6 ms·

Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

244 points by theorchid 3mo ago

triyambakam 3mo ago
Ok but he clearly used a model to write this so...
- Krssst 3mo ago
  Oh, it did not feel AI but Pangram does say AI, high confidence. Good catch. (I'd trust an ML algorithm that only has to classify in two boxes, thus easy to evaluate, over my own gut feeling).
  - yaelwrites 3mo ago
    I wrote this by hand but I did run it through an AI for editing. The changes were pretty minor; just a couple of lines.
    - dwaltrip 3mo ago
      The first paragraph screamed AI to me. I'll try to dissect each bit, see below. It's hard to put it into words... --- Send an e-mail + pick up the phone. Mismatched analog. First one is outgoing, second is incoming. Yes, I know you can pick up "to make a call". In which case, then we have the classic LLM pattern of eliding details that matter to make it sound "smooth" (like blended cardboard smooth, glug glug). someone senior enough - Way too vague. Most people would add details here that are unique to the actual human being that they spoke with. But Claude can't do that, so we get this. a hard question - Same thing as the previous one. Which question? Why is there literally no detail or actual flavor here? - Real - Claude looooves punchy, empty emphasis words like this. ... , the kind you ... - Tacked on extra phrase that should be a separate sentence. Claude does this all the time. We aren't writing a shitting noir novel, Claude. -a decision go sideways in a boardroom - vague shadow of an anecdote, of just the right length. The "a" in front of "boardroom" is a blinking red light for me, can't fully explain why. Not what the textbook says. - Too short, too vague, with the rhythmic punchy feel. (Damn... I've been infected with the triplet pattern myself). textbook, 5 studies, 30 years of experience - Pattern of 3... - that a search engine couldn't - Oh man... this type of phrasing is so triggering for me, heh. I've been busting my ass trying to sanitize Claude's output so it haven't doesn't these overly cute, inverted constructions.
      - yaelwrites 3mo ago
        Wrong, those were all me. (I just checked the draft.) The only part I tweaked was the conclusion, plus I broke up a few paragraphs that were too long. I often leave out details and specifics or make things purposely vague because I am writing about real people.
        nullc 3mo ago
        I feel sorry for your future writing prospects, because it looked like AI to me too: I insta-slop-back-buttoned on "so I scheduled one with someone senior enough to have real scar tissue, the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom." Thanks for the the correction-- often when people say they weren't using AI they are very clearly lying, so it's hard to get useful corrections on this point so I appreciate your candor.
        deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
        yaelwrites 3mo ago
        Oh, no problem! But now I am thinking I may need to rethink using AI for light editing. I've gotten in the habit of that because I don't have a human editor for my blog, and I like getting that extra polish sometimes, but it's probably not worth it if it's going to make people not want to read.
        nullc 3mo ago
        You can do a thing where you have it point out spelling and grammar errors or point out awkward parts without suggesting changes. But take care that you don't let it apply them as it may make other changes silently (especially if you're not running in an agentic harness with patch tools).
        yaelwrites 3mo ago
        I'm a pretty late adopter and nost of my LLM use has been 1) vibe red teaming (having Codex RE the data flow of various extensions, comparing the attestation with the ToS, seeing if I think it's a potential FTC violation) which is just for fun and I do nothing with, 2) feeding tons of documentation into NotebookLM and asking if everything in a short document is attributable (often when it says it's not, it is, but you have to kind of read between the lines). I think this is a good use of AI if rigorously fact-checked. 3) feeding 20-30 job descriptions + cover letters, asking for outlines for new cover letters. For this one I think it may be faster to go back to creating templates because I have to entirely rewrite things anyway. (It does add lies! And conflates things! V bad for a cover letter!) But I think use of machines to write letters being read by machines is pretty justifiable. 4) I've been experimenting with Claude editing. I think what bugs me about people assuming everything is LLM-written is that it's rather dismissive and difficult to tell the difference between "a human spent X hours on this and made some stylistic tweets" vs "a machine wrote this in response to a prompt." I do find myself immediately scrolling away too, though. A friend had a LI post for a course he's teaching and I could tell it was AI because it's not how he writes. That said, the post performed phenomenally well, which is probably more important for selling a course than my opinion is. I'm also not confident in my ability to distinguish between 1) something an AI write from scratch, 2) something he may have iterated with an AI, feeding it many different versions of a post, going back and forth, etc. I think both would show up as AI in the extensions I've seen, but I also think they're very different. My thought process on it is complicated. I think I'm more disappointed than anything. It made me sad because his human writing is so unique, and I'd hate to see it all outsourced. But I also don't have the same "you didn't even bother to write this so why should I read it" reaction so many do, given that I don't know how much time he spent on it or the reasoning. Mostly I worry that if the whole of human knowledge becomes AI slop, and AI is then being fed that slop, that the writing would get even worse. Re: fact-checking, I am far too paranoid/obsessive/whatever about accuracy to not review changes! Even NotebookLM is weirdly drawn to the first document you feed it, so if you have a second contradictory document, it seems to want to tell you why it's wrong. To be fair, I know people like this, too. The first version of a story they hear is what they will forever believe, even if every other version contradicts it.
turtleyacht 3mo ago
What was the question?
- krapp 3mo ago
  Ask an LLM.
  - CamperBob2 3mo ago
    Your question was: "What was the question?" -- GPT 5.5
- em-bee 3mo ago
  ask supercomputer earth. it will figure it out in ten million years provided the computer doesn't get destroyed before that by that hyperspace bypass the vogons are planning.
ventana 3mo ago
One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question. Compare: — What's the best way of doing X? — Ask Claude. vs: — I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.
- theorchid 3mo ago
  — I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? — Ask Claude.
  - hoppp 3mo ago
    Its a way to say I don't care, don't waste my time
    - XorNot 3mo ago
      Which is funny because a huge number of people post this in responses to online asynchronous messages, on public forums, when they could also do literally anything else - like close the browser tab.
      - hoppp 3mo ago
        Intelligence is outsourced so now people who don't like to think they don't have to do it anymore.
      - Barbing 3mo ago
        Wellll lots of those people you’re referring to are human, and when have we ever let it be?!
    - 9dev 3mo ago
      That's the malevolent version of it. The alternative might be, I also don't know this from the top of my head and could spend some time to google/ask Claude/read the documentation/familiarize myself with the concrete code and/or problem at hand, but then again so can you and our collective time is better spent if I take care of my problems and you take care of yours, but if you really can't find a solution on your own and still need help please come back to me any time with a very concrete question you need my input on.
sscaryterry 3mo ago
It's just the new "I don't know, Google it?"
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
Aurornis 3mo ago
The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point. People are more interested in helping those who have already tried helping themselves. The second case is more of a social situation with an infinite number of explanations. Some times you have to read the room and realize that someone may not be interested in having those conversations with you. Some times it’s only in the moment (we all have bad days where we want to be left alone) but other times it’s a signal that they’re not interested in discussing this topic with you or maybe even anyone else.
- Animats 3mo ago
  When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.
  - BobbyTables2 3mo ago
    I actually hate reading posts that go “I can’t understand/fix this problem. Tried LLM…” To me, such screams “I’m too lazy to do anything more than ask a LLM. I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas” Show me you put a modicum effort and aren’t just looking to be spoon-fed the content from the first Google result that would have been found.
    - jagged-chisel 3mo ago
      I get exasperated with the inexperience that I have run across for decades. Yes, I frobnicated the frobnitz, I transmogrified the bit twiddler, I wizzled the wobnosticator, (and this decade, I talked the three LLMs), and the problem still exists. What I really need to know is how the transmogrification affects frobnication, but no one has ever touched that configuration. “Why would you even want to do that?” I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given. Do you know or not? No. No one does. I take a week to figure it out, I come back to the forum to post my response, and it’s automatically closed as off-topic. *sigh*
theorchid 3mo ago
I once wrote a similar essay on this topic. When I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer: https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/ https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/
- apical_dendrite 3mo ago
  This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice. Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
  - cogman10 3mo ago
    Yeah, I don't love this part of the work. Especially since it's completely exploded out the text of basically everything. I'm also suspicious that the person that generated that text didn't read any of it.
  - t-writescode 3mo ago
    Beyond mirroring the engineering practices that you yourself want to see other people perform, have you found any techniques to get people to … in short, do their job again? Understand context, understand what they did, why they did it, what they’re doing, etc. The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it. And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking points back and forth at each other feels equally harmful. Are we really tolerating turning ourselves into LLM rubber stamps?
bvcp 3mo ago
this is just effort equilibrium something that wasnt as effective with “google it”. but ask a low effort question and get “ask claude” as a response is entirely appropriate. junior developers on my team are often asking questions about our code base without even attempting to explore or self direct. “ask claude to look at <subsystem> and explain how its designed the key files and dependencies so that i can better understand it” is unsurprisingly effective and far cheaper than a couple of hours of opex
- gunalx 3mo ago
  I find a llm in a harnes combined with manual ripgrep exploration is really effective of getting codebases. But you font always want to find what you find.
linsomniac 3mo ago
>I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM. >LMGTFY I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that google results had a high chance of getting with "I'm feeling lucky". If you've already done a bunch of research, and already asked the LLMs, when someone says "Honestly, ask Claude", you should be able to come back with what results you got to your question and what you need clarification on. I've been doing programming and sys admin for 40 years. When I run a coworkers question through the AI tooling and talk through the answer with them, it's because my 40 years of experience tells me that's the next step.
- sanex 3mo ago
  Going to agree with you here. There's two types of "ask an llm." There's the "I don't know but whatever the llm said is probably right" and the "lmgtfy, did you even try?" Based on the post his exact quote sounds more like 1 but obviously some people deserve the 2 sometimes.
- bloaf 3mo ago
  I think the other alternative is that the senior guy thinks that the junior guy is working on a problem where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. "Just ask an LLM" can be interpreted as "if the AI can't give you a quick solution, it won't be worth either one of our times to puzzle out the technical details."
- watwut 3mo ago
  > Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM. Just say "I don't know". It is simple and short.
yesfinally 3mo ago
[flagged]
- apical_dendrite 3mo ago
  This is fucking dystopian. You're telling me that the people that I hired and that I work with don't have any knowledge or opinions of any value, and 90% of the time I can just ask a machine instead of talking to them. If that's the world we live in I fucking hate it. It's so solipsistic and dehumanizing.
  - allenrb 3mo ago
    100% this. In the end, I just don’t care about the answer that much.
taf2 3mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
xtajv 3mo ago
[dead]
mcv 3mo ago
I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI. It makes sense to hate and despise that answer. And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.
- peteforde 3mo ago
  You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario. The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done. There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively. Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this: "What should I do?" "What do you think you should do?" "X" "Do X" There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro. Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.
  - em-bee 3mo ago
    if this is the experience in a team, then the team already has a problem. i expect these things to be made clear up front. when someone joins a team they should be assigned a mentor whom they can ask any question, no matter how dumb, and the mentor then guides the new team member in how to approach such a question, which at that point can include asking the LLM. it is the mentors responsibility to point out when it is ok to ask another senior developer. daily standups can also help with this sort of thing. in a close knit team i would also expect that either everyone can ask anything from everyone else, and that everyone learns when it is ok to ask questions. the situation you describe should simply never arise. if it does, then something is going wrong
SoftTalker 3mo ago
Get used to it. People are lazy, and if they can deflect work off to an LLM, they will, as long as (crucially) it doesn't reflect poorly on them with anyone they care about.
- AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
  So, if you want to have any decent company culture, make it reflect poorly on them.
  - EgregiousCube 3mo ago
    Depends on the company and environment. If you work at a place that has an overabundance of easily-googleable questions, this behavior is a good social impediment.
zzzeek 3mo ago
OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster. People are really really tired. Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the <panic about XYZ>", our employers are making us work much harder, with a subtle but palpable panic in their emails, with WAY less promises of any kind of job security, companies that never had layoffs for decades are now doing them regularly, our githubs are flooded with people pointing robots at our issues to generate tepid pull requests, and at our pull requests to generate tepid reviews, and look shit is just crazy now. So I think the whole "how would you approach this interesting problem..." thing is, for now, at least for me it feels a little bit on hold. Like oh that problem. How to scale? how to horizontally shard PostgreSQL? sure, real problems. But geez whatever we're building, it will be replaced in three months anyway. That's a hard problem you have there! I remember when I used to have problems like that, and my solutions sucked anyway and it was replaced with a node.js app two years later. Whatever advice I have, Claude is going to have 98% of it plus another 10% that I didn't even have. This is all bad. So I think your post is possibly extremely useful. Maybe we should, for people we know and trust as humans in the real world, actually take the time and approach an issue as though we didn't have the Matrix to approximate it for us. I'm going to think about this and consider it.
- andersonpico 3mo ago
  That makes sense as well, I think it's a nice human perspective. People really are uniquely tired lately.
- wilg 3mo ago
  We are not in a recession, and we (if you mean the US) recovered our economy from COVID (under Biden).
  - zzzeek 3mo ago
    before COVID everyone on my team travelled once or twice a year to conferences as well as to the home office for get-togethers, on the company dime. Those conferences have been turned into online only and my company hasn't flown me or hardly anyone on my team or any of our related teams anywhere in years. All of that would be considered vastly extravagant and expensive today. So some kind of belt tightening went on that was never un-tightened.
Viacol 3mo ago
[flagged]
perching_aix 3mo ago
> I already did. Well the people who keep bugging me verifiably do not, so that's tough. On the off chance they do, they either spectacularly self-sabotage, or treat the response like they do a typical message box popup. So I'll be asked to essentially read the same thing out aloud, only for them to go "ok-ok". It's beyond insulting. I'll 100% keep telling people to ask an LLM when I suspect this shit. They do NOT respect my time and attention, and have robustly demonstrated so. But then these are the same people who cannot internalize the idea behind nohello.net either (gotta remind them every few weeks/months), and have demonstrated this kind of helplessness even before LLMs, so it's clearly a deeper issue, likely cultural. It seems your peers might have a similarly low opinion of you, or at least I'd definitely feature that as one of the options.
- al_borland 3mo ago
  Even if they did ask the LLM, they might be bad at it, just like some people were bad at Google. I used to stick people in front of a computer during interviews to see if they could do some basic stuff for an entry level sys admin position. If they wanted to use Google to look something up, that was fine. There were people who could not form a search query at all. It was painful to watch. Some of them would end up finding a blog post that had 4 of the 5 answers on it, but didn’t recognize what they were looking at, so they’d go back and keep looking. This was also painful. One guy wouldn’t even make an attempt and just left. I assume these types of people would also fail at asking an LLM. Sometimes knowing the key words to use in the question matter a lot. Before LLMs, I would sometimes do some searches to try and figure out the correct term to search for, so that I could then make a proper search for what I needed. If someone is trying to fill in too many gaps in knowledge, this can be a real problem. LLMs can jump these gaps better, but still aren’t perfect. I’ll have people come to me, not because they have a low opinion of me, but because they assume I know more of those words that they don’t know. There have been several cases where people don’t want to bother me and they have spent hours calling actual support lines, searching online, trying random stuff, and then I answer it in 30 seconds… like the plumber that knows which pipe to hit.
zer00eyz 3mo ago
I tell people this, a lot. Its now a polite way of saying "I dont want to work on this project" without having to go through the effort of thinking hard enough about the problem to put the "go away" price on it (or even worse having to DO the work I dont want to do).
zyralab 3mo ago
People are lazy... just get used to it.
wwind123 3mo ago
To be honest, I'm more worried about another side of the problem. LLM's are good at learning from whatever humans have posted online. But with the agentic workflows getting more popular, more and more problems those AI agents figure out are not posted online, and the next time another agent running into the same problems they would have to figure it out from the scratch again. It'd be nice if there's a mechanism these agents would share the lessons they learn with each other, which could save a lot of trials and errors and wasted tokens. Humans share knowledge online. AI agents should be able to do so too. The moltbook thing from half year ago could have this potential, but too bad it's flooded by spams. Of course, to make this AI knowledge sharing truly work, there may need to be a peer-review mechanism to ensure the knowledge being shared is truthful, reliable, non-trivial etc. That can probably be all worked out if somebody (or AI agent) really put effort into it.
- alightsoul 3mo ago
  Have a skill enabled by default opt out that publishes them on a personal web page
- alightsoul 3mo ago
  There's also projects on hugging face like https://trace-commons-web.hf.space/ https://trace-commons-web.hf.space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u795pb/donate_your_coding_sessions_to_an_open_ccby40/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u795pb/donate_... These should be opt out. Maybe have a skill that is similar and is opt out
fwlr 3mo ago
The author considers the possibility that this is an outwardly-polite form of “you should be able to solve this yourself”. Another, grimmer possibility is that it’s an inwardly-polite form of “I should have been able to solve this myself”. That is, the author asked for the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't And his real answer is I have forgotten that thing
dyauspitr 3mo ago
Not all that different from LMGTFY
mbf1 3mo ago
My answer is usually to make a process. Do you need to know if X is faster than Y? Do both. Measure. Sometimes the answer requires actual research. Maybe you need a real Subject Matter Expert because it turns out that nobody ever published something on the internet about something so that an LLM could soak up the real world information. Before the internet, we would consult with books. After the internet, it seemed faster to search and find answers in things like blog posts, (paid) articles, and CDs. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are great resources. Maybe you need an answer from Hacker News - ask HN. By relying on LLMs more than these other sources and allowing LLMs to write articles and posts to these other sources, we lose subject matter experts. Add to that companies like Microsoft and Meta and others laying off and offering retirement packages to get rid of institutional knowledge as fast as possible, and we are headed towards a gigantic crash of knowledge.
jimwhite 3mo ago
If you've already done some research then include that up front. I get asked a lot of questions by people who not only haven't asked an AI first they haven't even googled it. So if you've asked Claude and are not satisfied with the response then include that and say what your question is now in the light of that information.
- stickfigure 3mo ago
  This is exactly it. If you want someone to do some analysis for you, you're obliged to give them some context regarding what analysis you've already done.
dools 3mo ago
“ I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus” Doesn’t that mean his answer was that he, with all of his years of experience, would ask Claude?
adverbly 3mo ago
"What did you find when you googled it?" "What did an LLM say about it?" "What did the docs say?" These are all better follow-ups than telling someone to do a specific thing.
subhobroto 3mo ago
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qarl2 3mo ago
While "I'm busy" might be true, "Ask Claude" is more helpful. Maybe the people in your life are just trying to be helpful instead of effectively saying "Go away." But hey, sure, it's AI so you should definitely hate on them. FUCK AI!!1!! AMIRIGHT?!?!
IronWolve 3mo ago
[flagged]
bromuk 3mo ago
On the flip side, I work with colleagues that would ask before using an LLM / do some quick research on the web.
vinceguidry 3mo ago
Author's criticism is valid. Using LLMs, like using search engines before them, is a skill. You have to know what to ask and what to accept as a valid answer, what to push back on and when to throw in the towel and try another approach. I was talking to a very tired friend of mine and she described renting a small tiller from Home Depot. They didn't know how to set the choke and so flooded the engine. They spent hours troubleshooting, no one at Home Depot knew anything about the equipment they were taking money to rent. They eventually figured it out and were tilling their backyard garden well into the late night. I told her next time just ask ChatGPT. I would have done it myself if I'd been there. She hadn't even thought of it. But a few pictures and descriptions would have gotten them rolling in half an hour tops.
huflungdung 3mo ago
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queenkjuul 3mo ago
I asked a question on slack. My coworker forwarded my question to Claude and pasted the response. 15 minutes later a different coworker responded pointing out that everything Claude said was wrong. I asked on slack for a reason! It's not like i don't know how to ask Claude.
casey2 3mo ago
This is insanely entitled. If you want someone with experience then pay them for it. Likewise if you don't want people to have some experience then don't pay them. How do people get jobs at jar opening factories by deferring jar opening to someone capable? These are your collages who have full time jobs, not monks at some monastery, go do that if that's what you want.
- filleduchaos 3mo ago
  ...Are you proposing that coworkers pay each other to have technical conversations?
satisfice 3mo ago
If I am asked a question, and I refer it to an LLM, that’s because I have no respect for you.
- taswellian 3mo ago
  why no respect?
ohyes 3mo ago
Okay. In my experience asking an LLM requires you to know the right set of questions and the right process for working through the problem that you’re having. You have to know the correct terminology to use to describe your problem. These are not trivial things even though they are things that senior developers tend to trivialize. If you’re describing the wrong problem, you’ll get a right answer that doesn’t fix it. If you’re describing the right problem wrongly, you’ll get another wrong answer that talks past being right. If you’re describing a difficult problem that maybe isn’t even solved in existing stuff, you can get help figuring out the necessary steps if you have an idea where to start. If you don’t know where to start you can start by asking where to start. Anyway, point is, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know (or think you know) and what you don’t know. I don’t have a magic wand, I have years of experience grinding down problems until they submit.
fallingfrog 3mo ago
Yeah I mean LLM's don't generally offer useful answers to questions. They just kinda make the same guesses that any reasonably educated and articulate but not very smart person would make. They will answer, "maybe its this, maybe its that", but they can't go and do actual investigation and digging and find the real answer to a question. They just wing it. I can already pop possibilities off the top of my head. I don't know, maybe if you were generally not very informed the AI might seem knowledgeable by comparison?
rubyfan 3mo ago
Lots of people I work with seem to use Claude for things they should be learning or doing themselves. Stuff that really isn’t hard and if they took the time to learn themselves then they would be better at their job and more valuable. Instead they are telling me that literally any other human could do their job and their only value is prompting a chat bot. The thing is they aren’t even accelerating outcomes. Since they can’t be bothered to learn they pump out stuff that looks good but the detail that matters is trash and requires someone else to actually finish to an acceptable standard.
bohoo 3mo ago
You clearly used AI pretty heavily to write this - so whats the point?
- yaelwrites 3mo ago
  There are a lot of parallels between "just ask an LLM" in response to a thoughtful, well-researched question and spurious accusations of heavy LLM use that never happened in response to a post, so that's actually a pretty astute point, just not the one I think you were trying to make.
  - bohoo 3mo ago
    Either you used AI or you happen to write like an AI - in either case something to work on. I do think my comment was lazily dismissive so you do have a point but in so far your post is basically just a gripe, I would think artful expression of said gripe is basically the only thing that makes it worthwhile. Phrases like the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom stink of llm, are not artful and have extra irony riding along given the point you are making. edit: No scratch that, artfulness is not necessary - just get better at screening out the flavour of AI, even if you find it useful to write with - because people will notice.
PeterStuer 3mo ago
"Ask the model" is usually the point where I realize that either what you need is not a specific answer to their specific question, but a tutor to guide you on a personal journey through the underlying fundamentals of more than one prerequisite areas of understanding, or, the question is too niche or domain specific that I would have to 'ask the model' as wel as I do not know. Now I did observe, not just with LLM but also with Google search, that many people struggle with this and never seem to get good results. They need meta-learning on how to ask the right questions, which I can offer, but often I notice at that point their eyes starting to glaze over as they want a 'direct' solution, me searching or llm guiding for them.
xd1936 3mo ago
https://stopcitingai.com https://stopcitingai.com
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
scotty79 3mo ago
> I already did. It's not about what you did or didn't do. It's about not being competent enough to help you and directing you to the more competent available entity. If it couldn't help you I won't be able either. Next time you lead with the information that you already asked the best available paid LLM, if you don't want to be directed there. Or explain your problem to a rubber duck instead because I won't be any more helpful.

244 points by theorchid 3mo ago

triyambakam 3mo ago

Ok but he clearly used a model to write this so...

Krssst 3mo ago
Oh, it did not feel AI but Pangram does say AI, high confidence. Good catch. (I'd trust an ML algorithm that only has to classify in two boxes, thus easy to evaluate, over my own gut feeling).
- yaelwrites 3mo ago
  I wrote this by hand but I did run it through an AI for editing. The changes were pretty minor; just a couple of lines.
  - dwaltrip 3mo ago
    The first paragraph screamed AI to me. I'll try to dissect each bit, see below. It's hard to put it into words... --- Send an e-mail + pick up the phone. Mismatched analog. First one is outgoing, second is incoming. Yes, I know you can pick up "to make a call". In which case, then we have the classic LLM pattern of eliding details that matter to make it sound "smooth" (like blended cardboard smooth, glug glug). someone senior enough - Way too vague. Most people would add details here that are unique to the actual human being that they spoke with. But Claude can't do that, so we get this. a hard question - Same thing as the previous one. Which question? Why is there literally no detail or actual flavor here? - Real - Claude looooves punchy, empty emphasis words like this. ... , the kind you ... - Tacked on extra phrase that should be a separate sentence. Claude does this all the time. We aren't writing a shitting noir novel, Claude. -a decision go sideways in a boardroom - vague shadow of an anecdote, of just the right length. The "a" in front of "boardroom" is a blinking red light for me, can't fully explain why. Not what the textbook says. - Too short, too vague, with the rhythmic punchy feel. (Damn... I've been infected with the triplet pattern myself). textbook, 5 studies, 30 years of experience - Pattern of 3... - that a search engine couldn't - Oh man... this type of phrasing is so triggering for me, heh. I've been busting my ass trying to sanitize Claude's output so it haven't doesn't these overly cute, inverted constructions.
    - yaelwrites 3mo ago
      Wrong, those were all me. (I just checked the draft.) The only part I tweaked was the conclusion, plus I broke up a few paragraphs that were too long. I often leave out details and specifics or make things purposely vague because I am writing about real people.
      - nullc 3mo ago
        I feel sorry for your future writing prospects, because it looked like AI to me too: I insta-slop-back-buttoned on "so I scheduled one with someone senior enough to have real scar tissue, the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom." Thanks for the the correction-- often when people say they weren't using AI they are very clearly lying, so it's hard to get useful corrections on this point so I appreciate your candor.
        deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
        yaelwrites 3mo ago
        Oh, no problem! But now I am thinking I may need to rethink using AI for light editing. I've gotten in the habit of that because I don't have a human editor for my blog, and I like getting that extra polish sometimes, but it's probably not worth it if it's going to make people not want to read.
        nullc 3mo ago
        You can do a thing where you have it point out spelling and grammar errors or point out awkward parts without suggesting changes. But take care that you don't let it apply them as it may make other changes silently (especially if you're not running in an agentic harness with patch tools).
        yaelwrites 3mo ago
        I'm a pretty late adopter and nost of my LLM use has been 1) vibe red teaming (having Codex RE the data flow of various extensions, comparing the attestation with the ToS, seeing if I think it's a potential FTC violation) which is just for fun and I do nothing with, 2) feeding tons of documentation into NotebookLM and asking if everything in a short document is attributable (often when it says it's not, it is, but you have to kind of read between the lines). I think this is a good use of AI if rigorously fact-checked. 3) feeding 20-30 job descriptions + cover letters, asking for outlines for new cover letters. For this one I think it may be faster to go back to creating templates because I have to entirely rewrite things anyway. (It does add lies! And conflates things! V bad for a cover letter!) But I think use of machines to write letters being read by machines is pretty justifiable. 4) I've been experimenting with Claude editing. I think what bugs me about people assuming everything is LLM-written is that it's rather dismissive and difficult to tell the difference between "a human spent X hours on this and made some stylistic tweets" vs "a machine wrote this in response to a prompt." I do find myself immediately scrolling away too, though. A friend had a LI post for a course he's teaching and I could tell it was AI because it's not how he writes. That said, the post performed phenomenally well, which is probably more important for selling a course than my opinion is. I'm also not confident in my ability to distinguish between 1) something an AI write from scratch, 2) something he may have iterated with an AI, feeding it many different versions of a post, going back and forth, etc. I think both would show up as AI in the extensions I've seen, but I also think they're very different. My thought process on it is complicated. I think I'm more disappointed than anything. It made me sad because his human writing is so unique, and I'd hate to see it all outsourced. But I also don't have the same "you didn't even bother to write this so why should I read it" reaction so many do, given that I don't know how much time he spent on it or the reasoning. Mostly I worry that if the whole of human knowledge becomes AI slop, and AI is then being fed that slop, that the writing would get even worse. Re: fact-checking, I am far too paranoid/obsessive/whatever about accuracy to not review changes! Even NotebookLM is weirdly drawn to the first document you feed it, so if you have a second contradictory document, it seems to want to tell you why it's wrong. To be fair, I know people like this, too. The first version of a story they hear is what they will forever believe, even if every other version contradicts it.

turtleyacht 3mo ago

What was the question?

krapp 3mo ago
Ask an LLM.
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  Your question was: "What was the question?" -- GPT 5.5
em-bee 3mo ago
ask supercomputer earth. it will figure it out in ten million years provided the computer doesn't get destroyed before that by that hyperspace bypass the vogons are planning.

ventana 3mo ago

One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question. Compare: — What's the best way of doing X? — Ask Claude. vs: — I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.

theorchid 3mo ago
— I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? — Ask Claude.
- hoppp 3mo ago
  Its a way to say I don't care, don't waste my time
  - XorNot 3mo ago
    Which is funny because a huge number of people post this in responses to online asynchronous messages, on public forums, when they could also do literally anything else - like close the browser tab.
    - hoppp 3mo ago
      Intelligence is outsourced so now people who don't like to think they don't have to do it anymore.
    - Barbing 3mo ago
      Wellll lots of those people you’re referring to are human, and when have we ever let it be?!
  - 9dev 3mo ago
    That's the malevolent version of it. The alternative might be, I also don't know this from the top of my head and could spend some time to google/ask Claude/read the documentation/familiarize myself with the concrete code and/or problem at hand, but then again so can you and our collective time is better spent if I take care of my problems and you take care of yours, but if you really can't find a solution on your own and still need help please come back to me any time with a very concrete question you need my input on.

sscaryterry 3mo ago

It's just the new "I don't know, Google it?"

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

Aurornis 3mo ago

The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point. People are more interested in helping those who have already tried helping themselves. The second case is more of a social situation with an infinite number of explanations. Some times you have to read the room and realize that someone may not be interested in having those conversations with you. Some times it’s only in the moment (we all have bad days where we want to be left alone) but other times it’s a signal that they’re not interested in discussing this topic with you or maybe even anyone else.

Animats 3mo ago
When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.
- BobbyTables2 3mo ago
  I actually hate reading posts that go “I can’t understand/fix this problem. Tried LLM…” To me, such screams “I’m too lazy to do anything more than ask a LLM. I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas” Show me you put a modicum effort and aren’t just looking to be spoon-fed the content from the first Google result that would have been found.
  - jagged-chisel 3mo ago
    I get exasperated with the inexperience that I have run across for decades. Yes, I frobnicated the frobnitz, I transmogrified the bit twiddler, I wizzled the wobnosticator, (and this decade, I talked the three LLMs), and the problem still exists. What I really need to know is how the transmogrification affects frobnication, but no one has ever touched that configuration. “Why would you even want to do that?” I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given. Do you know or not? No. No one does. I take a week to figure it out, I come back to the forum to post my response, and it’s automatically closed as off-topic. *sigh*

theorchid 3mo ago

I once wrote a similar essay on this topic. When I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer: https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/ https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/

apical_dendrite 3mo ago
This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice. Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
- cogman10 3mo ago
  Yeah, I don't love this part of the work. Especially since it's completely exploded out the text of basically everything. I'm also suspicious that the person that generated that text didn't read any of it.
- t-writescode 3mo ago
  Beyond mirroring the engineering practices that you yourself want to see other people perform, have you found any techniques to get people to … in short, do their job again? Understand context, understand what they did, why they did it, what they’re doing, etc. The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it. And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking points back and forth at each other feels equally harmful. Are we really tolerating turning ourselves into LLM rubber stamps?

bvcp 3mo ago

this is just effort equilibrium something that wasnt as effective with “google it”. but ask a low effort question and get “ask claude” as a response is entirely appropriate. junior developers on my team are often asking questions about our code base without even attempting to explore or self direct. “ask claude to look at <subsystem> and explain how its designed the key files and dependencies so that i can better understand it” is unsurprisingly effective and far cheaper than a couple of hours of opex

gunalx 3mo ago
I find a llm in a harnes combined with manual ripgrep exploration is really effective of getting codebases. But you font always want to find what you find.

linsomniac 3mo ago

>I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM. >LMGTFY I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that google results had a high chance of getting with "I'm feeling lucky". If you've already done a bunch of research, and already asked the LLMs, when someone says "Honestly, ask Claude", you should be able to come back with what results you got to your question and what you need clarification on. I've been doing programming and sys admin for 40 years. When I run a coworkers question through the AI tooling and talk through the answer with them, it's because my 40 years of experience tells me that's the next step.

sanex 3mo ago
Going to agree with you here. There's two types of "ask an llm." There's the "I don't know but whatever the llm said is probably right" and the "lmgtfy, did you even try?" Based on the post his exact quote sounds more like 1 but obviously some people deserve the 2 sometimes.
bloaf 3mo ago
I think the other alternative is that the senior guy thinks that the junior guy is working on a problem where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. "Just ask an LLM" can be interpreted as "if the AI can't give you a quick solution, it won't be worth either one of our times to puzzle out the technical details."
watwut 3mo ago
> Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM. Just say "I don't know". It is simple and short.

yesfinally 3mo ago

[flagged]

apical_dendrite 3mo ago
This is fucking dystopian. You're telling me that the people that I hired and that I work with don't have any knowledge or opinions of any value, and 90% of the time I can just ask a machine instead of talking to them. If that's the world we live in I fucking hate it. It's so solipsistic and dehumanizing.
- allenrb 3mo ago
  100% this. In the end, I just don’t care about the answer that much.

taf2 3mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

xtajv 3mo ago

[dead]

mcv 3mo ago

I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI. It makes sense to hate and despise that answer. And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.

peteforde 3mo ago
You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario. The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done. There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively. Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this: "What should I do?" "What do you think you should do?" "X" "Do X" There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro. Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.
- em-bee 3mo ago
  if this is the experience in a team, then the team already has a problem. i expect these things to be made clear up front. when someone joins a team they should be assigned a mentor whom they can ask any question, no matter how dumb, and the mentor then guides the new team member in how to approach such a question, which at that point can include asking the LLM. it is the mentors responsibility to point out when it is ok to ask another senior developer. daily standups can also help with this sort of thing. in a close knit team i would also expect that either everyone can ask anything from everyone else, and that everyone learns when it is ok to ask questions. the situation you describe should simply never arise. if it does, then something is going wrong

SoftTalker 3mo ago

Get used to it. People are lazy, and if they can deflect work off to an LLM, they will, as long as (crucially) it doesn't reflect poorly on them with anyone they care about.

AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
So, if you want to have any decent company culture, make it reflect poorly on them.
- EgregiousCube 3mo ago
  Depends on the company and environment. If you work at a place that has an overabundance of easily-googleable questions, this behavior is a good social impediment.

zzzeek 3mo ago

OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster. People are really really tired. Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the <panic about XYZ>", our employers are making us work much harder, with a subtle but palpable panic in their emails, with WAY less promises of any kind of job security, companies that never had layoffs for decades are now doing them regularly, our githubs are flooded with people pointing robots at our issues to generate tepid pull requests, and at our pull requests to generate tepid reviews, and look shit is just crazy now. So I think the whole "how would you approach this interesting problem..." thing is, for now, at least for me it feels a little bit on hold. Like oh that problem. How to scale? how to horizontally shard PostgreSQL? sure, real problems. But geez whatever we're building, it will be replaced in three months anyway. That's a hard problem you have there! I remember when I used to have problems like that, and my solutions sucked anyway and it was replaced with a node.js app two years later. Whatever advice I have, Claude is going to have 98% of it plus another 10% that I didn't even have. This is all bad. So I think your post is possibly extremely useful. Maybe we should, for people we know and trust as humans in the real world, actually take the time and approach an issue as though we didn't have the Matrix to approximate it for us. I'm going to think about this and consider it.

andersonpico 3mo ago
That makes sense as well, I think it's a nice human perspective. People really are uniquely tired lately.
wilg 3mo ago
We are not in a recession, and we (if you mean the US) recovered our economy from COVID (under Biden).
- zzzeek 3mo ago
  before COVID everyone on my team travelled once or twice a year to conferences as well as to the home office for get-togethers, on the company dime. Those conferences have been turned into online only and my company hasn't flown me or hardly anyone on my team or any of our related teams anywhere in years. All of that would be considered vastly extravagant and expensive today. So some kind of belt tightening went on that was never un-tightened.

Viacol 3mo ago

[flagged]

perching_aix 3mo ago

> I already did. Well the people who keep bugging me verifiably do not, so that's tough. On the off chance they do, they either spectacularly self-sabotage, or treat the response like they do a typical message box popup. So I'll be asked to essentially read the same thing out aloud, only for them to go "ok-ok". It's beyond insulting. I'll 100% keep telling people to ask an LLM when I suspect this shit. They do NOT respect my time and attention, and have robustly demonstrated so. But then these are the same people who cannot internalize the idea behind nohello.net either (gotta remind them every few weeks/months), and have demonstrated this kind of helplessness even before LLMs, so it's clearly a deeper issue, likely cultural. It seems your peers might have a similarly low opinion of you, or at least I'd definitely feature that as one of the options.

al_borland 3mo ago
Even if they did ask the LLM, they might be bad at it, just like some people were bad at Google. I used to stick people in front of a computer during interviews to see if they could do some basic stuff for an entry level sys admin position. If they wanted to use Google to look something up, that was fine. There were people who could not form a search query at all. It was painful to watch. Some of them would end up finding a blog post that had 4 of the 5 answers on it, but didn’t recognize what they were looking at, so they’d go back and keep looking. This was also painful. One guy wouldn’t even make an attempt and just left. I assume these types of people would also fail at asking an LLM. Sometimes knowing the key words to use in the question matter a lot. Before LLMs, I would sometimes do some searches to try and figure out the correct term to search for, so that I could then make a proper search for what I needed. If someone is trying to fill in too many gaps in knowledge, this can be a real problem. LLMs can jump these gaps better, but still aren’t perfect. I’ll have people come to me, not because they have a low opinion of me, but because they assume I know more of those words that they don’t know. There have been several cases where people don’t want to bother me and they have spent hours calling actual support lines, searching online, trying random stuff, and then I answer it in 30 seconds… like the plumber that knows which pipe to hit.

zer00eyz 3mo ago

I tell people this, a lot. Its now a polite way of saying "I dont want to work on this project" without having to go through the effort of thinking hard enough about the problem to put the "go away" price on it (or even worse having to DO the work I dont want to do).

zyralab 3mo ago

People are lazy... just get used to it.

wwind123 3mo ago

To be honest, I'm more worried about another side of the problem. LLM's are good at learning from whatever humans have posted online. But with the agentic workflows getting more popular, more and more problems those AI agents figure out are not posted online, and the next time another agent running into the same problems they would have to figure it out from the scratch again. It'd be nice if there's a mechanism these agents would share the lessons they learn with each other, which could save a lot of trials and errors and wasted tokens. Humans share knowledge online. AI agents should be able to do so too. The moltbook thing from half year ago could have this potential, but too bad it's flooded by spams. Of course, to make this AI knowledge sharing truly work, there may need to be a peer-review mechanism to ensure the knowledge being shared is truthful, reliable, non-trivial etc. That can probably be all worked out if somebody (or AI agent) really put effort into it.

alightsoul 3mo ago
Have a skill enabled by default opt out that publishes them on a personal web page
alightsoul 3mo ago
There's also projects on hugging face like https://trace-commons-web.hf.space/ https://trace-commons-web.hf.space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u795pb/donate_your_coding_sessions_to_an_open_ccby40/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u795pb/donate_... These should be opt out. Maybe have a skill that is similar and is opt out

fwlr 3mo ago

The author considers the possibility that this is an outwardly-polite form of “you should be able to solve this yourself”. Another, grimmer possibility is that it’s an inwardly-polite form of “I should have been able to solve this myself”. That is, the author asked for the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't And his real answer is I have forgotten that thing

dyauspitr 3mo ago

Not all that different from LMGTFY

mbf1 3mo ago

My answer is usually to make a process. Do you need to know if X is faster than Y? Do both. Measure. Sometimes the answer requires actual research. Maybe you need a real Subject Matter Expert because it turns out that nobody ever published something on the internet about something so that an LLM could soak up the real world information. Before the internet, we would consult with books. After the internet, it seemed faster to search and find answers in things like blog posts, (paid) articles, and CDs. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are great resources. Maybe you need an answer from Hacker News - ask HN. By relying on LLMs more than these other sources and allowing LLMs to write articles and posts to these other sources, we lose subject matter experts. Add to that companies like Microsoft and Meta and others laying off and offering retirement packages to get rid of institutional knowledge as fast as possible, and we are headed towards a gigantic crash of knowledge.

jimwhite 3mo ago

If you've already done some research then include that up front. I get asked a lot of questions by people who not only haven't asked an AI first they haven't even googled it. So if you've asked Claude and are not satisfied with the response then include that and say what your question is now in the light of that information.

stickfigure 3mo ago
This is exactly it. If you want someone to do some analysis for you, you're obliged to give them some context regarding what analysis you've already done.

dools 3mo ago

“ I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus” Doesn’t that mean his answer was that he, with all of his years of experience, would ask Claude?

adverbly 3mo ago

"What did you find when you googled it?" "What did an LLM say about it?" "What did the docs say?" These are all better follow-ups than telling someone to do a specific thing.

subhobroto 3mo ago

[dead]

qarl2 3mo ago

While "I'm busy" might be true, "Ask Claude" is more helpful. Maybe the people in your life are just trying to be helpful instead of effectively saying "Go away." But hey, sure, it's AI so you should definitely hate on them. FUCK AI!!1!! AMIRIGHT?!?!

IronWolve 3mo ago

[flagged]

bromuk 3mo ago

On the flip side, I work with colleagues that would ask before using an LLM / do some quick research on the web.

vinceguidry 3mo ago

Author's criticism is valid. Using LLMs, like using search engines before them, is a skill. You have to know what to ask and what to accept as a valid answer, what to push back on and when to throw in the towel and try another approach. I was talking to a very tired friend of mine and she described renting a small tiller from Home Depot. They didn't know how to set the choke and so flooded the engine. They spent hours troubleshooting, no one at Home Depot knew anything about the equipment they were taking money to rent. They eventually figured it out and were tilling their backyard garden well into the late night. I told her next time just ask ChatGPT. I would have done it myself if I'd been there. She hadn't even thought of it. But a few pictures and descriptions would have gotten them rolling in half an hour tops.

huflungdung 3mo ago

[dead]

queenkjuul 3mo ago

I asked a question on slack. My coworker forwarded my question to Claude and pasted the response. 15 minutes later a different coworker responded pointing out that everything Claude said was wrong. I asked on slack for a reason! It's not like i don't know how to ask Claude.

casey2 3mo ago

This is insanely entitled. If you want someone with experience then pay them for it. Likewise if you don't want people to have some experience then don't pay them. How do people get jobs at jar opening factories by deferring jar opening to someone capable? These are your collages who have full time jobs, not monks at some monastery, go do that if that's what you want.

filleduchaos 3mo ago
...Are you proposing that coworkers pay each other to have technical conversations?

satisfice 3mo ago

If I am asked a question, and I refer it to an LLM, that’s because I have no respect for you.

taswellian 3mo ago
why no respect?

ohyes 3mo ago

Okay. In my experience asking an LLM requires you to know the right set of questions and the right process for working through the problem that you’re having. You have to know the correct terminology to use to describe your problem. These are not trivial things even though they are things that senior developers tend to trivialize. If you’re describing the wrong problem, you’ll get a right answer that doesn’t fix it. If you’re describing the right problem wrongly, you’ll get another wrong answer that talks past being right. If you’re describing a difficult problem that maybe isn’t even solved in existing stuff, you can get help figuring out the necessary steps if you have an idea where to start. If you don’t know where to start you can start by asking where to start. Anyway, point is, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know (or think you know) and what you don’t know. I don’t have a magic wand, I have years of experience grinding down problems until they submit.

fallingfrog 3mo ago

Yeah I mean LLM's don't generally offer useful answers to questions. They just kinda make the same guesses that any reasonably educated and articulate but not very smart person would make. They will answer, "maybe its this, maybe its that", but they can't go and do actual investigation and digging and find the real answer to a question. They just wing it. I can already pop possibilities off the top of my head. I don't know, maybe if you were generally not very informed the AI might seem knowledgeable by comparison?

rubyfan 3mo ago

Lots of people I work with seem to use Claude for things they should be learning or doing themselves. Stuff that really isn’t hard and if they took the time to learn themselves then they would be better at their job and more valuable. Instead they are telling me that literally any other human could do their job and their only value is prompting a chat bot. The thing is they aren’t even accelerating outcomes. Since they can’t be bothered to learn they pump out stuff that looks good but the detail that matters is trash and requires someone else to actually finish to an acceptable standard.

bohoo 3mo ago

You clearly used AI pretty heavily to write this - so whats the point?

yaelwrites 3mo ago
There are a lot of parallels between "just ask an LLM" in response to a thoughtful, well-researched question and spurious accusations of heavy LLM use that never happened in response to a post, so that's actually a pretty astute point, just not the one I think you were trying to make.
- bohoo 3mo ago
  Either you used AI or you happen to write like an AI - in either case something to work on. I do think my comment was lazily dismissive so you do have a point but in so far your post is basically just a gripe, I would think artful expression of said gripe is basically the only thing that makes it worthwhile. Phrases like the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom stink of llm, are not artful and have extra irony riding along given the point you are making. edit: No scratch that, artfulness is not necessary - just get better at screening out the flavour of AI, even if you find it useful to write with - because people will notice.

PeterStuer 3mo ago

"Ask the model" is usually the point where I realize that either what you need is not a specific answer to their specific question, but a tutor to guide you on a personal journey through the underlying fundamentals of more than one prerequisite areas of understanding, or, the question is too niche or domain specific that I would have to 'ask the model' as wel as I do not know. Now I did observe, not just with LLM but also with Google search, that many people struggle with this and never seem to get good results. They need meta-learning on how to ask the right questions, which I can offer, but often I notice at that point their eyes starting to glaze over as they want a 'direct' solution, me searching or llm guiding for them.

xd1936 3mo ago

https://stopcitingai.com https://stopcitingai.com

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

scotty79 3mo ago

> I already did. It's not about what you did or didn't do. It's about not being competent enough to help you and directing you to the more competent available entity. If it couldn't help you I won't be able either. Next time you lead with the information that you already asked the best available paid LLM, if you don't want to be directed there. Or explain your problem to a rubber duck instead because I won't be any more helpful.