5 ms·

I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand This really bothers me. I've had people ask me to do some task except they get AI to provide instruc

I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand This really bothers me. I've had people ask me to do some task except they get AI to provide instructions on how to do the task and send me the instructions, rather than saying "Hey can you please do X". It's insulting.

andy99 1y ago
Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight. This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  Imagine a boring dystopia where everyone is given hallucinated tasks from LLMs that may in some crazy way be feasible but aren't, and you can't argue that they're impossible without being fired since leadership lacks critical thinking.
  - tines 1y ago
    Reminds me of the wonderful skit, The Expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
    - stirfish 1y ago
      And the solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      That is incredibly accurate - I used to be at meetings like that monthly. Please submit this as an HN discussion.
  - whoisthemachine 1y ago
    Unfortunately this is the most likely outcome.
  - turol 1y ago
    That is a very good description of the Paranoia RPG.
- a4isms 1y ago
  > This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have. This is very, very germane and a very quotable line. And these people have been around from long before LLMs appeared. These are the people who dash off an incomplete idea on Friday afternoon and expect to see a finished product in production by next Tuesday, latest. They have no self-awareness of how much context and disambiguation is needed to go from "idea in my head" to working, deterministic software that drives something like a process change in a business.
  - bobjordan 1y ago
    You can change "software" to "hardware" and this is still an all too common viewpoint, even for engineers that should know better.
  - 1dom 1y ago
    The unfortunate truth is that approach does work, sometimes. It's really easy and common for capable engineers to think their way out of doing something because of all the different things they can think about it. Sometimes, an unreasonable dumbass whose only authority comes from corporate heirarchy is needed to mandate the engineers start chipping away at the tasks. If they weren't a dumbass, they'd know the unreasonable thing they're mandating, and if they weren't unreasonable, they wouldn't mandate the someone does it. I am an an engineer. "Sometimes" could be swapped for "rarely" above, but the point still stands: as much frustration as I have towards those people, they do occasionally lead to the impossible being delivered. But then again, a stopped clock -> twice a day etc.
    - taleinat 1y ago
      That approach sometimes does work, but usually very poorly and often not at all. It can work very well when the higher-up is well informed and does have deep technical experience and understanding. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are great, well-known examples of this. They've also provided great examples of the same approach mostly failing when applied outside of their areas of deep expertise and understanding.
    - 1y ago
- alluro2 1y ago
  A friend experienced a similar thing at work - he gave a well-informed assessment of why something is difficult to implement and it would take a couple of weeks, based on the knowledge of the system and experience with it - only for the manager to reply within 5 min with a screenshot of an (even surprisingly) idiotic ChatGPT reply, and a message along the lines of "here's how you can do it, I guess by the end of the day". I know several people like this, and it seems they feel like they have god powers now - and that they alone can communicate with "the AI" in this way that is simply unreachable by the rest of the peasants.
  - OptionOfT 1y ago
    Same here. You throw a question in a channel. Someone responds in 1 minute with a code example that either you had laying around, or would take > 5 minutes to write. The code example was AI generated. I couldn't find a single line of code anywhere in any codebase. 0 examples on GitHub. And of course it didn't work. But, it sent me on a wild goose because I trusted this person to give me a valuable insight. It pisses me off so much.
    - mailund 1y ago
      I experienced mentioning an issue I was stuck on during standup one day, then some guy on my team DMs me a screenshot of chatGPT with text about how to solve the issue. When I explained to him why the solution he had sent me didn't make sense and wouldn't solve the issue, he sent me back the reply the LLM would give by pasting in my reply, at which point I stopped responding. I'm just really confused what people who send LLM content to other people think they are achieving? Like if I wanted an LLM response, I would just prompt the LLM myself, instead of doing it indirectly though another person who copy/pastes back and forth.
      - meindnoch 1y ago
        The appropriate response is giving these people an LLM-generated explanation on why sending people LLM-generated slop is inappropriate and provides zero value.
  - 1y ago
- alganet 1y ago
  In corporate, you are _forced_ to trust your coworker somehow and swallow it. Specially higher-ups. In free software though, these kinds of nonsense suggestions always happened, way before AI. Just look at any project mailing list. It is expected that any new suggestion will encounter some resistance, the new contributor itself should be aware of that. For serious projects specifically, the levels of skepticism are usually way higher than corporations, and that's healthy and desirable.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  People keep asking me if AI is going to take my job and recent experience shows that it very much is not. AI is great for being mostly correct and then giving someone without enough context a mostly correct way to shoot themselves in the foot. AI further encourages the problem in DevOps/Systems Engineering/SRE where someone comes to you and says "hey can you do this for me" having come up with the solution instead of giving you the problem "hey can you help me accomplish this"... AI gives them solutions which is more steps away to detangle into what really needs to be done. AI has knowledge, but it doesn't have taste. Especially when it doesn't have all of the context a person with experience, it just has bad taste in solutions or just the absence of taste but with the additional problem that it makes it much easier for people to do things. Permissions on what people have access to read and permission to change is now going to have to be more restricted because not only are we dealing with folks who have limited experience with permissions, now we have them empowered by AI to do more things which are less advisable.
  - MoreQARespect 1y ago
    The question about whether it takes jobs away is more whether one programmer with taste can multiply their productivity between ~3-15x and take the same salary while demand for coding remains constant. It's less about whether the tool can directly replace 100% of the functions of a good programmer.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- joshstrange 1y ago
  I’ve started to experience/see this and it makes me want to scream. You can’t dismiss it out of hand (especially with it coming from up the chain) but it takes no time at all to generate by someone who knows nothing about the problem space (or worse, just enough to be dangerous) and it could take hours or more to debunk/disprove the suggestion. I don’t know what to call this? Cognitive DDOS? Amplified Plausibility Attack? There should be a name for it and it should be ridiculed.
  - whatevertrevor 1y ago
    It's simply the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle/Brandolini's Law. It's just that bullshit generation speedrunners have recently discovered tool-assists.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  > Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight. I would find it very insulting if someone did this to me, for sure, as well as a huge waste of my time. On the other hand I've also worked with some very intransigent developers who've actively fought against things they simply didn't want to do on flimsy technical grounds, knowing it couldn't be properly challenged by the requester. On yet another hand, I've also been subordinate to people with a small amount of technical knowledge -- or a small amount of knowledge about a specific problem -- who'll do the exact same thing without ChatGPT: fire a bunch of mid-wit ideas downstream that you have already thought about, but you then need to spend a bunch of time explaining why their hot-takes aren't good. Or the CEO of a small digital agency I worked at circa 2004 asking us if we'd ever considered using CSS for our projects (which were of course CSS heavy).
- sltr 1y ago
  Reminds me of "Appeal to Aithority". (not a typo) An LLM said it, so it must be true. https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/ https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/
- masfuerte 1y ago
  You should send him a chatGPT critique of his management style. (Or not, unless you enjoy workplace drama.)
- itslennysfault 1y ago
  At a company I used to work at I saw the CEO do this publicly (on slack) to the CTO who was an absolute expert on the topic at hand, and had spent 1000s of hours optimizing a specific system. Then, the CEO comes in and says I think this will fix our problems (link to ChatGPT convo). SOO insulting. That was the day I decided I should start looking for a new job.
nijave 1y ago
Especially when you try to correct them and they insist AI is the correct one Sometimes it's fun reverse engineering the directions back into various forum, Stack Overflow, and documentation fragments and pointing out how AI assembled similar things into something incorrect
windward 1y ago
It's the modern equivalent of sending a LMGTFY link, except the insult is from them being purely credulous and sincere
guappa 1y ago
My company hired a new CTO and he asked chatgpt to write some lengthy documents about "how engineering gets done in our company". He also writes all his emails with chatgpt. I don't bother reading. Oddly enough he recently promoted a guy who has been fucking around with LLMs for years instead of working as his right hand man.
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  That's directly lethal, in a limited sympathy with engineers that don't immediately head for the exit sort of fashion. Best of luck
  - guappa 1y ago
    The most experienced people quit, yes. There's some other not as experienced who are left, but seeing how a noob with less seniority and a large ego is now their boss, I expect they're proof reading their CVs as well. I think under current management immigrants have no chance of getting promoted.
- latexr 1y ago
  > Oddly enough he recently promoted a guy who has been fucking around with LLMs for years instead of working as his right hand man. Why is that odd? From the rest of your description, it seems entirely predictable.

andy99 1y ago

Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight. This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have.

candiddevmike 1y ago
Imagine a boring dystopia where everyone is given hallucinated tasks from LLMs that may in some crazy way be feasible but aren't, and you can't argue that they're impossible without being fired since leadership lacks critical thinking.
- tines 1y ago
  Reminds me of the wonderful skit, The Expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
  - stirfish 1y ago
    And the solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    That is incredibly accurate - I used to be at meetings like that monthly. Please submit this as an HN discussion.
- whoisthemachine 1y ago
  Unfortunately this is the most likely outcome.
- turol 1y ago
  That is a very good description of the Paranoia RPG.
a4isms 1y ago
> This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have. This is very, very germane and a very quotable line. And these people have been around from long before LLMs appeared. These are the people who dash off an incomplete idea on Friday afternoon and expect to see a finished product in production by next Tuesday, latest. They have no self-awareness of how much context and disambiguation is needed to go from "idea in my head" to working, deterministic software that drives something like a process change in a business.
- bobjordan 1y ago
  You can change "software" to "hardware" and this is still an all too common viewpoint, even for engineers that should know better.
- 1dom 1y ago
  The unfortunate truth is that approach does work, sometimes. It's really easy and common for capable engineers to think their way out of doing something because of all the different things they can think about it. Sometimes, an unreasonable dumbass whose only authority comes from corporate heirarchy is needed to mandate the engineers start chipping away at the tasks. If they weren't a dumbass, they'd know the unreasonable thing they're mandating, and if they weren't unreasonable, they wouldn't mandate the someone does it. I am an an engineer. "Sometimes" could be swapped for "rarely" above, but the point still stands: as much frustration as I have towards those people, they do occasionally lead to the impossible being delivered. But then again, a stopped clock -> twice a day etc.
  - taleinat 1y ago
    That approach sometimes does work, but usually very poorly and often not at all. It can work very well when the higher-up is well informed and does have deep technical experience and understanding. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are great, well-known examples of this. They've also provided great examples of the same approach mostly failing when applied outside of their areas of deep expertise and understanding.
  - 1y ago
alluro2 1y ago
A friend experienced a similar thing at work - he gave a well-informed assessment of why something is difficult to implement and it would take a couple of weeks, based on the knowledge of the system and experience with it - only for the manager to reply within 5 min with a screenshot of an (even surprisingly) idiotic ChatGPT reply, and a message along the lines of "here's how you can do it, I guess by the end of the day". I know several people like this, and it seems they feel like they have god powers now - and that they alone can communicate with "the AI" in this way that is simply unreachable by the rest of the peasants.
- OptionOfT 1y ago
  Same here. You throw a question in a channel. Someone responds in 1 minute with a code example that either you had laying around, or would take > 5 minutes to write. The code example was AI generated. I couldn't find a single line of code anywhere in any codebase. 0 examples on GitHub. And of course it didn't work. But, it sent me on a wild goose because I trusted this person to give me a valuable insight. It pisses me off so much.
  - mailund 1y ago
    I experienced mentioning an issue I was stuck on during standup one day, then some guy on my team DMs me a screenshot of chatGPT with text about how to solve the issue. When I explained to him why the solution he had sent me didn't make sense and wouldn't solve the issue, he sent me back the reply the LLM would give by pasting in my reply, at which point I stopped responding. I'm just really confused what people who send LLM content to other people think they are achieving? Like if I wanted an LLM response, I would just prompt the LLM myself, instead of doing it indirectly though another person who copy/pastes back and forth.
    - meindnoch 1y ago
      The appropriate response is giving these people an LLM-generated explanation on why sending people LLM-generated slop is inappropriate and provides zero value.
- 1y ago
alganet 1y ago
In corporate, you are _forced_ to trust your coworker somehow and swallow it. Specially higher-ups. In free software though, these kinds of nonsense suggestions always happened, way before AI. Just look at any project mailing list. It is expected that any new suggestion will encounter some resistance, the new contributor itself should be aware of that. For serious projects specifically, the levels of skepticism are usually way higher than corporations, and that's healthy and desirable.
colechristensen 1y ago
People keep asking me if AI is going to take my job and recent experience shows that it very much is not. AI is great for being mostly correct and then giving someone without enough context a mostly correct way to shoot themselves in the foot. AI further encourages the problem in DevOps/Systems Engineering/SRE where someone comes to you and says "hey can you do this for me" having come up with the solution instead of giving you the problem "hey can you help me accomplish this"... AI gives them solutions which is more steps away to detangle into what really needs to be done. AI has knowledge, but it doesn't have taste. Especially when it doesn't have all of the context a person with experience, it just has bad taste in solutions or just the absence of taste but with the additional problem that it makes it much easier for people to do things. Permissions on what people have access to read and permission to change is now going to have to be more restricted because not only are we dealing with folks who have limited experience with permissions, now we have them empowered by AI to do more things which are less advisable.
- MoreQARespect 1y ago
  The question about whether it takes jobs away is more whether one programmer with taste can multiply their productivity between ~3-15x and take the same salary while demand for coding remains constant. It's less about whether the tool can directly replace 100% of the functions of a good programmer.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
joshstrange 1y ago
I’ve started to experience/see this and it makes me want to scream. You can’t dismiss it out of hand (especially with it coming from up the chain) but it takes no time at all to generate by someone who knows nothing about the problem space (or worse, just enough to be dangerous) and it could take hours or more to debunk/disprove the suggestion. I don’t know what to call this? Cognitive DDOS? Amplified Plausibility Attack? There should be a name for it and it should be ridiculed.
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  It's simply the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle/Brandolini's Law. It's just that bullshit generation speedrunners have recently discovered tool-assists.
petesergeant 1y ago
> Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight. I would find it very insulting if someone did this to me, for sure, as well as a huge waste of my time. On the other hand I've also worked with some very intransigent developers who've actively fought against things they simply didn't want to do on flimsy technical grounds, knowing it couldn't be properly challenged by the requester. On yet another hand, I've also been subordinate to people with a small amount of technical knowledge -- or a small amount of knowledge about a specific problem -- who'll do the exact same thing without ChatGPT: fire a bunch of mid-wit ideas downstream that you have already thought about, but you then need to spend a bunch of time explaining why their hot-takes aren't good. Or the CEO of a small digital agency I worked at circa 2004 asking us if we'd ever considered using CSS for our projects (which were of course CSS heavy).
sltr 1y ago
Reminds me of "Appeal to Aithority". (not a typo) An LLM said it, so it must be true. https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/ https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/
masfuerte 1y ago
You should send him a chatGPT critique of his management style. (Or not, unless you enjoy workplace drama.)
itslennysfault 1y ago
At a company I used to work at I saw the CEO do this publicly (on slack) to the CTO who was an absolute expert on the topic at hand, and had spent 1000s of hours optimizing a specific system. Then, the CEO comes in and says I think this will fix our problems (link to ChatGPT convo). SOO insulting. That was the day I decided I should start looking for a new job.

nijave 1y ago

Especially when you try to correct them and they insist AI is the correct one Sometimes it's fun reverse engineering the directions back into various forum, Stack Overflow, and documentation fragments and pointing out how AI assembled similar things into something incorrect

windward 1y ago

It's the modern equivalent of sending a LMGTFY link, except the insult is from them being purely credulous and sincere

guappa 1y ago

My company hired a new CTO and he asked chatgpt to write some lengthy documents about "how engineering gets done in our company". He also writes all his emails with chatgpt. I don't bother reading. Oddly enough he recently promoted a guy who has been fucking around with LLMs for years instead of working as his right hand man.

JonChesterfield 1y ago
That's directly lethal, in a limited sympathy with engineers that don't immediately head for the exit sort of fashion. Best of luck
- guappa 1y ago
  The most experienced people quit, yes. There's some other not as experienced who are left, but seeing how a noob with less seniority and a large ego is now their boss, I expect they're proof reading their CVs as well. I think under current management immigrants have no chance of getting promoted.
latexr 1y ago
> Oddly enough he recently promoted a guy who has been fucking around with LLMs for years instead of working as his right hand man. Why is that odd? From the rest of your description, it seems entirely predictable.