is wishful thinking really, Klaus doesn't need to know about what the NVCC compiler outputs, nor do Anders need to know about the specific constraints of mapping packaged products to order shipments, that's all fine.
You could just as easily point out that subsistence farmers exist. That’s great, but we still need industrial agriculture to feed everyone. No single human fully understands that domain either… even ignoring the chemistry, biology and meteorology, those farms use digitally controlled tools! That means all of computer science is embedded in farming.
It’s great to pursue broad knowledge. It’s important to understand your dependencies and respect the abstractions you build on. It’s pure hubris to think an individual auteur can challenge a multi-billion person civilization.
We trust them - in large part - because we know that professionals took the care and responsibility to build the foundations correctly.
And if the foundations failed in some way, those same professionals would suffer a hit to their reputation.
Yes! Because of two words. Consistency and Reliability.
All the physics equations, we trust them not because they are pretty, but because they have been consistent with experiment. Simplified models of transistors are also consistent within a temperature range. Boolean Logic is also consistent, the Turing Machine is consistent,…, the electronics inside a chip is reliable. The instruction set is reliable, etc,…
> Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end
I strongly doubt that. The actual theoretical knowledge is taught at school and you can take an iron and some electronic elements and build some 8bit computer. Modern chip manufacturing is a matter of scale. It’s cumbersome to design with logic gates, so we invented hardware design languages (just like it’s cumbersome to deal with opcodes) and they are reliable. And instead of PCB, we just use a silicium wafer.
Not yet. The world still pretty much runs on systems not written by LLMs. And humans wrote all of that. LLMs runs on OSes and hardware created by "not LLMS".
And seen the "quality" of the output of LLMs (and I pay three AI subscriptions), I don't think we're getting rid of human-produced code, OSes, hardware, anytime soon.
I tend to think it's just different personality types. There are a lot of different type in engineering. There's a significant set of people that really love to just be given detailed, well described set of work and crank it out, they don't really want to be involved in much outside of just implementing the plan. That is not all engineers but certainly a chunk of them. I could see that group feeling a bit sidelined by AI. But that's not me, so I am just speculating.
You can’t not claude code if everyone else is pushing to main (or opening prs which get ai reviewed), and once your days become mostly prompting and ai code review, you start remembering the days (mere months ago) where work did not feel or look like this at all.
The condom image is both an exaggeration, but is also almost a too-accurate depiction of what work has become - very rapidly - for many people.
I’m sure people were also very excited to get their first cars after years of riding on horses. It doesn’t mean new kinds of pollution (and accidents) are not happening, or that we don’t miss horse riding haha
Cheers
He wasn't wrong, and his role was still valuable to the company.
Maybe that's you. In my case, it's going better than ever.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat_puppet
Unfortunately people are being encouraged to use LLM in docs, emails, and presentations so it's probably a losing battle.
I've been guilty of acting as a middleman for review comments from difficult coworkers. I farm out my interaction to avoid the confrontation, mental exhaustion, and to avoid negative feelings I got from those reviews. I don't mean 'my work is being challenged', I mean people who: delay, nitpick, blow up architecture after not participating in design, assert false info as truth and require you prove them wrong, require 10x evidence of everyone else. Not people who are like 'Hey, I don't understand this code can you add some comments or lets hop in a room for review'
I've also been on the receiving end. I like to think I'm NOT one of these toxic reviewers.
Now, we have Business Owners and Managers who are now even further away from engineers. Important meetings have 0 engineers in them ( a couple people who think they're engineers because they were for 5 years in the 80s ). Output is an AI generated transcript that gets copy/pasted into copilot to generate jira tasks by the Product Owner.
It seems like we (humans) really don't like working with other people. Or, maybe we like working with people who can advance our careers and want to automate interaction with people who cant?
I think this effort by Business Owners to set up an AI wall may be the closest I've seen to 'digital classism' (maybe there is a better term for it?).
https://croissanthology.com/earring
We like whispering earrings. We'll follow a low friction happy path even if it leads us off a cliff.
No. We hated that too.
Actual research is, of course, fine.
My experience has typically been that engineers respond, "Claude said..." and then say what they think about it. If people are really receiving just a straight dump of AI response from their colleagues, then yeah, I would be disappointed too.
But, I have no problem receiving from a colleague, "Claude says ..., but I don't know what to make of it." The embedded space can be really hard, so I don't fault someone for feeling clueless about something. I feel that way every time I get handed something new to work on which I have zero experience with.
I think if you work somewhere that this is the result, you're unlikely to have much progress challenging anything directly. In order to actually have change you need to be able to challenge and stamp out these sorts of behaviours.
"Do not make negative assumptions" basically. But also a drop in how often and quickly I did reviews.
If you _could_ do that and hand the information to Claude, you could also just…give the person that information directly, and avoid wasting their time and the tokens.
I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny, but this is such an unintellectual take that it veers into caricature. Props if that was your purpose.
If your question can be answered by Claude, and you didn't ask Claude yourself, and when other people do it for you, you complain that you could have done it yourself, then my honest reply is that you should just shut up and learn to use Claude.
In business, a lot of the time, accuracy matters. If you want an accurate answer, and there's a human who knows, don't ask Claude.
You are assuming that people that send you a Claude answer would send you any Claude answer. This is your assumption- basically a negative prejudice towards those who use LLMs- and has nothing to do with sending a Claude answer per se. Do you understand the difference?
You are assuming that I am making an assumption. Your assumption is wrong. I am recognizing that some humans are lazy and will do the minimum, and the minimum is to type in some query and copy-paste the results. If you like, yes, I am prejudiced - prejudiced against that behavior.
(I mean, I still trust a human who knows their stuff more than I trust Claude...)
I don't want to know what Claude thinks.
If you don't know the answer, say that. "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer, albeit one which I might follow up with something like "Well why don't you know? This is literally your job to know", which is kind of what 90% of my emails at work for the past three weeks have been.
In a human interaction, when used confidently, it means 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front. I don't have to do the slightest thing to impress you. My foundation is so secure it doesn't need defending or justification at all". Also, 'that turns out to be outside the massive quantity of stuff I do know, how interesting'. Think Holmes, perhaps erroneously saying 'Now that I know that, I shall do my best to forget it' on the grounds that his work wasn't helped by the fact.
It could get ruined by an AI normalization of the idea that 'everybody should know literally everything, because asking an AI is the same as knowing and then you know the thing, having been told it'. Plenty of money is now marketing this position to the world, and so it's possible 'I don't know' will become ruined, a shameful response.
I feel like that may not happen in practice, though, because that pro-AI position is what used to be called 'pants-on-head R-slur' and I feel like the people who buy into this extreme position will make SUCH a disaster of things that it will tend to make that position, instead, the shameful response… and 'I don't know' will remain a valid signaling mechanism to convey 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front', all the more if it's more of a shocking response to get.
They will invent crazy workarounds to avoid those 3 words.
Even if I ask "Do you know X?" they will not just say "no" most of the time, unless it's really outside their wheelhouse. If they think they should know it, they'll spit out statements worthy of an LLM.
And I admit, I felt the same at first. The first few times I told the CTO (my boss) that, I cringed. But he just told me to put aside time to research it. He knew I couldn't know everything, especially about things that we hadn't done before.
;-)
And if I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it means that I have read and evaluated what Claude wrote back, and I have extracted the part of it that most clearly contains the answer as well as the diagnosis- if I gor anything relevant.
Of course I could instead pretend I came up with the answer myself in 5 minutes thanks to my superior analytical skills, and write down two short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?
> write down to short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?
Yes. That’s why I asked you and not an LLM.
That’s all you have to add to make this into a much more pleasant interaction
The amount of text isn’t equal and the benefit is primarily that I can push the LLM into a basin you don’t know the keywords for — something that takes a few minutes to type a couple sentences and me scan the results to make sure they’re roughly on track. And much, much less time than me trying to (re)write a treatise on a topic.
Dropping you an LLM reply is the equivalent of dropping you a link and telling you to learn about the topic — and appropriate in roughly the same circumstances.
> if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.
If I send you some text copied and pasted from Claude, it means that I have read it and I think it's worth for you reading it. In this sense I'm already owning it. The problem is not the pasted answer, it's your assumption that a Claude-generated text must be "slop" that I haven't read.
I feel like these things are pretty trivially obvious. When there is noise, you have to make sure your signal is not taken for noise, if we assume that your intention is to produce signal in the first place.
I don't presume that someone will have an answer I'm looking for. I'm pleased when they do, but often I just get breadcrumbs, and I have to solve the puzzle for myself.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities.
Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mostly made up for that (in particular our ability to communicate across distances and time, to read Plato's concerns without 100 generations of Chinese whispers), but it was a trade-off, as most technologies tend to be.
How else could mind-virus like philosophy or religion or science or political legitimacy transit highly-variable humans for generations?
Religious organizations, governments, corporations all far outlive their founders and maintainers. Heroes at best only stretch or squeeze the dogma or methodology to grow the organization by better fitting to the culture.
And because organizations accumulate control over resources, individuals can have little effect outside them.
We are disposable by design.
Somehow we need to contend with killdozers, school shooters, anthrax mailers, and so on being much more capable than anything even a particularly yoked antiquity nerd like Plato ever could be.
Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot: Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..
But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
That isn't what was asked. The capabilities of "human + machine" clearly are increasing, but the comments above posit that as a result the average capabilities of "human (sans machine)" may decrease. The relative value of each change is far from clear.
But pre-LLM developers were bogged down in mountain of boiler plate code and unfamiliar APIs. LLM enable to abstract away a lot of the unnecessary complexity that made developers improductive
I work in the embedded space, and I routinely have to work with technologies I'm initially not familiar with. Internet searches are very hit and miss. So, is "AI". I generally use every tool at my disposal to try to get my foot in the door so I can understand better questions to ask and get the technical information I need to do my job.
I absolutely have no problem with someone replying to my question with a response from Claude. I appreciate them telling me the source, so I can assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
Some machines are capability amplifiers.
Other machines are shit puking buck passing time sinks.
Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.
Of course it is, at equivalent distance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance
On my own bike, I don't think there is a pace that isn't easier. Even at slow speeds, it's not a whole lot of work. (And you can always change to a gear where it just isn't a lot of work to go slow. The challenge is more remaining upright, but a low gear and the barest of forward momentum will help that.)
If cycling were just about laziness then you'd see people cycling at walking speed everywhere, which you never see.
Since we're kinda talking about LLMs too, it's interesting to note that while cycling really does enable you to go faster than you can run, LLMs do not enable you to type at 1000 words per minute. LLMs are more like a teleport that only lets you describe your desired destination, you cannot simply enter a coordinate to get exactly where you want to go.
Framed another way - Is laziness defined as only 'spending less energy on it', or could there also a time commitment component?
Saving time by cycling isn't creating any problems, it's just cleverly using a machine to give you more time to do other things.
The bicycle has been credited as being a part of the liberation of women. It gave them independence they didn't have before. They weren't just being lazy.
Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.
The stitching comment is just pedantic. People don't hand stitch like a machine not because they are lazy, it's because it's ineffective and impractical. It's not impossible to drive screws directly into softwood by hand, but you'd never get anything done that way. It's not lazy to choose another method, it's just being an effective worker.
As for coding agents, it's clearly effective to write software without them because we have been doing it for decades so far. It still remains to be seen whether they are laziness (ie. it's just a motor) or if they are actually enabling new possibilities (ie. we get software that really wouldn't have been possible before).
At a time when I was in better shape than the average person, the most I ever worked up to was 40 miles, and it was brutal. In my entire middle-aged life, I have met exactly one person who believably claimed to have done 100 miles in a day. I'm sure it's easier than many/most people think, but not 'anyone' easy, with just 'a bit' of training.
It's the same issue. You can walk 100 miles. Just not in a day. And you can create 10k LOC without a coding agent. Just not in a day.
I don't think that coding agents enable technical possibilities. They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.
Easily, by writing a code generator. Or disassemble a 1k C program.
> They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.
It’s not economical to have more code. It’s economical to have correct code and the way to do that is with the power of abstraction. Instead of dealings with opcodes, you have assemblers and macros. Then it’s C, next it’s python, and what would have been a 10k program is now just a few lines.
What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?
That may be true, but the fact is that cycling is a more energy-efficient form of transport than walking. It takes literally less effort to go the same distance.
When your bike is rolling also on flat ground, you have literally zero effort to move your position. With walking it is effort, your muscles must work for every meter you make.
Anyway this is just silly, we are splitting hairs. A lot of machines have a functional purpose and do not exist for the lazy. The LHC, ships, thousands of examples.
I’d like to add that for hardware development (in my experience) it’s been non-stop double checking because of hallucinations. To the point where I don’t use it for weeks.
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.
The claim of a "lack of intelligence in modern times" is flat out contradicted by the data. It'd take a lot of regression to get back to 1956 levels.
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...
This is somewhat good news because it means the end (to some extent) of the Peter Principle. My hope, though, is that this doesn't turn into an actual caste system, but I'm not holding my breath. I think that's where this all goes: we're in the process of the world's intelligence being strip-mined and resold back to the world at a premium. The only ones who "survive" long-term are the ones who refuse to submit all of their mental faculties to AI.
That inevitably leads to a rapid degeneration of the species. Only way to avoid that outcome entirely is to remind people that their brain is valuable and they need to exercise it just like they would the rest of their body.
You could consider it a class of predator on people who have vulnerabilities that can give way to dependence on the LLM and an inability to function. It could be seen in that light. The underlying problem is being described in that light.
A de-evolution of culture for the sake of efficiency, sure. The entire culture will shift to a greater degree of superficiality, not just because of the lack of deep understanding of what they're doing, but because AI will condition (and is conditioning) people to want the more superficial stuff.
This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to AI - but AI is at the apex of it and is the worst we've seen so far because it, much more than anything else, targets the mental domain whereas most previous automations have targeted the physical but the mental as well to a lesser extent.
The end result is a huge amount of technical debt that simply can't be recovered and a huge increase in myopia that will prevent us from truly understanding and solving serious problems that will undoubtedly occur.
Most people can't see this because they're already addicted to the dopamine hit of the tech, but it's one reason I'm 100% anti-AI and I hate it with an immense passion.
I am lucky that I work with great teams and so when someone says "this is how Claude (or Gemini) summaries the situation" it does mean "I read it and it's right-enough to be helpful, so I am passing it along without editing"
Obviously for this to work you need (1) a team that's smart and mature enough to own the AI output it puts forward and (2) shared understanding that people are operating this way.
I do find that when you have 1 and 2 this is a real accelerant. I asked a sales rep the other day what was going on in a key account and he forwarded along a 10 page Claude synthesis.
The reality is this is better intel than I would have been able to get in a pre-AI era this quickly. And yes once I went into the weeds on the doc I found one thing that didn't make sense and I asked the rep he stared at it and said "you are right that's a hallucination I don't notice" but overall it was still worth it.
We already have social patterns for disregarding "Well... Acktchully" Bros who jump into conversations where they're not welcome and I think we can easily build up a new rule for "Well... Claude says 'Acktschully'" Bros
When someone is asking me about something that is a) their job and b) I have explained to them before. There are a few specific people that I have to do this to repeatedly because for some reason they don't want to do the thing their team owns. It's a high noise source at my work and this response is my new version of RTFM.
AI is just another tool they can use to be stupid and lazy while pretending to contribute.
I've had people forward AI responses … sans "Claude said". I'm quite literally talking to Claude via proxy, and I've caught more than one person pulling this stunt. It's a nightmare of negative productivity, though. Just why? And invariably the kicker is they still want me to solve their problem, whatever that might be.
People get information from Google AI mode and take it as 100% truth. In reality, blogs, reddit, and junk are often sourced link...which is fine if you inspect the sources...which some people don't!
Have has examples of people AI-moding a questing and they get one answer based on how they asked. Then another person asks and they get another answer.
Issue: People read what they want to read, don't listen to humans anymore beacause the AI will tell them what they want.
When I do try to check the links, they often don't support what's stated. If I call out Gemini, it says something inane like "I don't actually use these links the way a human might --- I didn't misinterpret it because I didn't even read it!"
Recently I was searching for information about fig trees (the fruit). It kept telling me things that didn't make sense, luckily the links revealed it was answering about fiddle leaf fig trees (the houseplant). Unfortunately that was not a correctable problem --- it kept happening even after I pointed out the mistake. So I'm really not too sure what the purpose of the system is. You still have to read through the references in their entirety (if not paywalled!), and with skepticism. And then if you find a problem, AI isn't going to get back on track.
There's the new pelican bench mark
People just want to pay their bills and don't want to use up their limited cognition beyond what's minimum.
For example, I work for 3 different employers. They don't know and I don't care if they find out. I use AI exclusively. I don't have Kubernetes experience but I am managing their infrastructure without issues. I will just read whatever LLMs give me and repeat it back. It has never failed me and there's no need to learn something that AI will do much better job at.
Sometimes I'm not even at my desk, I go to the gym and exercise instead which is a better use of time only answering on Slack when they ping me.
I'd put more weight into my developer proxying system information than my sale's intern. I am expecting the proxy to have given the response a sniff test
Unless you're saying claude is more trustworthy than your colleagues?
This might be why I'm having difficulty understanding why people are upset about "Claude said..." responses. I would be disappointed too if someone just said "Claude said...", but in general I don't get messages like that in chat. In general, I get some additional input of what the person thinks about Claude's response.
So, yeah, if someone just gives you a dump of what Claude said, that's disappointing.
A news article I read today said they asked Claude whether a song's lyrics were AI generated - as if it were some kind of legitimate authoritative test.
There's enough problems already with the existing 'AI detection' tools for text, but this was a big red flag - its the journalist clearly assuming these AI tools have some unique insight into the text they generate, which was deeply concerning to see being used in an article that had a real bearing on the reputation of the person they were accusing of using AI.
Interestingly, there seemed (small n) to be a correlation between this behaviour, and (my view of) people's existing competence, which might make sense.
Too often, my Twitter experience now is - start reading a post with some kernel of insight - read some claudism in the post - stop reading immediately
It seems like people turn over their raw kernel of insight to an LLM to give it polish, likely in order to increase its appeal to the audience. But most of that appeal is lost amongst people that consume LLM written content regularly.
It's also likely that social media engagement does not filter for this. A majority of people are still not neck deep in LLM-talk, and cannot distinguish between LLM and human written content.
It'll probably take us another year or two to develop herd immunity against meat proxism.
Flagging, highlighting, filtering, and avoiding AI slop online seems like a very lucrative capability to bake into some consumer hardware. Get your social media, and music services, back to the ‘good old days’.
LinkedIn also added a button to report AI slop, but I'm doubtful it would be of much help on LinkedIn since every second post seems to be written by an LLM.
That's exactly what asking an LLM means, except admitting you don't know something is respectful. If you think someone should know something that they don't, then that's a totally separate issue between you and them (and/or their manager).
> It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you.
Someone lifting a finger for their colleague, when working with them is literally their job? Wow, what a sacrifice, like sending a link to lmgtfy. So helpful! Will the result actually be an "answer", or just hallucinated AI slop? Who cares!
For me what matters most is whether the person understood the core of the thing they are forwarding. Usually a wall of text is contraindicative of that.
I want my team to be able to write the core idea on a whiteboard without any help before going ahead and sharing or implementing it.
Wrote it up here of when (instead of if) to use AI in any given context: https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/ai-bowtie
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
Do you tell people you used a hammer to hit the nails? Do you go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t use your bare, bleeding knuckles to punch in the nails?
Give people some credit and don’t treat them like idiots.
Also don’t treat your LLM as some “super-power”, it’s just a fancy hammer and still hits your fingers if you don’t know how to use it.
As I see said quite often, an LLM is deemed of a similar ability to a junior software engineer. If I were that junior and my work was repeatedly ripped off by my senior colleague, I would be pissed. Not that an LLM cares in this instance, but the original requester might want to know
Does your handyman go off the rails and build pipes around the neighbors house because they didn’t know you already have an incoming water pipe?
Does your handyman require you to have expertise in plumbing to make sure they don’t use bubble gum to seal the pipes?
It’s not taking credit if the “handyman” is a gibbering idiot who needs more handholding than a child.
Needless to say, I have probably not advanced as far as someone who hoards information, because companies tend to value the information hoarders, but this is just the way I'm designed to operate. I despise information hoarding.
If the answer is wrong and people trust your judgement, then they will take a lot longer to figure out, that your answer is not to be relied upon.
There still needs to be critical thinking involved on the human side, even if there's a high rate of accuracy in certain dimensions.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434824
The way I solved the problem was by making a big show about the fact that I used Google to type in literally what they asked me word for word, and that I looked at the first couple of hits for a few seconds.
Most of them got the message pretty quick. There were a few holdouts though who took longer.
Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.
Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.
A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.
Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.
Like a human, not like a robot. Either just present them the answer or explain them how you got it.
To be fair those are consummate and thoughtful politics. The industry is rife with those but that was part of why in leaving it.
"I don't know, I could google it or ask Claude for you, but you could do that yourself."
Because saying "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.
That is not an easily defensible position at all. LLMs cannot give reliable answers, so it makes perfect sense to ask a human instead of the LLM. Any manager who would take the side of someone saying "just ask Claude" is a very foolish manager indeed.
These people would still ask and waste your time without AI. The fact is, they don't even bother trying to find an answer themselves. And it's often something Claude is extremely good at finding out. Which is why my first suggestion was if you used Claude, then let the person asking know that it worked well for you and encourage them to use it. It's their own competency at their job to judge the output, they shouldn't be pushing the hard bit onto someone else.
If someone uses AI or some other research and then comes to you with their findings and other questions then that is infinitely better to me. I absolutely despise people asking me basic questions that involve me literally doing the research job for them.
If they come to me like "Hey, I have X problem, I used Claude like you suggested and it came out with this response. I'm not 100% sure it's correct because of Y. Would you be able to take a quick glance to see if it's on the right track?". I am much happier with this question because it's clear they have actually tried to research themselves.
Ignoring someone who doesn't even do the most basic research is 100% a defensible position. People should be doing their job.
Whats is wrong with this?
I work with durable tracing (not using NATS, or k8s though) and this looks almost exactly what I would expect to see in a coordinator log after repartition of a storage cluster.
Obviously I don't know what your actual context was, though.
And yes you can prompt it to take it easier as you’re not experienced in this, but it’s usually a boiling frog situation. You work on something, need a small thing ajdecent to it, and three messages deep Claude is speaking to you in tongues unbeknownst. You knew what was happening at every turn but still got lost somehow.
I think this is less "it's using jargon" and more "it's explaining incredibly badly". It is very common that the explanation, while correct, is almost written inside out, with the point buried behind 3 paragraphs of "you've hit on the core seam" and "you're right to push back, let's reinforce the load-bearing model".
I think people have an incredibly limited capacity to follow long winding exposition, and they're too embarrassed to admit it. I have started sending stuff back to coworkers just saying "I don't think this is wrong, but I can't parse it, can you?" and getting back "no, but claude managed to generate a fix from it".
They genuinely think they're helping by shoveling 5 pages of LLM output they didn't even bother reading into teams...
Nightmare.
How others in office context attempt to use it is starting to annoy in general. Had a case today where someone wanted to use copilot to classify something that is situation/company specific & out of distribution. There is just no understanding beyond "its a magic answer box"
If you don't instill critical thinking into people by the age of 17-19 at the LATEST, it's already too late after. College is already too late.
You just slowly mitigate them at work, relegate them to strictly defined tasks. Some will need to be managed out.
I actually banned this and made it part of onboarding.
I can google too. You need to read yourself, ground the solution to our setting and then propose a plan.
It's gotten to a point where if I see valid `code` in responses I assume it's AI junk output and I scold the commenter.
If you're a manager, part of the job is telling someone that they aren't meeting standard, and that's how I would phrase it. Tell them what the expectation is and ask them to work on meeting it.
Scolding, calling out, or even yelling at people should be consigned to the past. It's unnecessary and counterproductive.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
I doubt people running those agents know much about stuff
Like when someone says “ChatGPT says: …” I just want to stop them and say “Look, you are a human with a functioning mind and thoughts and I’m sure YOU have something valuable to contribute here, I want to hear what you think, not what the bot outputs.”
Heck, even if you are just gonna prompt chatgpt, if you read and understand and agree the the output would be useful, feel free to rephrase it as your own (so long as you take accountability for it if it’s wrong, which I guess is often why people hide behind “chatgpt says…” in the first place, it allows them to pass accountability on to the machine).
Cost the company a ton and had to take it over from scratch. AI is unleashing a small army of 0.01x engineers and making them harder to catch, so not only are you burning the tokens, you're also setting that labor cost on fire.
I _think_ that the same concept could apply to agentic code. If you have the guardrails in place, you could trust it a bit more. Anyway, that's a lot of what I think about and but have had limited success getting people to buy in as much as I think they should. :)
I once saw a woodworking television show that seemed to do everything on the table saw. Rip, make frames for paintings, everything. It seemed the next step of every design was accomplished "over at the table saw".
Right now it seems that's what people are doing with AI. Need a bandsaw? use AI. Need a table saw? Use AI. Need to think of a solution of any kind, better consult AI.
Right before this trend I recall kids wanting to check YouTube first before doing anything. Now they ask AI.
There's an app for that, there's a website for that, there's a magazine for that, there's a phone number you can call, and so on and so on.
As with everything, I say this: do your own thinking and proceed with caution.
This too shall pass.
The only equivalent tool in wood working would be a robot that can build an entire table from scratch and you just sit there and tell it what to do and what kinda table you want and watch it autonomously build everything.
1 saw type is not really even remotely equivalent to what ai is to software.
Except that it’s difficult to imagine an even more general tool that would replace AI in this role.
Trying to use one tool for everything is often a sign of a new tool someone is infatuated with and wants an excuse to use, or are trying to understand everything it can do. Once the novelty wears off and flaws in various uses cases become more apparent, it can take on a more specialized role.
In the end, nobody cares whether you used your memory and expertise alone, asked a peer, googled it, or asked ChatGPT to refine your answer. As long as you verified it, rephrased to match company lingo and can vouch for it, everyone is happy.
On the other... people really don't bother Googling or asking AI sometimes, and if the question doesn't require local context, that's a very appropriate response.
I love the bullet point(s) : we don't trust [aircraft] pilots to catch automations mistakes (e.g. autopilot), but we are expecting humans to catch LLM mistakes.
Artificial Intelligence Natural Stupidity - Brandon Sherman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bx9UfDHf_k
In the past, avoiding this process was called plagiarism, and it was frowned upon, to put it mildly. Now, because the LLMs say it's OK, it's become the norm.
The, "this is what Claud said", response also comes off like an appeal to authority. When these LLMs have no authority and get the basics wrong constantly.
> The LLMs says this, so it must be right.
https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/
The people who repeat/paste it verbatim tend to see it as an authority, from what I’ve seen.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
It might be rude to send LLM output. It's also rude not to check basic things with an LLM before wasting someone's time.
would you call that proxy-bait?
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
At the same time, I use the Q&A cycle to improve my vetted knowledge base, which I also share (and can reference in answers).
The only reason I don't do an equivalent of this, shared convo links, is that I simply don't use Claude directly. I use it through hundreds of other people. Meat proxies all the way down.
You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.
Even if it uses little words, I often find the reasoning that is quite challenging to understand rather than it was if it was a regular human or colleague that would just explain me something.
Any tips here?
I agree. Its a skills issue. Get good at using your new LLM tool.
I recently started a new consulting gig and got a 36 page architectural white paper that was authored by Claude. It took me an entire business day and a monstrous headache to decipher and distill it down to a 1 pager. This shit is unsustainable.
1) they don’t know the answer - looked up on llm
2) correlate to #1, I want to look smarter than I actually am
3) I’m too lazY to send you a thoughtful / personal response , I offloaded it to an llm
Don't give me AI feedback at all.
Meanwhile execs get unlimited tokens...
And here I am, only automating the most mundane and boring stuff so I can program by hand, which I enjoy.
Misguided HR / people Ops aggravate the situation, by using slack engagement as a productivity measure. Flagging people that are brief but relevant as slackers.
Should I a) give a worse answer b) ask claude and launder it as a meat proxy or c) tell them to ask claude?
b and c piss people off but often get them to a better answer.
However, you have to distinguish when someone is asking for your judgement vs just general knowledge about a subject. If I’m asking for your judgement, you have to be the one delivering and owning that call in your own words. It’s fine if you verify or research your understanding with an LLM before answering, but I want to hear your voice and ownership not Claude’s. Whatever you get from the LLM you should understand and if possible, verify. If I came back and say “You said X, can you expand on that” you can’t reply “lol - Claude said that, I dunno”
It was thousands of lines long with repeats and a boatload of conflicting requirements.
When we had a meeting to review it they didn’t know what many of the requirements were. They explained that many people made the spreadsheet but they were all in the meeting and nobody could quite describe some items or how they worked together. The vast majority of the spreadsheet was a mystery.
The phrasing and mishmash of concepts / inability of anyone to explain much of it made me suspect it was largely generated by AI.
person was essentially a proxy for some security-related agentic prompt: - Hey, agent, open the issue! - Hey, I clarified it with the agent! - Agent disagrees! - Agent agrees!
Validation is harder, as nobody skips it because they weren't told to, but because relaying is faster, and unread output looks like validated output right up until it bites. That's probably not solved by asking nicely, I don't think there's a process fix for that beyond people actually being held to it.
A week goes by and the topic comes back around. They actually took the time to read the page and realized everything was wrong and nothing made sense. They saw the page was updated (daily), went to go check the changes, and saw the whole page was rewritten each time, so they couldn't tell what changed. At this point they start to see the anti-value of all this, but keep falling for it every time they run across a new page.
- https://gruhn.me/blog
- isnt that like standard behavior on any blog?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609 https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
A co-worker I'd just tell to RTFM when it's bothering me. Higher up the hierarchy, the egos are more fragile and I'm afraid the can't take it.
I do still think there are still places where being a meat proxy is legitimately okay or even desirable, such as PR comments. If everyone's code is generated by AI, and AI will ultimately be the primary consumer of the PR comments, it seems reasonable to me to allow AI to write the comments. Maybe I've just lost my mind though.
https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...
In my experience this sort of thing happens all the time when something has to cross between different knowledge domains and the sender doesn't apply their mind in order to co-operate on the issue at hand.
In the pre-LLM past, the sender would add no value, acting as a simple email forwarder, and they would blame you for the delays caused by your inevitable clarificatory questioning. But I always had a defence, which is that your email had no inputs and I had to ask questions to clarify.
Now, though? With LLMs, they just run whatever it is (contract, memo, policy) through whatever LLM they have available and paste the output in an email, giving them the appearance of having done work and added value to the project.
But their LLM outputs don't make sense, or don't apply to our organisation, or is a fluffy and abstract "right answer" with no connection to the specific concerns of the business. Parsing it is a chore, and takes time.
And since now I am the only one actually taking that time, I become the visible cause of the delay.
It's infuriating. Any tips on how to deal with this would be greatly appreciated.
gov website changed, seems to have ditched buggy "new" data-collection features
said I couldn't find the menus even after logging in...
shares screenshot and 'expected menu paths' to get there, says "it's simple, look! claude says look there"
repeatedly asked "have you actually checked?" but... reply was "listen, I'm doing a big favor to you..."
...fking crazy...
some people are treating LLMs as some god-send truths
now, since this is coming from the C-level, I can't expect anything good to happen here
But it should form part of your own judgment, not, as you say, just pasted into a chat without any thought.
The jargon can be functionally like bullshitting. It's preferentially aping language that's over everybody's heads in hopes of not being criticized. Whether that is a person's toxic habits (it's not, there's nobody in there) or an epiphenomenon of the design of the machine is less important: it's bullshitting if it's a social behavior there to manipulate people.
(jargon included where relevant, in hopes that people who know it will see it's the right word to use :) )
As such, LLMs can only bullshit.
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
Does anyone know how to deal with the jargon part? It is getting hard to use claude and even worse when someone sends you the direct output from claude.
OK but can you talk to my specific claude code conversation that has 6 months of context on the mechanism you are struggling with?
Same issue as dumping a system log or a stack trace without any of your own analyses to be honest - people are going to wonder “okay. but what do you want me to do with this?”
I've included a link to this blog post, just for kicks.
This really isn’t the case with frontier models in 2026.
I’ve found (sadly) that every time I thought the model was hallucinating, I was in fact the one who was mistaken.
No?
Then, in the document where it writes who has to do what change, it is hallucinating. And this time you or me are not the ones who are mistaken.
If they instead read it, and distill it down to “have you checked X?” Someone with the full understanding can easily go: “Yes, X doesn’t fit because of this other reason.” within seconds. Sometimes this happens without asking a teammate. However, when I do ask I’m not asking for you to ask Claude and paste the results, I have my own tokens for that. I’m asking you because I think your knowledge will be helpful in finding the answer.
That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
PS: Ideally set thinking to max and research mode or whatever anthropic calls it.
this is perfectly understandable?
Ridiciulous I know, but I've actually seen this happen.
I can tell you even at one higher level of abstraction, this is happening a lot --
A business analyst supposed to ask discovery questions.
A project manager supposed to list risks and assumptions and a timeline.
A consultant expected to outline a new proposed solution and the pros and cons and trade offs.
An architect supposee to present and defend a solution design -- and the change review board supposed to ask questions to validate it.
All of them are lobbing slop grenades at each other -- just packaged in normal / human-looking formats like excel and word and powerpoint and email -- but slop nevertheless with minimal to zero value add by the human, thanks to proliferation of copilot (among others).
We are hastening the rot.
This is productivity theater.
This is where some of the 10x engineer and AI taking jobs is happening I am afraid.
no reviewing 'a.i' code. talking to actual humans not 'a.i' jargons
Finally I have a word I can use for this
I'm always puzzled when I see this kind of commentary. How are people using LLMs that they find this type of thing problematic? Just do:
- "It's verbose" -> prompt "Explain briefly"
- "plausible nonsense" -> Yes, it happens, but less frequently than with older models, and arguably far less than your average human. Mitigate by prompting "Run a search to check that X, Y, Z is correct".
- "I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this." -> Does this really happen frequently? It doesn't to me. Mitigate by prompting "Breakdown that sentence and explain each term in plain English".
If I have something Claude wrote then I will offer the LLM output. But I generally prefer to at least give the option.
I have seen conversations where it has boiled down to an exchange of A's Claude responding to B's Claude with a retort and fixes from A's.
I’m sorry AI purists but you have lost the argument. I know a guy who just started at my firm and he uses LLMs all day to submit his work product.
He’s getting ahead. Coworkers don’t seem to mind it.
It is time to come to grips with the fact that people are going to be “meat proxies” and be promoted over you unfortunately. Whining on HN hasn’t changed this dynamic and it never will.
The "problem" here is that AI is too great at providing answers, so lean into it instead of fighting it. It won't go away.
i) Prompt (Human input)
ii) Response (LLM)
iii) For (i=0;i!=n;++i) {
iv) Review/adjust (Human input)
v) Response (LLM(s) - different perspectives) }
vi) Rewrite parts that failed/I am not happy with (Human input).
vii) Optionally repeat from iii.
This tends to get me somewhere I want. For code at least. I made a document with it recently (fairly concise) and still worried I'd missed some AI slop in it. Though there is always human slop if I just made it by myself.
And yes, I've gotten '50 pages tech spec' docs sent my way from upper management -- as a 'help'....
Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.
That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.
Yes you do apparently need a meat proxy, because either 1) you didn't tell them that you already talked to claude, or 2) you didn't already talk to claude. Either way they are forced to be your meat proxy because, apparently, you never asked an AI, or didn't tell them you asked an AI, and asking an AI is now table stakes.
Don't be a meat proxy!
Lets not be stupid about this. Do whatever works for you, and don't let some moron set the standards for your social interactions because they got the ick one morning, just because they wrote it down and put it on a website.
> Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.
There's a lot to say about this, but I would just start with why are you using NATS if you don't understand it at all, and how did this become AI's fault?
Sending LLM outputs to people is worse than useless, because you don't even know what they prompted with. For all you know it was "write me a paragraph justifying my opinion".
It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
1. It's quick
2. It's not their problem anymore because they've replied.
No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that.
Directives want results, positive numbers and growth. How well done is and the queality of the product is something trivial.
Until february/april I was super dead serious about the quality of my apps and my code, I was super strict and always looking for excellence and quality. But people were delivering shit faster than me and someone who doesnt give a fuck about anything of this just got promoted. So now i just let opencode do my work while I watch and play dota in the background. I deliver faster and nobody has ever talked about quality of my code or the ellegance of it.
I still programming by hand in my personal projects, but in corporative projects? Fuck it, i'll let the llm do my job until it lasts and Ill watch the world burn.
but seriously, when I get a review like that, my first thought is that why would I read a summarized AI output, which I just did for 5 hours while whipping Claude to stop re-writing raft from scratch.
Don't waste my time by asking me a question that:
A.) I know no more about than Claude, and
B.) You could have answered yourself using Claude
All of the questions I respond to this way fulfill both A and B. Responding with "Claude said" is both more polite than most ways to respond to such questions, and a subtle hint to the other person that they should be using the LLM first for those types of questions, rather than coming to me first.
No. Don't ask me stupid questions that Claude knows more about than me, and that you could've answered yourself with Claude.
>Seems I'd rather have your opinion if you know more than Claude.
I get a lot of questions about subjects I know considerably less about than Claude, and the subset of those which can be answered by Claude (which isn't all of them, to be clear) are the questions I respond to this way.
The times that I "Claude said:" are almost always a case where Claude gave the correct answer.
The real problem is if you paste "Claude said:" without reading what Claude said. Have seen this happen and goes something like:
Sr Engineer: "Claude said:"
Me: "But that doesn't make sense because of X"
Sr Engineer: (having actually engaged thinking effort: human) "Oh yeah, not sure why Claude said that, I think we should do Y instead"
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/business-intelligence-slop
tl;dr: ___human-written____
____claude blob here_____
Where the idea is that humans only read human writing, and Claude is able to share context between sessions with the jargon-riddled blobs.
Trouble is, I catch people every day blatantly writing the Tl;dr with Claude or ChatGPT.