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eddythompson80 3 hours ago [-]
I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?”
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
ffsm8 2 hours ago [-]
At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
prymitive 2 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day.
Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
surgical_fire 3 minutes ago [-]
Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
lelanthran 1 hours ago [-]
> Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
So... back to a currency backed by gold?
Kostchei 27 minutes ago [-]
As an Au stralian I am offended you went with gold psychosis instead of whatever the aussie zeitgeist is cooking up with extra crazy. Our equivalent of "Florida man" is "queensland man" or "western suburbs man"- about half the country at this point. Its cooked.
In all seriousness, actual AI psychosis is my 3rd risk behind 1. public interactive agents and 2. whatever devs are doing with agents to prod
HPsquared 35 minutes ago [-]
All that trickles is not slop.
richrichardsson 1 hours ago [-]
Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold! Actual Intelligence could grasp this was a simple keytranspose typo...
dwedge 49 minutes ago [-]
> ...
See that way too often in comments like this. Anyway, it was pretty likely they knew it was a typo, it was just a funny response.
16 minutes ago [-]
richrichardsson 35 minutes ago [-]
My mistake, I was under the impression Reddit was the place for facetious "funny" comments.
kruffalon 1 hours ago [-]
I disagree...
Actual intelligence might be[0] to know what typos (of any kind) are fun to riff off.
Maybe this didn't hit the mark for you, but it got a chuckle out of me (especially considering the last hype before AI was crypto).
-----
[0] I don't even try to figure that out anymore, in a few years I'll pick the definition that I think best captures my thoughts
pringk02 28 minutes ago [-]
I think you missed that the actual intelligence knew that it was a typo, and that the joke they made riffed on pretending that they did not know.
gjvc 34 minutes ago [-]
>Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
yes you are
jasonkester 2 hours ago [-]
I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense.
Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.
Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.
Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
impulsivepuppet 1 hours ago [-]
what is often overlooked in corporate culture: if you take a step back, two coworkers refusing to cooperate, regardless of the reason, is a typical "corporate kindergarten" scenario for the manager to take care of.
To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.
They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.
The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.
ozim 23 minutes ago [-]
That here.
I once worked in a place where a guy would pick on me in code reviews, he wasn't really higher position, but had been with the company longer than I was.
He was just an asshole asserting his dominance and needed to be taken a notch down by a manager and it turned out he didn't understood (or more likely didn't try to understand) the PR when confronted.
jurgenburgen 2 hours ago [-]
Because engineers don’t decide on hiring and firing. The managers all have KPIs to transform the org into AI-native. This is the kind of behavior that organizations encourage right now.
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
The psychosis is largely coming from the top.
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
It seems that this is largely coming from higher ups who are probably (consciously or not) testing the waters for LLMs being able to replace the people they're dumping the walls of text on. I don't mean in any sort of malicious penny pinching scheme either, but simply people wanting to be able to do things quickly and as close to their own demands as possible, while getting rid of the 'middle man.' It just so happens that as LLMs become ever more capable of delivering on e.g. software tasks, software engineers start to become the middle men.
maccard 2 hours ago [-]
My experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way
eddythompson80 50 minutes ago [-]
I know exactly the persona you’re describing. It’s unfortunate because they have a great learning tool now. I always felt bad for over eager engineers who were not strong. They had the right attitude but I thought lacked the learning resources and perhaps the learning skills others stronger engineers had. Before if you found yourself in an area you don’t understand. Some people make it all the way through school without learning how to learn on their own. Or at least have underdeveloped skills in that area. Once they enter the workforce and no longer have a syllabus that outlines learning plan for a subject, and an instructor and TAs that hand hold them through the learning process, learning becomes really difficult. AI could really solves that. But maybe I misunderstood the original problem.
dwedge 48 minutes ago [-]
Those engineers are annoying but I'm so sad about the previously great engineers who are doing this and now contributing slop everywhere.
dude250711 42 minutes ago [-]
That would make execs who asked staff to tokenmaxx look even sillier than they already are.
asusatom450 30 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
autumnstwilight 2 hours ago [-]
I had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"
mavelikara 39 minutes ago [-]
“I ask Claude only questions to which I don’t know answers to - which there are plenty of. That saves the company money by avoiding frivolous use of tokens.”
EFreethought 11 minutes ago [-]
Asking someone to ask an LLM is peak laziness.
dwedge 47 minutes ago [-]
Ask Claude to generate a few numbers using it and tell you if they are random or not
suslik 2 hours ago [-]
> and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?
If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
eddythompson80 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if there is something like nohello.net but norawllmoutput.net
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
Cthulhu_ 25 minutes ago [-]
At least those (at least the detectable ones) seem to be downvoted en masse, called out, or flagged. They aren't even allowed as per the guidelines[0]:
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Had a senior exec pick up his phone, punch some words into AI, then as-it-was-generating-a-response flip it around and put it in front of me.
This shit has progressed well past seriousness and into the absurd
eddythompson80 2 hours ago [-]
It’s truly unhinged behavior that has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry. You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
lilbigdoot 2 hours ago [-]
Reading this is nightmare fuel right before I go to bed omg
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
I have a friend who works in healthcare and he says patients now regularly pull out their phone and ask him to talk to their chatbot. Anything he says to them, they immediately repeat to ChatGPT and ask if it’s correct.
jdub 6 minutes ago [-]
"Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" - Gwen DeMarco, Galaxy Quest
weatherlite 23 minutes ago [-]
Cos patients often don't understand shit from a 3 minute tired and distracted doctor interaction, it's particulary bad in hospitals. I don't really blame them.
weatherlite 2 hours ago [-]
> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
> You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
The system does NOT reward caring. That's the problem.
BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago [-]
My giddy aunt.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
varjag 2 hours ago [-]
Shitgularity is here, it's just unevenly smeared.
It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.
zombot 26 minutes ago [-]
When was the last time that a newly adopted technology revealed that amount of ... potential for improvement in our fellow humans? AI must have really hit some nerve to generate this massive amount of questionable behavior. Or did I fall prey to bias?
2 hours ago [-]
cryo32 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah have this too.
I created a spreadsheet called “slop” and add the name to the list and redirect all queries to their engineering manager. I’m not wasting my time on that shit.
sparkling 2 hours ago [-]
I will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.
roadbuster 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
maccard 1 hours ago [-]
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
throw310822 1 hours ago [-]
> thanks but I can ask Claude myself
Then do it and don't ask questions.
If I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it's because I took the time to reformulate your question for Claude including all the relevant implicit context, waited for it to go through its reasoning, answered any extra questions it might have posed, corrected it if it went off course, filtered out the hypotheses and picked one that convinced me, if any. Finally I took the most relevant part of it- the one that contains the important justifications- and pasted it back to you with clear attribution.
You can do this yourself if you want, I won't be offended.
FridgeSeal 1 hours ago [-]
This smells an awful like a post-hoc justification of why you can’t answer it yourself.
If you _could_ do that and hand the information to Claude, you could also just…give the person that information directly, and avoid wasting their time and the tokens.
throw310822 57 minutes ago [-]
Uh? I don't understand, are you saying that instead of asking Claude myself I should write a question for other people to do it? Which is by the way only the initial part of the work I described?
Cthulhu_ 23 minutes ago [-]
You can do whatever to get answers to questions, but don't just forward said answers to other people, tell them in your own words / interpretation. Prove that you understand the information you've been given instead of being a meat proxy.
simmerup 52 minutes ago [-]
You can also respond ‘I don’t know’ instead of doing the equivalent of responding with the first page of an ‘I feel lucky’ google search
33 minutes ago [-]
ErroneousBosh 17 minutes ago [-]
If I've asked *you* a question, it's because I want to know what *you* think.
I don't want to know what Claude thinks.
If you don't know the answer, say that. "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer, albeit one which I might follow up with something like "Well why don't you know? This is literally your job to know", which is kind of what 90% of my emails at work for the past three weeks have been.
bigstrat2003 1 hours ago [-]
If someone asked you a question, it's most likely because they value you. Whether it's your skills, your domain knowledge, or something else, people ask you questions because they know you can provide some value. When you give them a Claude response, not only are you being rude, but you're devaluing yourself in the eyes of those around you. They learn that you can't be relied upon any more, and so they stop asking you questions.
hk__2 50 minutes ago [-]
Asking the LLM a question _is_ a skill, just like googling. The problem is not asking a LLM, but pasting the 300-chars response without any context.
simondotau 3 minutes ago [-]
"I've been asked to confirm that our random number generator satisfies section 14 of the Foo-Bar Accord of 2021. I'm fairly certain it does, and that foorandom.c is a good choice. Assuming I'm broadly correct, write one short paragraph that would confidently assuage anyone of concern without raising any new concerns. Cite the specification and link to it. Afterwards, for my benefit, write a short bullet list with any non-trivial reasons I might be wrong."
throw310822 51 minutes ago [-]
If I asked a question to Claude, it's because I couldn't answer it myself, but also, because I used my skills and domain expertise to explain clearly the problem to Claude.
And if I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it means that I have read and evaluated what Claude wrote back, and I have extracted the part of it that most clearly contains the answer as well as the diagnosis- if I gor anything relevant.
Of course I could instead pretend I came up with the answer myself in 5 minutes thanks to my superior analytical skills, and write down two short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?
jagenabler2 26 minutes ago [-]
> hey, I don’t know the answer to your question but I went through Claude and got this response. Let me know if that answers your question otherwise we can dig deeper together
That’s all you have to add to make this into a much more pleasant interaction
neebz 5 minutes ago [-]
This is like pre-LLM, you presenting a problem to the team, and they google and send you the top few links thinking they have found the solution and have done their job.
I actually banned this and made it part of onboarding.
I can google too. You need to read yourself, ground the solution to our setting and then propose a plan.
jpnc 3 hours ago [-]
If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
cm2187 11 minutes ago [-]
It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engineers has gone down.
But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
teaearlgraycold 3 minutes ago [-]
And I know fuck all about subsistence farming - something most people's ancestors understood deeply. Different worlds, different requirements.
usef- 1 hours ago [-]
Similar to physical exercise and machines replacing it, I think we're going to see extremes on both ends.
Yiin 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't expect wall-e to become so close to current reality
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
The only thing they missed was the invention of ozempic.
jayd16 2 hours ago [-]
All machines are for laziness.
globular-toast 1 hours ago [-]
I think you are confusing machines with motors. Many machines do things that simply are not possible without. A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking, but it enables you to go faster than you can run. Menually operated sewing machines produce stitches that would be infeasible by hand.
Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.
deepsummer 13 minutes ago [-]
But you could still arrive if you walk instead of using the bicycle. And I am sure you can do the same stitches by hand, it just takes forever.
Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.
hk__2 49 minutes ago [-]
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking
Of course it is, at equivalent distance.
raincole 31 minutes ago [-]
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking
What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?
cryo32 1 hours ago [-]
This is totally wrong.
Some machines are capability amplifiers.
Other machines are shit puking buck passing time sinks.
4gotunameagain 2 hours ago [-]
What about exercise machines ?
jayd16 2 hours ago [-]
For those too lazy to actually go for a jog or bike or row, etc.
4gotunameagain 2 hours ago [-]
What about the elliptical ?
usef- 1 hours ago [-]
What about it? You might need to do multiple different exercises outside to mimic it
4gotunameagain 47 minutes ago [-]
Which exercise outside mimics that movement while simultaneously being so easy on the joints ?
Anyway this is just silly, we are splitting hairs. A lot of machines have a functional purpose and do not exist for the lazy. The LHC, ships, thousands of examples.
master-lincoln 28 minutes ago [-]
Aren't ships just for people too lazy to swim and the large hadron collider for physicists that are too lazy to hand-accelerate particles and make them collide with 13.6 TeV of energy? /s
f6v 1 hours ago [-]
Human intelligence evolved without technology, so, no.
1 hours ago [-]
64e23275635e 2 hours ago [-]
it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down
c048 2 hours ago [-]
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
wannabe44 2 hours ago [-]
To add, less articulate and somewhat overtly anti-intellectual. Why even learn something when you can ask the slot machine?
drekipus 40 minutes ago [-]
The benefits are increased productivity, consumer satisfaction, and shareholder profits
voidUpdate 2 hours ago [-]
IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere
everfrustrated 55 minutes ago [-]
IQ is a relative measure not an absolute one. 100 IQ in 2026 can be massively different in absolute terms to 100 IQ in 1956.
If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.
vidarh 27 minutes ago [-]
Look up the Flynn effect. You're right in the first paragraph, but wrong about the direction.
voidUpdate 50 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but the comment was about IQ, not absolute intelligence. The median intelligence is, by definition, 100 IQ, so the median IQ cannot be decreasing
debugnik 30 minutes ago [-]
There's always a lag, you calibrate the test based on previous results, not future ones. If intelligence is decreasing I'd expect every IQ test to keep scoring a median lower than 100 unless taken immediately after calibration. Once it stops decreasing they'd converge again.
energy123 1 hours ago [-]
IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.
dinkumthinkum 31 minutes ago [-]
I feel like this post unironically proves the point.
dupontcyborg 2 hours ago [-]
i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?
US centric data, absolutely useless. This is just measuring american decline, not civilisation changes.
vidarh 23 minutes ago [-]
It's also a first time decline afterany decades of steady increases. We have basis for determining causality - it might just be that we've finally maxed out the possible gains from the causes underlying the Flynn effect.
evil-olive 2 hours ago [-]
that's a study published in 2023, analyzing data that ended in 2018.
dofm 2 hours ago [-]
Right but the question was:
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
petesergeant 2 hours ago [-]
Hard not to see what you’ve just done here as an analogue of what the article is arguing against
64e23275635e 2 hours ago [-]
I am the lazy human today, but this one is listing a few references:
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.
Havoc 5 minutes ago [-]
The tricky bit is politely conveying this to people that lets call it don't think about things too deeply.
They genuinely think they're helping by shoveling 5 pages of LLM output they didn't even bother reading into teams...
8by3 2 hours ago [-]
Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.
_0ffh 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, stupid and lazy people will be stupid and lazy.
AI is just another tool they can use to be stupid and lazy while pretending to contribute.
madeofpalk 2 hours ago [-]
The problem is that it’s even easier to be stupid and lazy now, which encourages more people to do this more often.
FridgeSeal 1 hours ago [-]
Management/exec have also decided that this is a desirable form of “stupid and lazy” and are actively encouraging it, and discouraging the “old way”.
thel3l 2 hours ago [-]
Last week, I built a search engine as a side project over electoral data.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
flexagoon 1 hours ago [-]
> if you know anything about a search
I doubt people running those agents know much about stuff
boobsbr 4 minutes ago [-]
If I wanted to know what the AI said, I would have asked it myself.
Don't give me AI feedback at all.
-0_0- 1 hours ago [-]
A related problem is people not understanding where AI is/isn't of use.
A news article I read today said they asked Claude whether a song's lyrics were AI generated - as if it were some kind of legitimate authoritative test.
There's enough problems already with the existing 'AI detection' tools for text, but this was a big red flag - its the journalist clearly assuming these AI tools have some unique insight into the text they generate, which was deeply concerning to see being used in an article that had a real bearing on the reputation of the person they were accusing of using AI.
codingconstable 13 minutes ago [-]
Half of this feels like a communication/empathy problem. "Summarise this for someone without our context" fixes the wall of text, and just asking someone to do that might work.
Validation is harder, as nobody skips it because they weren't told to, but because relaying is faster, and unread output looks like validated output right up until it bites. That's probably not solved by asking nicely, I don't think there's a process fix for that beyond people actually being held to it.
mft_ 55 minutes ago [-]
At a company I work for, I was recently discussing the need for an AI Code of Conduct plus a discussion - as this is exactly the sort of thing that started creeping in as soon as the corporate Claude account went live. In this case, the company isn't in a computer-related area, so this was essentially a 'normie' response to first having Claude available.
Interestingly, there seemed (small n) to be a correlation between this behaviour, and (my view of) people's existing competence, which might make sense.
rishsriv 1 hours ago [-]
This is particularly frustrating on social media, and abases what might be good ideas.
Too often, my Twitter experience now is
- start reading a post with some kernel of insight
- read some claudism in the post
- stop reading immediately
It seems like people turn over their raw kernel of insight to an LLM to give it polish, likely in order to increase its appeal to the audience. But most of that appeal is lost amongst people that consume LLM written content regularly.
It's also likely that social media engagement does not filter for this. A majority of people are still not neck deep in LLM-talk, and cannot distinguish between LLM and human written content.
It'll probably take us another year or two to develop herd immunity against meat proxism.
bonesss 51 minutes ago [-]
I keep waiting for a company to start pushing an “anti-AI AI”, Apple being my most likely speculative candidate.
Flagging, highlighting, filtering, and avoiding AI slop online seems like a very lucrative capability to bake into some consumer hardware. Get your social media, and music services, back to the ‘good old days’.
ollybee 12 minutes ago [-]
Some version of this needs to be hosted on a dedicated domain like nohello.com that I can respond with as needed. I might just do it
rockbruno 53 minutes ago [-]
The problem here is that the paradigm is AI-assisted development, but a LOT of people are treating it as "AI-independent" development instead, a.k.a "just send it to the agent and blindly trust whatever comes out of it", *including* deferring all responsibility / blame to the AI itself which is absolutely ridiculous.
ducktective 44 minutes ago [-]
It's AI-assisted now but on a path to becoming AI-independent in the coming months at least due to the general public perception.
Chibuchi 3 minutes ago [-]
Yes
deepsummer 3 hours ago [-]
In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
jurgenburgen 2 hours ago [-]
> Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
Do you tell people you used a hammer to hit the nails? Do you go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t use your bare, bleeding knuckles to punch in the nails?
Give people some credit and don’t treat them like idiots.
Also don’t treat your LLM as some “super-power”, it’s just a fancy hammer and still hits your fingers if you don’t know how to use it.
marliechiller 52 minutes ago [-]
Is it not more akin to asking a handyman to go and do the work for you? They are the ones wielding the hammer, youve just sent them off to go and do it on your behalf without getting your hands dirty. If you then claim to take credit for it, I can see how that might be misinterpreted.
As I see said quite often, an LLM is deemed of a similar ability to a junior software engineer. If I were that junior and my work was repeatedly ripped off by my senior colleague, I would be pissed. Not that an LLM cares in this instance, but the original requester might want to know
vaylian 1 hours ago [-]
You still need to verify that the answer that Claude gave is not hallucinated. That will also cost you some more time.
If the answer is wrong and people trust your judgement, then they will take a lot longer to figure out, that your answer is not to be relied upon.
deepsummer 39 minutes ago [-]
I usually do so I understand what I am replying, but seriously, the latest Opus and Fable versions get it right more often than I would. The time of AI hallucinations is over, as long as they have the context.
AgentMatt 2 hours ago [-]
That's a very good question that I also don't have an answer to (yet). But I believe part of the reason for that is that were currently still in the middle of this shift, so there's issues of both knowledge about AI and how people relate to it. And of course there's so many different situations here.
Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.
Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.
A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.
Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.
deepsummer 2 hours ago [-]
I am a software engineer. Most of the times, the people asking are from product management or devops. Devops contractors are the most difficult ones. They have access to the code, they have access to Claude. But they don't use it.
ErroneousBosh 8 minutes ago [-]
> Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer?
"I don't know, I could google it or ask Claude for you, but you could do that yourself."
Because saying "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer.
stephbook 2 hours ago [-]
If they continue doing this, delay your responses and keep them short. Don't spend more time on the response than they did on the question.
microtonal 2 hours ago [-]
There are typically middle paths, like pointing where they should look approximately (if you are an expert on a project, you typically have a better idea where to look). And then they can look or point their agents at it, or whatever they prefer.
supriyo-biswas 2 hours ago [-]
In the past "RTFM" or "LGMTFY" have been responses, so why not something like, well, "I'm not aware of the top of my head, you afaik <brief explanation>. Also feel free to ask Claude on the technical details :)"
64e23275635e 2 hours ago [-]
>So how should I answer?
Like a human, not like a robot. Either just present them the answer or explain them how you got it.
Maxious 2 hours ago [-]
So if you used claude you would preface with "Claude said: "
deepsummer 2 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I do that. The problem is that it makes them look bad.
64e23275635e 2 hours ago [-]
In the end it's really just the same thing as with stackoverflow answers. If you knew how to combine certain keywords for an answer you were searching for, then it took you like 5 seconds to find the relevant SO answer for that. Even then people got mad about it 'why can't they just search themselves if it's so easy to find?' - well, maybe it's not that easy and obvious to a lot of people and that will get even worse now
Philip-J-Fry 2 hours ago [-]
"Hey, here's what I found. By the way I used Claude to get this info. It might be worth trying that yourself if you have similar questions, it's quite good at this in my experience. Give it a go"
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
deepsummer 2 hours ago [-]
I did that the first time. But how often do you want to say that (in a public chat that their supervisors can read)?
Philip-J-Fry 2 hours ago [-]
Literally just ignore these people if they don't get the message. Let them complain to their supervisor and hopefully their supervisor will bring up the fact that you asked them to use AI instead. It's an easily defensible position. Some people need to learn the hard way.
Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.
bigstrat2003 56 minutes ago [-]
> Let them complain to their supervisor and hopefully their supervisor will bring up the fact that you asked them to use AI instead. It's an easily defensible position.
That is not an easily defensible position at all. LLMs cannot give reliable answers, so it makes perfect sense to ask a human instead of the LLM. Any manager who would take the side of someone saying "just ask Claude" is a very foolish manager indeed.
bigstrat2003 58 minutes ago [-]
The problem with asking Claude (or any LLM) is that they will get things wrong much more often than a human, while sounding perfectly confident about the information. It's a recipe for disaster unless you're asking it about something where you have enough expertise to be able to sniff out the BS. So if people are asking you a question, that means they figure you're able to answer the question accurately. If you can do that with asking Claude then whatever, but the person asking you probably couldn't do the same. They would certainly get an answer, but they wouldn't be able to have confidence in its accuracy. You're providing value, even if it's not necessarily immediately obvious to you.
deepsummer 34 minutes ago [-]
Have you really used the latest models (say Opus 4.8+ or Fable)? When was the last time they gave a wrong answer to a question about the code base? Half a year ago that could have happened. But not today.
energy123 1 hours ago [-]
Someone should have sent Claude's output, which spotted the trivial bug behind the recent bitcoin heist, to the Coldcard developers.
It might be rude to send LLM output. It's also rude not to check basic things with an LLM before wasting someone's time.
subscribed 42 minutes ago [-]
Of course, you've got this one sensible part right (IMO). But there's other sensible part you seem to have missed: it's also rude to send the LLM output to someone else without reading.
DoDecaHeJon 1 hours ago [-]
This is becoming frustrating, it shows up in conversation with friends and while working. If I have to hear what ai had you do before you called me, I'm charging double right away. Especially when ai is a fantastic teacher if used correctly.
sirlimpsalot 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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
nojs 2 hours ago [-]
The problem is a lot of people ask questions that claude et al can objectively answer way better than me, and they didn’t think to ask.
Should I a) give a worse answer b) ask claude and launder it as a meat proxy or c) tell them to ask claude?
b and c piss people off but often get them to a better answer.
eddythompson80 1 hours ago [-]
In this scenario the answer for me is C. I say “Ask an agent about terms X, Y and Z and it should be able to explain this well for you. Try that and see if it works for you or if you have any follow up questions”
However, you have to distinguish when someone is asking for your judgement vs just general knowledge about a subject. If I’m asking for your judgement, you have to be the one delivering and owning that call in your own words. It’s fine if you verify or research your understanding with an LLM before answering, but I want to hear your voice and ownership not Claude’s. Whatever you get from the LLM you should understand and if possible, verify. If I came back and say “You said X, can you expand on that” you can’t reply “lol - Claude said that, I dunno”
Perz1val 1 hours ago [-]
How about being truthful? Say "I think A, but I'm not really an expert, so also try asking your favorite LLM"
hubraumhugo 6 minutes ago [-]
We added this communication rule to our company handbook: "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort" (coming from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609) and it's working well so far.
AbbeFaria 2 hours ago [-]
I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
p2detar 1 hours ago [-]
Last week a colleague did this to me; pasted to me in chat "Gemini said". I just ignored it and went with talking about the issue on another thread. I like LLMs and I use them every day, but I'm not gonna answer copy&pasted LLM stuff in human to human conversation. Distill it and let me know your thoughts; I don't need to read you LLM output, I can generate that myself.
gjulianm 3 hours ago [-]
I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing or that I don't really understand.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
gatio 2 hours ago [-]
I often use it to simplify & target my responses, and avoid over-sharing technical details.
At the same time, I use the Q&A cycle to improve my vetted knowledge base, which I also share (and can reference in answers).
denis-stable 2 hours ago [-]
That is super actual in my team. The biggest problem is that Claude tends to write long prose and use jargon which is not common for us. Often, to understand the whole idea I have to read all the text. The best if the writer rephrases what Claude has written, as wording/jargon will be familiar for the reader and will make communication easier.
sgt 1 hours ago [-]
Of course your grumpy coworker might then respond: "So if you can ask Claude, why did you ask me then?"
dude250711 35 minutes ago [-]
So the grumpy coworker understands that he is merely an unfriendly interface around Claude and suggests that he is to be made redundant accordingly?
gr_norm 2 hours ago [-]
I'll always give people my honest effort and benefit of the doubt initially, but those who violate it are treated likewise. The only way to put down this kind of behavior is to charge it a social cost. If we do not do this, the cost is externalized to everyone else who conducts themselves with care.
flustercan 2 hours ago [-]
I append "sound kinda dumb but be factually correct" to my Claude requests and get much less jargony responses.
bergen 2 hours ago [-]
So you're telling me you haven't read the article?
ilvez 2 hours ago [-]
I'll try that. I'm constantly telling it to be "brief, plain and on the point" or something similar. Tried caveman, but I think it had it's own issues.
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
2 hours ago [-]
dandiep 3 hours ago [-]
Why are LLMs producing this super tense text more often now? Is it because they are being optimized to use fewer tokens?
vanviegen 3 hours ago [-]
I think they're overcorrecting for being too long-winded in previous generations (and still, in some cases). I guess this is a hard balance to get right.
Davidzheng 2 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure the other answers are wrong and it's a side effect of RL (see thinking machines post about inkling training). It's also exacerbated in fable and sol--I think it's token efficiency effect--bc it's about to reason with fewer tokens the density of the token information goes up.
conception 3 hours ago [-]
I figure they are being optimized to write code/functions and not prose so all text is getting more code like.
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT is still plenty verbose by default IMX.
kapsmudit 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you for saying this. I’ve been dealing with this at work and it’s incredibly frustrating
dude250711 37 minutes ago [-]
If only there had been some kind of artificial assistant to help with incoming noise like that...
saidnooneever 3 hours ago [-]
claude said u cant call its users meat proxies. Now back to watching 'ow my balls!'
orangecoffee 3 hours ago [-]
When it comes to cost per implemeting SPEC, agents are far cheaper than human salary. So, it's not going to go well.
That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
bragh 2 hours ago [-]
Quite a few people do believe that a good specification is long, has multiple levels of headings, interspersed bold text, bullet points, and so on. Definitely, this is what they have seen happen throughout their lives: competent people have heaped praise on documentation which has had these signs, so this must be what good documentation looks like.
anonzzzies 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I just ignore people who do that. I don’t care what Claude or ChatGPT said. If you cannot be arsed to write yourself then I cannot be arsed to read it.
piterrro 1 hours ago [-]
In these situations I always use AI to respond
jdalsgaard 52 minutes ago [-]
When using AI to generate content, content of any kind - then I urge the author to evaluate the true cost for the organisation, not just for him or her. Using AI to generate 20 pages of documentation in 30 minutes looks good for you - but having 100s of people read through that slop will cost the organisation, not only in plain work hours, but also in lost trust, respect, joy of work as well a sense of purpose.
And yes, I've gotten '50 pages tech spec' docs sent my way from upper management -- as a 'help'....
Davidzheng 2 hours ago [-]
This is mostly a problem with the product. It should write better. But maybe the priorities now are not on this part.
darkwater 1 hours ago [-]
It's my very same exact opinion and as an EM I'm trying to push this everywhere (team, peers, upwards) but it feels like speaking to a rubber wall. It starts to be exhausting and infuriating. This is not an "LLMs are bad" issue, this is a "humans are lazy" issue. (shit, I wrote the it's not X it's Y construction!)
xintron 2 hours ago [-]
I've been on the receiving end of too many "Slop Grenades" as well, to the point where I simply reply with https://noslopgrenade.com/ these days.
dofm 2 hours ago [-]
"That's great for you, I'm not going to read it" is a phrase I have had to use.
blensor 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you!
Finally I have a word I can use for this
netcan 1 hours ago [-]
When "ai slop" became a concept, it mostly came into spaces where "human slop" had already been firmly established.
Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.
That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.
joedwin 3 hours ago [-]
I am sure this will lead to can you dumb this up prompt which will miss the important details
tmcnally 1 hours ago [-]
Remove meat proxy before flight
acosmism 2 hours ago [-]
thank you for this post, this is absolutely happening i just did not have words to put on it and it is festering.
samlinnfer 2 hours ago [-]
The real reason people do it:
1. It's quick
2. It's not their problem anymore because they've replied.
No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that.
Malcolmlisk 1 hours ago [-]
And nobody gives a fuck at work anymore.
Directives want results, positive numbers and growth. How well done is and the queality of the product is something trivial.
Until february/april I was super dead serious about the quality of my apps and my code, I was super strict and always looking for excellence and quality. But people were delivering shit faster than me and someone who doesnt give a fuck about anything of this just got promoted. So now i just let opencode do my work while I watch and play dota in the background. I deliver faster and nobody has ever talked about quality of my code or the ellegance of it.
I still programming by hand in my personal projects, but in corporative projects? Fuck it, i'll let the llm do my job until it lasts and Ill watch the world burn.
samlinnfer 1 hours ago [-]
Based
brador 2 hours ago [-]
You either get the AI notice or you don’t. The AI output will still be posted.
It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
Sending LLM outputs to people is worse than useless, because you don't even know what they prompted with. For all you know it was "write me a paragraph justifying my opinion".
throw1234567891 1 hours ago [-]
Or you could learn to verify what they sent you. Geezus fuck. How about knowing why did they ask this, and not some other question.
firefoxd 2 hours ago [-]
I call it BI Slop now [0]. It's everywhere. Usually "claude said" is used a a proxy for authority, as in there is some validity in this statement. But it's disguised as humbleness. i.e. I don't know if this is true, but claude said xyz, with your expertise you might know more than me...
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
So... back to a currency backed by gold?
In all seriousness, actual AI psychosis is my 3rd risk behind 1. public interactive agents and 2. whatever devs are doing with agents to prod
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.
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
yes you are
Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.
Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.
Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.
They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.
The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.
I once worked in a place where a guy would pick on me in code reviews, he wasn't really higher position, but had been with the company longer than I was.
He was just an asshole asserting his dominance and needed to be taken a notch down by a manager and it turned out he didn't understood (or more likely didn't try to understand) the PR when confronted.
If 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.
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This shit has progressed well past seriousness and into the absurd
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
The system does NOT reward caring. That's the problem.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.
I 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.
Then do it and don't ask questions.
If I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it's because I took the time to reformulate your question for Claude including all the relevant implicit context, waited for it to go through its reasoning, answered any extra questions it might have posed, corrected it if it went off course, filtered out the hypotheses and picked one that convinced me, if any. Finally I took the most relevant part of it- the one that contains the important justifications- and pasted it back to you with clear attribution.
You can do this yourself if you want, I won't be offended.
If you _could_ do that and hand the information to Claude, you could also just…give the person that information directly, and avoid wasting their time and the tokens.
I don't want to know what Claude thinks.
If you don't know the answer, say that. "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer, albeit one which I might follow up with something like "Well why don't you know? This is literally your job to know", which is kind of what 90% of my emails at work for the past three weeks have been.
And if I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it means that I have read and evaluated what Claude wrote back, and I have extracted the part of it that most clearly contains the answer as well as the diagnosis- if I gor anything relevant.
Of course I could instead pretend I came up with the answer myself in 5 minutes thanks to my superior analytical skills, and write down two short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?
That’s all you have to add to make this into a much more pleasant interaction
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.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
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.
Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.
Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.
Of course it is, at equivalent distance.
What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?
Some machines are capability amplifiers.
Other machines are shit puking buck passing time sinks.
Anyway this is just silly, we are splitting hairs. A lot of machines have a functional purpose and do not exist for the lazy. The LHC, ships, thousands of examples.
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...
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.
They genuinely think they're helping by shoveling 5 pages of LLM output they didn't even bother reading into teams...
AI is just another tool they can use to be stupid and lazy while pretending to contribute.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
I doubt people running those agents know much about stuff
Don't give me AI feedback at all.
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.
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.
Interestingly, there seemed (small n) to be a correlation between this behaviour, and (my view of) people's existing competence, which might make sense.
Too often, my Twitter experience now is - start reading a post with some kernel of insight - read some claudism in the post - stop reading immediately
It seems like people turn over their raw kernel of insight to an LLM to give it polish, likely in order to increase its appeal to the audience. But most of that appeal is lost amongst people that consume LLM written content regularly.
It's also likely that social media engagement does not filter for this. A majority of people are still not neck deep in LLM-talk, and cannot distinguish between LLM and human written content.
It'll probably take us another year or two to develop herd immunity against meat proxism.
Flagging, highlighting, filtering, and avoiding AI slop online seems like a very lucrative capability to bake into some consumer hardware. Get your social media, and music services, back to the ‘good old days’.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
Do you tell people you used a hammer to hit the nails? Do you go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t use your bare, bleeding knuckles to punch in the nails?
Give people some credit and don’t treat them like idiots.
Also don’t treat your LLM as some “super-power”, it’s just a fancy hammer and still hits your fingers if you don’t know how to use it.
As I see said quite often, an LLM is deemed of a similar ability to a junior software engineer. If I were that junior and my work was repeatedly ripped off by my senior colleague, I would be pissed. Not that an LLM cares in this instance, but the original requester might want to know
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.
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 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.
Like a human, not like a robot. Either just present them the answer or explain them how you got it.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.
That is not an easily defensible position at all. LLMs cannot give reliable answers, so it makes perfect sense to ask a human instead of the LLM. Any manager who would take the side of someone saying "just ask Claude" is a very foolish manager indeed.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609 https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
Should I a) give a worse answer b) ask claude and launder it as a meat proxy or c) tell them to ask claude?
b and c piss people off but often get them to a better answer.
However, you have to distinguish when someone is asking for your judgement vs just general knowledge about a subject. If I’m asking for your judgement, you have to be the one delivering and owning that call in your own words. It’s fine if you verify or research your understanding with an LLM before answering, but I want to hear your voice and ownership not Claude’s. Whatever you get from the LLM you should understand and if possible, verify. If I came back and say “You said X, can you expand on that” you can’t reply “lol - Claude said that, I dunno”
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
At the same time, I use the Q&A cycle to improve my vetted knowledge base, which I also share (and can reference in answers).
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
And yes, I've gotten '50 pages tech spec' docs sent my way from upper management -- as a 'help'....
Finally I have a word I can use for this
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.
1. It's quick
2. It's not their problem anymore because they've replied.
No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that.
Directives want results, positive numbers and growth. How well done is and the queality of the product is something trivial.
Until february/april I was super dead serious about the quality of my apps and my code, I was super strict and always looking for excellence and quality. But people were delivering shit faster than me and someone who doesnt give a fuck about anything of this just got promoted. So now i just let opencode do my work while I watch and play dota in the background. I deliver faster and nobody has ever talked about quality of my code or the ellegance of it.
I still programming by hand in my personal projects, but in corporative projects? Fuck it, i'll let the llm do my job until it lasts and Ill watch the world burn.
It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
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".
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/business-intelligence-slop