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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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
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
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
“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.”
> 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.
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.
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...)
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...
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
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.
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.
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!)
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".
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”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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?
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 :)"
"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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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?”
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?
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.
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”
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 :) )
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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
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'....
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
while 0:
something like this?I think the worst is when they are skilled.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mweh, I'm not a native English speaker. It's a definitely existing archetype, though, just like "Spießbürger" points at a thing in German.
Is he wrong though?
More cringe than obnoxious, but yeah.
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.
The word “obnoxious” does not carry the connotation of smug superiority that “midwit” does.
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.
Engaging in direct open conflict in a sanitized environment like an office is shooting yourself in the foot. Different norms for different rooms.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Except I am not anti-AI.
You can see my comment history.
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!"
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.
we've been calling it meatware at work.
i just like dont read peoples md files they send me from claude anymore
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.
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
wow. what a nightmare.
Have you tried putting those explanations into your repo?
This sounds like true hell. I am very sorry.
> Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
So... back to a currency backed by gold?
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
All that trickles is not slop.
Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold! Actual Intelligence could grasp this was a simple keytranspose typo...
> 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.
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
> ...
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.
My mistake, I was under the impression Reddit was the place for facetious "funny" comments.
LinkedIn is the place for mid-intellectual condescension with an ellipsis at the end.
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.
AI be used to make reviewing it easy, eh?
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.
>Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
yes you are
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)
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You are absolutely right to push back...
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.
The psychosis is largely coming from the top.
Fish rot from the head, as they say.
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.
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.
I think that’s not an unreasonable expectation. Don’t share raw LLM output with other people.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That's why we have courses and certifications!
Yeah that’s exactly the person I’m talking about.
Those engineers are annoying but I'm so sad about the previously great engineers who are doing this and now contributing slop everywhere.
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.
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.
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.
How can it be a fireable offense when it's actively encouraged and rewarded?
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
I am comparing it with a skilled cousin or another employee, as a thought exercise.
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.
I see no harm with sharing an AI analysis in the ticket; it might save the engineer time.
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.
That would make execs who asked staff to tokenmaxx look even sillier than they already are.
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!"
Asking someone to ask an LLM is peak laziness.
Beyond reverse centaur
“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.”
Ask Claude to generate a few numbers using it and tell you if they are random or not
They may be random, but are they secure?
Just ask Claude if they are secure.
"Is Claude secure?"
Better get a Codex subscription to check!
> 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.
I wonder if there is something like nohello.net but norawllmoutput.net
There is https://noslopgrenade.com/
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.
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.
I want to suggest you read https://www.amazon.com/Advantage-Disadvantage-History-Hacket...
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.
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...)
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...
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
> 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.
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.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
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.
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!)
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.
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
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”
Reading this is nightmare fuel right before I go to bed omg
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.
"Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" - Gwen DeMarco, Galaxy Quest
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.
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.
> 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.
Politicians too apparently. There was this gem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlYa8NV5k-U
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.
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.
well put
> enshittification squared
I thought AI is an exponential?
> 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.
Did they ask Claude to do the job interview too?
>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.
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.
So often the sources listed by an LLM are just reddit posts, so this will be an ouroboros pretty soon.
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.
> "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.
Where I work we call these people “very expensive keyboards”.
If they can't even read a claude response then how are they still employed?
I always tell people that if they are not adding value to the AI output, then that person isn't needed.
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..
> I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous.
It's hard to make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious
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.
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.
> “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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
oh, interesting idea. edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639
Very cool. How have you liked the results of doing this? Any pitfalls so far with this approach?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
A whole new meaning to penetration testing
You guys are using protection?
I am rawdogging my server by letting user report bugs and send feature requests to a sorting bot
Don't do that, you might import a std
Raw_Claude can just go straight in prod.
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.
polsia.com AI slop spelled backwards.
Yeah bro passwordless sudo for claude all the way...
>"what are we even (left) doing"
Maybe that's you. In my case, it's going better than ever.
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
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.
That's a better approach than what I did, and I'll use that going forwards.
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.
Would you be OK with someone looking up the answer on the internet?
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.
I did a similar thing and I got reported to HR.
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.
> 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.
devils advocate; why didnt you ask claude then? stop wasting people's time when you could get your own answers.
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.
Why is it their job to know, but it's not your job to know?
Different roles and specialties? Different work history?
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
And I know fuck all about subsistence farming - something most people's ancestors understood deeply. Different worlds, different requirements.
I didn't expect wall-e to become so close to current reality
The only thing they missed was the invention of ozempic.
Maybe they have it but simply don't use it.
Similar to physical exercise and machines replacing it, I think we're going to see extremes on both ends.
All machines are for laziness.
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.
This is totally wrong.
Some machines are capability amplifiers.
Other machines are shit puking buck passing time sinks.
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.
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking
Of course it is, at equivalent distance.
Depending on speed of course. At some speeds drag will cause significantly more work.
… 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
With the additional detail and the numbers you provided, that seems reasonable. Steepness of hills is definitely relevant, haha.
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.
> 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.
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking
What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?
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).
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
What about exercise machines ?
it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down
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.
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.
You should point out then that "border collies are just intelligent in different ways, too"
To add, less articulate and somewhat overtly anti-intellectual. Why even learn something when you can ask the slot machine?
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.
The benefits are increased productivity, consumer satisfaction, and shareholder profits
IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere
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.
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
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.
The median IQ of successive generations may absolutely be falling
Look up the Flynn effect. You're right in the first paragraph, but wrong about the direction.
The Flynn effect ended several years ago and started reversing.
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.
IQ is a measure that tests how well people can do IQ tests, I don't think it's an objective measure at all.
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.
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)
IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.
Hmm, who does the calibration, and how scientific are they about it? Can we check their work?
I feel like this post unironically proves the point.
i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734
that's a study published in 2023, analyzing data that ended in 2018.
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.
US centric data, absolutely useless. This is just measuring american decline, not civilisation changes.
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.
Hard not to see what you’ve just done here as an analogue of what the article is arguing against
I am the lazy human today, but this one is listing a few references:
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...
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.
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!
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 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.
Only in corporate setting.
We're already seeing it.
Human intelligence evolved without technology, so, no.
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.
> 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.
// 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that it’s even easier to be stupid and lazy now, which encourages more people to do this more often.
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”.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
I appreciate "Claude said...", because it helps me assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"I don't know." is a better answer than "Claude said..."
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Artificial Intelligence Natural Stupidity - Brandon Sherman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bx9UfDHf_k
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.
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’.
Kagi does something like this: https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop
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.
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.
Wrote it up here of when (instead of if) to use AI in any given context: https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/ai-bowtie
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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?
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434824
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
So if you used claude you would preface with "Claude said: "
Sometimes I do that. The problem is that it makes them look bad.
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.
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
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.
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 :)"
> 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.
"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.
I did that the first time. But how often do you want to say that (in a public chat that their supervisors can read)?
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
Yesterday, when I was working with LVGL, using Fable.
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...
But if some people lack the understanding ability to even realise that they lack understanding, how do you tell them?
Nightmare.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
- how come your blog page doesnt show a list of posts?
- https://gruhn.me/blog
- isnt that like standard behavior on any blog?
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.
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)
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.
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?
Unless they're a professional stack exchange responder (not a real job afaik) they probably do a lot besides answer random questions
That isn’t the topic of TFA.
Why would you do that instead of asking them if they checked Claude first?
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.
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.
Yeah, AI is a general purpose technology, on a par with the introduction of the computer itself. Analogies to tools seems inappropriate.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Reminds me of "Appeal to Aithority"
> The LLMs says this, so it must be right.
https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/
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.
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?
> if you know anything about a search
I doubt people running those agents know much about stuff
We desperately need a Let Me Google That For You-style saying to appropriately shame people who do this.
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.
The appropriate response in that case is to tell them what to use, not to use it for them.
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.
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.
I use it to summarize my work and update JIRA/Asana because that is still the thing I hate doing most.
Claude told me to tell you, you’re right
Claude says this is funny.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Well put, this is incredibly becoming annoying. Like has it occured to you i can prompt claude too?
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!
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.
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.
"Writing is nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is." -- Richard Guindon
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).
Thank you for saying this. I’ve been dealing with this at work and it’s incredibly frustrating
If only there had been some kind of artificial assistant to help with incoming noise like that...
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.
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.
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
If I wanted to know what the AI said, I would have asked it myself.
Don't give me AI feedback at all.
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?
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?”
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?
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.
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.
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”
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.
How about being truthful? Say "I think A, but I'm not really an expert, so also try asking your favorite LLM"
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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?
If you've been working on the issue for 6 months you should understand it well enough to answer in your own words.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609 https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
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.
For anyone unfamiliar with the meat reference, here is Terry Bisson's delightful 1991 short-short story, "They're Made out of Meat":
https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...
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
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.
> 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.
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.
I'm adding "ELI8" (explain like I'm 8 years old) to the end of my prompts a lot. It helps.
Why ELI8 and not the ubiquitous ELI5?
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.
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.
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 :) )
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of this post, from a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876441
> "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.
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.
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.
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 append "sound kinda dumb but be factually correct" to my Claude requests and get much less jargony responses.
So you're telling me you haven't read the article?
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.
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.
Why are LLMs producing this super tense text more often now? Is it because they are being optimized to use fewer tokens?
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.
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.
ChatGPT is still plenty verbose by default IMX.
I figure they are being optimized to write code/functions and not prose so all text is getting more code like.
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
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.
I have this set as my slack bio
I agree. How can I see the rest of your blog?
claude said u cant call its users meat proxies. Now back to watching 'ow my balls!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
this is perfectly understandable?
Too many damn people are meat proxy
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.
This is the new "Let Me Google This For You".
Of course your grumpy coworker might then respond: "So if you can ask Claude, why did you ask me then?"
So the grumpy coworker understands that he is merely an unfriendly interface around Claude and suggests that he is to be made redundant accordingly?
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.
"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.
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.
This is mostly a problem with the product. It should write better. But maybe the priorities now are not on this part.
thank you for this post, this is absolutely happening i just did not have words to put on it and it is festering.
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.
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.
> 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".
"That's great for you, I'm not going to read it" is a phrase I have had to use.
Thank you!
Finally I have a word I can use for this
When you say "X proxy" the 'X' stands for the thing that is being proxied not the thing that is doing the proxying.
I am sure this will lead to can you dumb this up prompt which will miss the important details
Claude's not a person. Claude is just a tool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
eventually two people will just be forwarding AI outputs to each other, each assuming the other one read it
It's our absolute obligation to make sure "meat proxy" sticks as hard as "vibe coding" did. It's too good not to.
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
In these situations I always use AI to respond
well, I dont understand code myself, so in this case the only way I could to do verify is to test the real product
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'....
> 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?
im the opposite: be a good meat proxy, not a bad one.
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.
Remove meat proxy before flight
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.
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.
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"
I wrote about this a year ago: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/
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".
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.
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.
This is a weak argument but I hope you develop it into a better one.
Genuinely open to that. What's weak about it?
There is no meat proxy subverting discourse. There are just a bunch of dumb disinterested people in the way of a real community.
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.
If people say: AI said "X". It usually means you should've asked AI before going to the human.
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.
So, don't ask you anything? Seems I'd rather have your opinion if you know more than Claude.
>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.
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.
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.
Based
Just my boss..
Yes
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...
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/business-intelligence-slop
niceee
The policy I set at my org is to put an organically written message at the top of your Claude blob. Something like:
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.
People do this all the time though w "paul graham said" "elon musk said". Why not "Sum Total Avatar of All Human Knowledge Said ..."
Don't spread ignorance like this.