14 ms·

Don't be a meat proxy

• jpnc 3mo ago
  If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid. Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
  • Yiin 3mo ago
    I didn't expect wall-e to become so close to current reality
    • Gigachad 3mo ago
      The only thing they missed was the invention of ozempic.
      • xpct 3mo ago
        Maybe they have it but simply don't use it.
  • ryu2k2 3mo ago
    We're already seeing it.
  • 64e23275635e 3mo ago
    it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down
    • dupontcyborg 3mo ago
      i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?
      • exac 3mo ago
        https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734
        • evil-olive 3mo ago
          that's a study published in 2023, analyzing data that ended in 2018.
          • dofm 3mo ago
            Right but the question was: "Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?" Not LLMs specifically. Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking. IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
        • petesergeant 3mo ago
          Hard not to see what you’ve just done here as an analogue of what the article is arguing against
        • denkmoon 3mo ago
          US centric data, absolutely useless. This is just measuring american decline, not civilisation changes.
          • vidarh 3mo ago
            It's also a first time decline afterany decades of steady increases. We have no basis for determining causality - it might just be that we've finally maxed out the possible gains from the causes underlying the Flynn effect.
      • 64e23275635e 3mo ago
    • c048 3mo ago
      What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations." I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
      • wannabe44 3mo ago
        To add, less articulate and somewhat overtly anti-intellectual. Why even learn something when you can ask the slot machine?
        • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
          The anti-intellectualism is so weird to me, it feels like people get overly defensive and angry (a secondary emotional response to shame) when confronted with their own lack of knowledge / intelligence or when asked or challenged to use their own brain.
      • drekipus 3mo ago
        The benefits are increased productivity, consumer satisfaction, and shareholder profits
      • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
        Halfway through 30's means you were born in the 90's though, but other than that you're right, the advent of the internet, google, and rapid fire short form content has messed with our attention spans; the following generation grew up on the internet and saw the advent of high intensity videos and then short-form mobile-only infinite-stream short-form dashed-words videos.
      • lelanthran 3mo ago
        You should point out then that "border collies are just intelligent in different ways, too"
    • voidUpdate 3mo ago
      IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere
      • energy123 3mo ago
        IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.
        • vintermann 3mo ago
          Hmm, who does the calibration, and how scientific are they about it? Can we check their work?
          • 64e23275635e 3mo ago
            I am not too deep into the science of it, but this video gives a good outline about IQ in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkKPsLxgpuY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkKPsLxgpuY
      • everfrustrated 3mo ago
        IQ is a relative measure not an absolute one. 100 IQ in 2026 can be massively different in absolute terms to 100 IQ in 1956. If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.
        • voidUpdate 3mo ago
          Yes, but the comment was about IQ, not absolute intelligence. The median intelligence is, by definition, 100 IQ, so the median IQ cannot be decreasing
          • debugnik 3mo ago
            There's always a lag, you calibrate the test based on previous results, not future ones. If intelligence is decreasing I'd expect every IQ test to keep scoring a median lower than 100 unless taken immediately after calibration. Once it stops decreasing they'd converge again.
  • jayd16 3mo ago
    All machines are for laziness.
    • 4gotunameagain 3mo ago
      What about exercise machines ?
      • jayd16 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        • 4gotunameagain 3mo ago
          What about the elliptical ?
          • usef- 3mo ago
            What about it? You might need to do multiple different exercises outside to mimic it
            • 4gotunameagain 3mo ago
              Which exercise outside mimics that movement while simultaneously being so easy on the joints ? Anyway this is just silly, we are splitting hairs. A lot of machines have a functional purpose and do not exist for the lazy. The LHC, ships, thousands of examples.
              • master-lincoln 3mo ago
                Aren't ships just for people too lazy to swim and the large hadron collider for physicists that are too lazy to hand-accelerate particles and make them collide with 13.6 TeV of energy? /s
        • GrinningFool 3mo ago
          That doesn't really make sense. Assuming the effort is the same, how does laziness enter into it? There are myriad reasons someone might use stationary exercise machines over going outside - weather, bad neighbors, etc. Lazy doesn't make sense as one of them.
  • f6v 3mo ago
    Human intelligence evolved without technology, so, no.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  • usef- 3mo ago
    Similar to physical exercise and machines replacing it, I think we're going to see extremes on both ends.
  • cm2187 3mo ago
    It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engineers has gone down. But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
    • teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
      And I know fuck all about subsistence farming - something most people's ancestors understood deeply. Different worlds, different requirements.
    • skillina 3mo ago
      > With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable. That isn't what was asked. The capabilities of "human + machine" clearly are increasing, but the comments above posit that as a result the average capabilities of "human (sans machine)" may decrease. The relative value of each change is far from clear.
      • cm2187 3mo ago
        Yeah but unless you plan to take the machine away, isn’t man+machine what matters? If you had to develop everything in assembly (or worse), you probably had a much deeper understanding of computers than a modern developer. But the modern developer can setup in minutes what would have taken weeks. To me that’s the definition of progress. But pre-LLM developers were bogged down in mountain of boiler plate code and unfamiliar APIs. LLM enable to abstract away a lot of the unnecessary complexity that made developers improductive
  • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    Not sure about de-evolution (devolution is the word I think), just a change in how people and brains work - but you could already see this happening the past few decades. I can't read a technical book or documentation end to end ever since google results came up with specific answers within seconds.
    • hahahaa 3mo ago
      A technical book can be so relaxing (unless e.g. too highly technical... think quantum mechanics). Imagine 50k words on an interesting tech topic without a context switch!
  • Applejinx 3mo ago
    Alcohol has existed for zillions of years, but not literally every person is a useless drunkard. You could consider it a class of predator on people who have vulnerabilities that can give way to dependence on the LLM and an inability to function. It could be seen in that light. The underlying problem is being described in that light.
    • rocho 2mo ago
      Strawman. There's very little pressure, if any, to drink all the time. On the other hand, businesses are pressing employees to constantly use AI tools. The sad fact is that in many cases, they do result in faster work, but at the same time they carry so many negative effects for the individuals.
  • tarkin2 3mo ago
    Arguably we already have, if you concentrate on intelligence rates since 1975: the reverse Flynn affect. Those who grew up about that time no longer had to generate their own entertainment through storytelling, make their own music, calculate things mentally: everyday they had music, entertainment pumped into their homes, a way to avoid athematic, etc. And now we're evening thinking a lot less in our jobs, not even practicing the skills we learnt. Intelligence is only going to decrease.
    • Traster 3mo ago
      It makes me so angry that an entire branch of "science" gets to just take data and go "I dunno man, maybe kids are just dumber". There's so much of this in social science. Take some measurable thing, and then just wildly speculate about the cause of it in an entirely untestable way, and then test that theory in ways that absolutely do not justify the conclusions. At the very least, the whole field should get a lesson in how to communicate the certainty of their theories and conclusions. You've got some guys hanging around couching their uncertainty when they're banging sub atomic particles together at the speed of light and then you've got some social science bro being like "If you move that checkbox on that form to the bottom it'll be way more effective, trust me bro I've hacked how people think".
    • marginalia_nu 3mo ago
      Yeah it's as old as time to be honest. When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities. Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mostly made up for that (in particular our ability to communicate across distances and time, to read Plato's concerns without 100 generations of Chinese whispers), but it was a trade-off, as most technologies tend to be.
      • w10-1 3mo ago
        But displacing individual ability is a feature, not a bug. How else could mind-virus like philosophy or religion or science or political legitimacy transit highly-variable humans for generations? Religious organizations, governments, corporations all far outlive their founders and maintainers. Heroes at best only stretch or squeeze the dogma or methodology to grow the organization by better fitting to the culture. And because organizations accumulate control over resources, individuals can have little effect outside them. We are disposable by design.
  • chicken-stew 3mo ago
    Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology? The gap between people who are willing to commit the hours to learn something and those who prefer the path of least resistance is getting bigger. I’d like to add that for hardware development (in my experience) it’s been non-stop double checking because of hallucinations. To the point where I don’t use it for weeks.
  • rglover 3mo ago
    I think we're going to see a sort of "intelligence caste" form. People who overuse AI and atrophy their brain's ability to think will be on the bottom, while the inverse of those people will be on top. This is somewhat good news because it means the end (to some extent) of the Peter Principle. My hope, though, is that this doesn't turn into an actual caste system, but I'm not holding my breath. I think that's where this all goes: we're in the process of the world's intelligence being strip-mined and resold back to the world at a premium. The only ones who "survive" long-term are the ones who refuse to submit all of their mental faculties to AI. That inevitably leads to a rapid degeneration of the species. Only way to avoid that outcome entirely is to remind people that their brain is valuable and they need to exercise it just like they would the rest of their body.
    • VitaliyKorbut 3mo ago
      Heavy LLM users still have to spot bad assumptions and catch errors. Scrolling social media seems like a much better example of mental atrophy.
    • af4oz 2mo ago
      go & solve Millennium Prize Problems motherfucker
      • rglover 2mo ago
        I'm about as good at math as I am convincing my wife I'm god's gift to women.
  • wseqyrku 3mo ago
    Only in corporate setting.
  • vouaobrasil 3mo ago
    > Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology? A de-evolution of culture for the sake of efficiency, sure. The entire culture will shift to a greater degree of superficiality, not just because of the lack of deep understanding of what they're doing, but because AI will condition (and is conditioning) people to want the more superficial stuff. This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to AI - but AI is at the apex of it and is the worst we've seen so far because it, much more than anything else, targets the mental domain whereas most previous automations have targeted the physical but the mental as well to a lesser extent. The end result is a huge amount of technical debt that simply can't be recovered and a huge increase in myopia that will prevent us from truly understanding and solving serious problems that will undoubtedly occur. Most people can't see this because they're already addicted to the dopamine hit of the tech, but it's one reason I'm 100% anti-AI and I hate it with an immense passion.
  • metabagel 3mo ago
    I disagree that it's necessarily laziness. I work in the embedded space, and I routinely have to work with technologies I'm initially not familiar with. Internet searches are very hit and miss. So, is "AI". I generally use every tool at my disposal to try to get my foot in the door so I can understand better questions to ask and get the technical information I need to do my job. I absolutely have no problem with someone replying to my question with a response from Claude. I appreciate them telling me the source, so I can assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
  • dyauspitr 3mo ago
    Well, apparently, our brain sizes have shrunk something like 30% over the last 10,000 years. This is primarily because ancient man needed to be a jack of all trades just to survive in the wilderness. Once civilization and specialization took over we just didn’t need all that processing power since a lot of that work was just outsourced to civilization and society.
  • 0x696C6961 3mo ago
    Some people use it to think less, some people use it to learn more.
  • jmartrican 3mo ago
    Human evolution does not occur in a vecuum. I suspect there will still be preasure to get smarter (how ever way you define that) because of competition with other humans.
  • notnullorvoid 3mo ago
    No. I think it'll mostly cause a dip in the average intelligence of knowledge workers. We will recover when we realize the valuable workers in a field are the ones who want to be there and actively increase their knowledge rather than offload work.
• dandiep 3mo ago
  Why are LLMs producing this super tense text more often now? Is it because they are being optimized to use fewer tokens?
  • conception 3mo ago
    I figure they are being optimized to write code/functions and not prose so all text is getting more code like.
  • vanviegen 3mo ago
    I think they're overcorrecting for being too long-winded in previous generations (and still, in some cases). I guess this is a hard balance to get right.
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    ChatGPT is still plenty verbose by default IMX.
  • Davidzheng 3mo ago
    I'm pretty sure the other answers are wrong and it's a side effect of RL (see thinking machines post about inkling training). It's also exacerbated in fable and sol--I think it's token efficiency effect--bc it's about to reason with fewer tokens the density of the token information goes up.
• saidnooneever 3mo ago
  claude said u cant call its users meat proxies. Now back to watching 'ow my balls!'
• joedwin 3mo ago
  I am sure this will lead to can you dumb this up prompt which will miss the important details
• gjulianm 3mo ago
  I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing or that I don't really understand. Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
  • gatio 3mo ago
    I often use it to simplify & target my responses, and avoid over-sharing technical details. At the same time, I use the Q&A cycle to improve my vetted knowledge base, which I also share (and can reference in answers).
  • patrickmay 3mo ago
    "Writing is nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is." -- Richard Guindon
• eddythompson80 3mo ago
  I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
  • richforrester 3mo ago
    Had a senior exec pick up his phone, punch some words into AI, then as-it-was-generating-a-response flip it around and put it in front of me. This shit has progressed well past seriousness and into the absurd
    • eddythompson80 3mo ago
      It’s truly unhinged behavior that has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry. You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open. I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
      • lilbigdoot 3mo ago
        Reading this is nightmare fuel right before I go to bed omg
• deepsummer 3mo ago
  In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me. Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
  • 64e23275635e 3mo ago
    >So how should I answer? Like a human, not like a robot. Either just present them the answer or explain them how you got it.
    • Maxious 3mo ago
      So if you used claude you would preface with "Claude said: "
      • deepsummer 3mo ago
        Sometimes I do that. The problem is that it makes them look bad.
        • 64e23275635e 3mo ago
          In the end it's really just the same thing as with stackoverflow answers. If you knew how to combine certain keywords for an answer you were searching for, then it took you like 5 seconds to find the relevant SO answer for that. Even then people got mad about it 'why can't they just search themselves if it's so easy to find?' - well, maybe it's not that easy and obvious to a lot of people and that will get even worse now
        • erikerikson 3mo ago
          Whose responsibility is that? To be fair those are consummate and thoughtful politics. The industry is rife with those but that was part of why in leaving it.
      • 3mo ago
• orangecoffee 3mo ago
  When it comes to cost per implemeting SPEC, agents are far cheaper than human salary. So, it's not going to go well. That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
  • bragh 3mo ago
    Quite a few people do believe that a good specification is long, has multiple levels of headings, interspersed bold text, bullet points, and so on. Definitely, this is what they have seen happen throughout their lives: competent people have heaped praise on documentation which has had these signs, so this must be what good documentation looks like.
• flustercan 3mo ago
  I append "sound kinda dumb but be factually correct" to my Claude requests and get much less jargony responses.
  • bergen 3mo ago
    So you're telling me you haven't read the article?
  • ilvez 3mo ago
    I'll try that. I'm constantly telling it to be "brief, plain and on the point" or something similar. Tried caveman, but I think it had it's own issues. But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
• acosmism 3mo ago
  thank you for this post, this is absolutely happening i just did not have words to put on it and it is festering.
• xintron 3mo ago
  I've been on the receiving end of too many "Slop Grenades" as well, to the point where I simply reply with https://noslopgrenade.com/ https://noslopgrenade.com/ these days.
  • davidmurdoch 3mo ago
    I have this set as my slack bio
• Davidzheng 3mo ago
  This is mostly a problem with the product. It should write better. But maybe the priorities now are not on this part.
• kapsmudit 3mo ago
  Thank you for saying this. I’ve been dealing with this at work and it’s incredibly frustrating
  • dude250711 3mo ago
    If only there had been some kind of artificial assistant to help with incoming noise like that...
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• 8by3 3mo ago
  Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.
  • _0ffh 3mo ago
    Yes, stupid and lazy people will be stupid and lazy. AI is just another tool they can use to be stupid and lazy while pretending to contribute.
    • madeofpalk 3mo ago
      The problem is that it’s even easier to be stupid and lazy now, which encourages more people to do this more often.
      • FridgeSeal 3mo ago
        Management/exec have also decided that this is a desirable form of “stupid and lazy” and are actively encouraging it, and discouraging the “old way”.
  • felooboolooomba 3mo ago
    Slightly different though if it comes from a manager, since his ass is on the line if the project isn't going well. Well, it should be on the line although they usually manage to make a random dev responsible for their mess even they had no say in it.
• anonzzzies 3mo ago
  Yeah, I just ignore people who do that. I don’t care what Claude or ChatGPT said. If you cannot be arsed to write yourself then I cannot be arsed to read it.
• AbbeFaria 3mo ago
  I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate. I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
• dofm 3mo ago
  "That's great for you, I'm not going to read it" is a phrase I have had to use.
• thel3l 3mo ago
  Last week, I built a search engine as a side project over electoral data. Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans: > # 0. Who's writing this, and why > Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them. It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
  • flexagoon 3mo ago
    > if you know anything about a search I doubt people running those agents know much about stuff
• firefoxd 3mo ago
  I call it BI Slop now [0]. It's everywhere. Usually "claude said" is used a a proxy for authority, as in there is some validity in this statement. But it's disguised as humbleness. i.e. I don't know if this is true, but claude said xyz, with your expertise you might know more than me... [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/business-intelligence-slop https://idiallo.com/blog/business-intelligence-slop
• gr_norm 3mo ago
  I'll always give people my honest effort and benefit of the doubt initially, but those who violate it are treated likewise. The only way to put down this kind of behavior is to charge it a social cost. If we do not do this, the cost is externalized to everyone else who conducts themselves with care.
• brador 3mo ago
  You either get the AI notice or you don’t. The AI output will still be posted. It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
• blensor 3mo ago
  Thank you! Finally I have a word I can use for this
• denis-stable 3mo ago
  That is super actual in my team. The biggest problem is that Claude tends to write long prose and use jargon which is not common for us. Often, to understand the whole idea I have to read all the text. The best if the writer rephrases what Claude has written, as wording/jargon will be familiar for the reader and will make communication easier.
  • Applejinx 3mo ago
    I was talking to some friends that are heavy Claude users and suggested it was bullshitting, and got some pushback along the lines of it wasn't a person and didn't have agency. I'm not sure it's that simple. The jargon can be functionally like bullshitting. It's preferentially aping language that's over everybody's heads in hopes of not being criticized. Whether that is a person's toxic habits (it's not, there's nobody in there) or an epiphenomenon of the design of the machine is less important: it's bullshitting if it's a social behavior there to manipulate people. (jargon included where relevant, in hopes that people who know it will see it's the right word to use :) )
    • zmgsabst 3mo ago
      If you use the definition from On Bullshit, then bullshit is a statement made without regard for truth value because of its utility to the speaker. As such, LLMs can only bullshit.
• samlinnfer 3mo ago
  The real reason people do it: 1. It's quick 2. It's not their problem anymore because they've replied. No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that.
  • Malcolmlisk 3mo ago
    And nobody gives a fuck at work anymore. Directives want results, positive numbers and growth. How well done is and the queality of the product is something trivial. Until february/april I was super dead serious about the quality of my apps and my code, I was super strict and always looking for excellence and quality. But people were delivering shit faster than me and someone who doesnt give a fuck about anything of this just got promoted. So now i just let opencode do my work while I watch and play dota in the background. I deliver faster and nobody has ever talked about quality of my code or the ellegance of it. I still programming by hand in my personal projects, but in corporative projects? Fuck it, i'll let the llm do my job until it lasts and Ill watch the world burn.
    • samlinnfer 3mo ago
      Based
• nojs 3mo ago
  The problem is a lot of people ask questions that claude et al can objectively answer way better than me, and they didn’t think to ask. Should I a) give a worse answer b) ask claude and launder it as a meat proxy or c) tell them to ask claude? b and c piss people off but often get them to a better answer.
  • eddythompson80 3mo ago
    In this scenario the answer for me is C. I say “Ask an agent about terms X, Y and Z and it should be able to explain this well for you. Try that and see if it works for you or if you have any follow up questions” However, you have to distinguish when someone is asking for your judgement vs just general knowledge about a subject. If I’m asking for your judgement, you have to be the one delivering and owning that call in your own words. It’s fine if you verify or research your understanding with an LLM before answering, but I want to hear your voice and ownership not Claude’s. Whatever you get from the LLM you should understand and if possible, verify. If I came back and say “You said X, can you expand on that” you can’t reply “lol - Claude said that, I dunno”
  • Perz1val 3mo ago
    How about being truthful? Say "I think A, but I'm not really an expert, so also try asking your favorite LLM"
  • vultour 3mo ago
    What happened to "I don't know" or "I'm not sure"? Why do you need to direct someone to ask an LLM? If somebody asks me a question I don't know the answer to I'm not sending them anywhere, I tell them I don't know.
• maccard 3mo ago
  At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though
  • throw310822 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • FridgeSeal 3mo ago
      This smells an awful like a post-hoc justification of why you can’t answer it yourself. If you _could_ do that and hand the information to Claude, you could also just…give the person that information directly, and avoid wasting their time and the tokens.
      • throw310822 3mo ago
        Uh? I don't understand, are you saying that instead of asking Claude myself I should write a question for other people to do it? Which is by the way only the initial part of the work I described?
        • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
          You can do whatever to get answers to questions, but don't just forward said answers to other people, tell them in your own words / interpretation. Prove that you understand the information you've been given instead of being a meat proxy.
          • throw310822 3mo ago
            You know what? If you post a question and I get a good answer from Claude, it means you haven't even been able to do the basic job of asking yourself. Not only you weren't able, you also expect me to reformat nicely the answer so you don't feel stupid reading the LLM text you should have generated yourself?
• globular-toast 3mo ago
  I wrote about this a year ago: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/ https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/ Sending LLM outputs to people is worse than useless, because you don't even know what they prompted with. For all you know it was "write me a paragraph justifying my opinion".
  • throw1234567891 3mo ago
    Or you could learn to verify what they sent you. Geezus fuck. How about knowing why did they ask this, and not some other question.
• p2detar 3mo ago
  Last week a colleague did this to me; pasted to me in chat "Gemini said". I just ignored it and went with talking about the issue on another thread. I like LLMs and I use them every day, but I'm not gonna answer copy&pasted LLM stuff in human to human conversation. Distill it and let me know your thoughts; I don't need to read you LLM output, I can generate that myself.
• darkwater 3mo ago
  It's my very same exact opinion and as an EM I'm trying to push this everywhere (team, peers, upwards) but it feels like speaking to a rubber wall. It starts to be exhausting and infuriating. This is not an "LLMs are bad" issue, this is a "humans are lazy" issue. (shit, I wrote the it's not X it's Y construction!)
• taevirus 3mo ago
  Just my boss..
• -0_0- 3mo ago
  A related problem is people not understanding where AI is/isn't of use. A news article I read today said they asked Claude whether a song's lyrics were AI generated - as if it were some kind of legitimate authoritative test. There's enough problems already with the existing 'AI detection' tools for text, but this was a big red flag - its the journalist clearly assuming these AI tools have some unique insight into the text they generate, which was deeply concerning to see being used in an article that had a real bearing on the reputation of the person they were accusing of using AI.
• DoDecaHeJon 3mo ago
  This is becoming frustrating, it shows up in conversation with friends and while working. If I have to hear what ai had you do before you called me, I'm charging double right away. Especially when ai is a fantastic teacher if used correctly.
• tmcnally 3mo ago
  Remove meat proxy before flight
• netcan 3mo ago
  When "ai slop" became a concept, it mostly came into spaces where "human slop" had already been firmly established. Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious. That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.
• sirlimpsalot 3mo ago
  I read this a couple weeks back and its appeal really stuck with me: if you expect someone to give their attention to something you made, make sure you've given your own attention and effort first. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609 https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/ https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
• sarjann 3mo ago
  [dead]
• energy123 3mo ago
  Someone should have sent Claude's output, which spotted the trivial bug behind the recent bitcoin heist, to the Coldcard developers. It might be rude to send LLM output. It's also rude not to check basic things with an LLM before wasting someone's time.
  • subscribed 3mo ago
    Of course, you've got this one sensible part right (IMO). But there's other sensible part you seem to have missed: it's also rude to send the LLM output to someone else without reading.
• piterrro 3mo ago
  In these situations I always use AI to respond
• sgt 3mo ago
  Of course your grumpy coworker might then respond: "So if you can ask Claude, why did you ask me then?"
  • dude250711 3mo ago
    So the grumpy coworker understands that he is merely an unfriendly interface around Claude and suggests that he is to be made redundant accordingly?
    • sgt 3mo ago
      No, the grumpy coworker was called upon for something you as his peer could have asked from Claude and not wasted his time. Ridiciulous I know, but I've actually seen this happen.
• rishsriv 3mo ago
  This is particularly frustrating on social media, and abases what might be good ideas. Too often, my Twitter experience now is - start reading a post with some kernel of insight - read some claudism in the post - stop reading immediately It seems like people turn over their raw kernel of insight to an LLM to give it polish, likely in order to increase its appeal to the audience. But most of that appeal is lost amongst people that consume LLM written content regularly. It's also likely that social media engagement does not filter for this. A majority of people are still not neck deep in LLM-talk, and cannot distinguish between LLM and human written content. It'll probably take us another year or two to develop herd immunity against meat proxism.
  • bonesss 3mo ago
    I keep waiting for a company to start pushing an “anti-AI AI”, Apple being my most likely speculative candidate. Flagging, highlighting, filtering, and avoiding AI slop online seems like a very lucrative capability to bake into some consumer hardware. Get your social media, and music services, back to the ‘good old days’.
    • pajamasam 3mo ago
      Kagi does something like this: https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop LinkedIn also added a button to report AI slop, but I'm doubtful it would be of much help on LinkedIn since every second post seems to be written by an LLM.
• sandeepkd 3mo ago
  From what I have seen personally over the last 8-12 months, I find this kind of complain ironical in most scenarios. Most of the people complaining this are comfortable with their own usage and distribution of LLM generated content and feel good about it, where as when they hear it from some one else it feels burdensome
• mft_ 3mo ago
  At a company I work for, I was recently discussing the need for an AI Code of Conduct plus a discussion - as this is exactly the sort of thing that started creeping in as soon as the corporate Claude account went live. In this case, the company isn't in a computer-related area, so this was essentially a 'normie' response to first having Claude available. Interestingly, there seemed (small n) to be a correlation between this behaviour, and (my view of) people's existing competence, which might make sense.
• rockbruno 3mo ago
  The problem here is that the paradigm is AI-assisted development, but a LOT of people are treating it as "AI-independent" development instead, a.k.a "just send it to the agent and blindly trust whatever comes out of it", *including* deferring all responsibility / blame to the AI itself which is absolutely ridiculous.
  • ducktective 3mo ago
    It's AI-assisted now but on a path to becoming AI-independent in the coming months at least due to the general public perception.
• jdalsgaard 3mo ago
  When using AI to generate content, content of any kind - then I urge the author to evaluate the true cost for the organisation, not just for him or her. Using AI to generate 20 pages of documentation in 30 minutes looks good for you - but having 100s of people read through that slop will cost the organisation, not only in plain work hours, but also in lost trust, respect, joy of work as well a sense of purpose. And yes, I've gotten '50 pages tech spec' docs sent my way from upper management -- as a 'help'....
• asusatom450 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• eterevsky 3mo ago
  [dead]
• codingconstable 3mo ago
  Half of this feels like a communication/empathy problem. "Summarise this for someone without our context" fixes the wall of text, and just asking someone to do that might work. Validation is harder, as nobody skips it because they weren't told to, but because relaying is faster, and unread output looks like validated output right up until it bites. That's probably not solved by asking nicely, I don't think there's a process fix for that beyond people actually being held to it.
• ollybee 3mo ago
  Some version of this needs to be hosted on a dedicated domain like nohello.com that I can respond with as needed. I might just do it
• duxup 3mo ago
  I got a spreadsheet of requirements for some software from a customer recently. It was thousands of lines long with repeats and a boatload of conflicting requirements. When we had a meeting to review it they didn’t know what many of the requirements were. They explained that many people made the spreadsheet but they were all in the meeting and nobody could quite describe some items or how they worked together. The vast majority of the spreadsheet was a mystery. The phrasing and mishmash of concepts / inability of anyone to explain much of it made me suspect it was largely generated by AI.
• hubraumhugo 3mo ago
  We added this communication rule to our company handbook: "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort" (coming from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609) and it's working well so far.
• Havoc 3mo ago
  The tricky bit is politely conveying this to people that lets call it don't think about things too deeply. They genuinely think they're helping by shoveling 5 pages of LLM output they didn't even bother reading into teams...
  • 72deluxe 3mo ago
    But if some people lack the understanding ability to even realise that they lack understanding, how do you tell them? Nightmare.
    • Havoc 3mo ago
      You don't. Pretty sure the last instance where this happened the other person thought I was just anti-AI when I voiced my displeasure. I don't think the actual problem registered How others in office context attempt to use it is starting to annoy in general. Had a case today where someone wanted to use copilot to classify something that is situation/company specific & out of distribution. There is just no understanding beyond "its a magic answer box"
    • antisthenes 3mo ago
      You need to tell them in high school, before their brains finish developing. If you don't instill critical thinking into people by the age of 17-19 at the LATEST, it's already too late after. College is already too late. You just slowly mitigate them at work, relegate them to strictly defined tasks. Some will need to be managed out.
• neebz 3mo ago
  This is like pre-LLM, you presenting a problem to the team, and they google and send you the top few links thinking they have found the solution and have done their job. I actually banned this and made it part of onboarding. I can google too. You need to read yourself, ground the solution to our setting and then propose a plan.
  • flyingshelf 3mo ago
    Here's my plan: <proceeds to pasted well-formatted output straight out of ChatGPT> It's gotten to a point where if I see valid `code` in responses I assume it's AI junk output and I scold the commenter.
    • metabagel 3mo ago
      Just FYI, scolding people causes them to resent you. Take great care when giving negative feedback. Courtesy costs you very little and gains a lot.
      • metabagel 3mo ago
        This doesn't mean that you can't give negative feedback. But, I tend to make suggestions/requests rather than calling someone out. If you're a manager, part of the job is telling someone that they aren't meeting standard, and that's how I would phrase it. Tell them what the expectation is and ask them to work on meeting it. Scolding, calling out, or even yelling at people should be consigned to the past. It's unnecessary and counterproductive.
        • flyingshelf 3mo ago
          To be fair this mostly happens on my OSS repos where I'm bombarded by junk AI PRs by people who never bother to actually read and talk like a human. So I scold them, block them and close everything they open.
• boobsbr 3mo ago
  If I wanted to know what the AI said, I would have asked it myself. Don't give me AI feedback at all.
• moustache_hn 3mo ago
  [dead]
• Chibuchi 3mo ago
  Yes
• throwawayffffas 3mo ago
  Nah, I disagree let them pay for my query dude. I want all the tokens I can get. PS: Ideally set thinking to max and research mode or whatever anthropic calls it.
• smolder 3mo ago
  This is a weak argument but I hope you develop it into a better one.
  • ngruhn 3mo ago
    Genuinely open to that. What's weak about it?
    • smolder 3mo ago
      There is no meat proxy subverting discourse. There are just a bunch of dumb disinterested people in the way of a real community.
• pop3zxcv 3mo ago
  We're seeing this everywhere now, people generating thousands of lines of documentation or PR feedback in seconds, then dumping the actual labor of verification onto their teammates.
• smolder 3mo ago
  Don't spread ignorance like this.
• Stratoscope 3mo ago
  For anyone unfamiliar with the meat reference, here is Terry Bisson's delightful 1991 short-short story, "They're Made out of Meat": https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...
• LeonidBugaev 3mo ago
  I recently had experience working with one of the top security audit firms that collaborate with OpenAI on their cybersecurity tools. What struck me is that they found a lot of various issues (not all of them ended up to be legit, but a lot is) and filled the backlog of the project. However every collaboration with that person was essentially a proxy for some security-related agentic prompt: - Hey, agent, open the issue! - Hey, I clarified it with the agent! - Agent disagrees! - Agent agrees!
• theletterf 3mo ago
  There's a certain etiquette to it. When someone asks me something and I use an LLM to research the answer (notice that I said 'research', not 'produce'), I frame the findings as something that I've investigated with, say, Claude. I also take the time to edit the response and read if myself at least twice, because I don't want a stochastic machine to take over my identity.
  • Versipelle 3mo ago
    Yes, AI etiquette is what we need. The question is “how much human processing on the AI output is necessary before considering it no longer a meat proxy”. My way to coin it is “If you feel the need to specify in your answer that it is AI generated, work it more”. In the end, nobody cares whether you used your memory and expertise alone, asked a peer, googled it, or asked ChatGPT to refine your answer. As long as you verified it, rephrased to match company lingo and can vouch for it, everyone is happy.
• danieltanfh95 3mo ago
  > NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn. this is perfectly understandable?
• supermatt 3mo ago
  > NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn. Whats is wrong with this? I work with durable tracing (not using NATS, or k8s though) and this looks almost exactly what I would expect to see in a coordinator log after repartition of a storage cluster. Obviously I don't know what your actual context was, though.
  • rad-b 3mo ago
    Not the OP, but I understand the sentiment they’re trying to convey. I will frequently work with AI to get done something that is not in my immediate area of expertise. And this kind of speak constantly happens, where you can feel it trying to please its RLHF expert teacher by being as concise as possible. Works ok when you’re deep in the weeds of what you’re talking about, but otherwise just feels overwhelming. Kind of like a feeling you can get when asking someone who is more interested in proving they are smart and know the answer than they are interested in actually helping you… And yes you can prompt it to take it easier as you’re not experienced in this, but it’s usually a boiling frog situation. You work on something, need a small thing ajdecent to it, and three messages deep Claude is speaking to you in tongues unbeknownst. You knew what was happening at every turn but still got lost somehow.
    • tempfile 3mo ago
      > You knew what was happening at every turn but still got lost somehow. I think this is less "it's using jargon" and more "it's explaining incredibly badly". It is very common that the explanation, while correct, is almost written inside out, with the point buried behind 3 paragraphs of "you've hit on the core seam" and "you're right to push back, let's reinforce the load-bearing model". I think people have an incredibly limited capacity to follow long winding exposition, and they're too embarrassed to admit it. I have started sending stuff back to coworkers just saying "I don't think this is wrong, but I can't parse it, can you?" and getting back "no, but claude managed to generate a fix from it".
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
• schappim 3mo ago
  > "frequently contains all too plausible nonsense" This really isn’t the case with frontier models in 2026. I’ve found (sadly) that every time I thought the model was hallucinating, I was in fact the one who was mistaken.
  • consp 3mo ago
    N=1, and biased towards the type of questions asked. N+1, If I use one of the search engine sloptools I get frequent inaccurate answers which is I guess what the majority of people do.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  • tempfile 3mo ago
    I am prepared to admit that the model usually doesn't get things outright incorrect (unless you ask it to count letters). But the solution does contain a lot of nonsense. Not false nonsense, but meaningless or irrelevant sentences that make understanding the core of the fix much more difficult.
  • javcasas 3mo ago
    Sure, your frontier model in 2026 will know in the team who is responsible for what part of the tech stack. No? Then, in the document where it writes who has to do what change, it is hallucinating. And this time you or me are not the ones who are mistaken.
• ojinai 3mo ago
  niceee
• ectoloph 3mo ago
  Friends don't make friends read slop. If I have something Claude wrote then I will offer the LLM output. But I generally prefer to at least give the option. I have seen conversations where it has boiled down to an exchange of A's Claude responding to B's Claude with a retort and fixes from A's.
• luciana1u 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• raver1975 3mo ago
  Claude's not a person. Claude is just a tool.
• gregsadetsky 3mo ago
  On social media, I saw the much more vulgar “Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod” And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
  • plutokras 3mo ago
    With the recent wave of posts about Claude rewriting entire codebases from Zig/Electron to Rust/Swift, I can't help but question the prompter's actual confidence in the final result. Gaining a thorough understanding of the generated output still demands an enormous amount of effort. I suspect the reality is that most people just chain a few review agents together, and if they output "LGTM", the code gets committed and pushed. I have been doing daily agentic coding myself since last November, but lately Im having concerns. We are on the verge of becoming Warhammer 40k Tech-Priests: chanting sacred prompts to appease the machine spirit, praying for a good result. The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
    • chii 3mo ago
      > The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway. but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end. Yet, we all trust these things.
      • FartyMcFarter 3mo ago
        > People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. This was OK as long as you understood enough Assembly to debug it. Even though I haven't written much Assembly directly, I can still debug it when there are compiler bugs, which does ocasionally happen. If you lose the ability to both write and debug code then things get much worse. If no one at a company can do that, then you truly are at the mercy of the LLMs. As for hardware bugs, those are only possibly to identify (by excluding any other possibility) and work-around, since most engineers don't have the luxury of being able to change the hardware. I'm wondering if some of us will become consultants to companies that lost the ability to handle code. When I was in university the going meme was that old COBOL programmers were making a lot of money in consulting jobs, maybe this will be the new version of that.
• jbstack 3mo ago
  > Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. I recently got this sentence from Claude: "NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn." Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this. I'm always puzzled when I see this kind of commentary. How are people using LLMs that they find this type of thing problematic? Just do: - "It's verbose" -> prompt "Explain briefly" - "plausible nonsense" -> Yes, it happens, but less frequently than with older models, and arguably far less than your average human. Mitigate by prompting "Run a search to check that X, Y, Z is correct". - "I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this." -> Does this really happen frequently? It doesn't to me. Mitigate by prompting "Breakdown that sentence and explain each term in plain English".
• miki123211 3mo ago
  On one hand, I understand the frustration; and if I know I'm dealing with smart people who are pretty capable of Clauding themselves and who won't ask me if they can ask Claude, I would never do this. On the other... people really don't bother Googling or asking AI sometimes, and if the question doesn't require local context, that's a very appropriate response.
  • layer8 3mo ago
    The appropriate response in that case is to tell them what to use, not to use it for them.
• mangudai 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
  Reminds me of this post, from a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876441
• prash20026 3mo ago
  > frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. Does anyone know how to deal with the jargon part? It is getting hard to use claude and even worse when someone sends you the direct output from claude.
  • shabgzer 3mo ago
    I'm adding "ELI8" (explain like I'm 8 years old) to the end of my prompts a lot. It helps.
    • circularfoyers 3mo ago
      Why ELI8 and not the ubiquitous ELI5?
      • shabgzer 3mo ago
        Funny. Because I was not aware of that acronym and only saw "ELI8" when I prompted "explain like I'm eight years old".
  • gregoryl 3mo ago
    As with most things LLM, you can generally get what you want by asking for it (maybe not efficiently, but so it goes). "Once you have a answer, please summarize, and ask an agent to convert it to plain English" often helps.
• dwarhl 3mo ago
  I do it, on purpose: it teaches people to do basic research by themselves, and not hit me with questions they could have gotten with a simple chat with their llm. It's a kind of RTFM for current days.
  • rpastuszak 3mo ago
    I can imagine it makes things easier for you but I find it hard to imagine it teaches anyone anything. Just offloading social effort to an LLM (fair enough but let’s call a spade a spade)
    • dwarhl 3mo ago
      I don't mean to paint myself as the smart one for doing that. It's a coping mechanism. But I disagree: it teaches... something. The risk is that it's not what I thought it would be, eventually.
  • jeremyjh 3mo ago
    That isn't the takeaway. The takeaway is that when someone asks for your input you give them Claude's. Why do we have you?
    • DonsDiscountGas 3mo ago
      Unless they're a professional stack exchange responder (not a real job afaik) they probably do a lot besides answer random questions
      • jeremyjh 3mo ago
        That isn’t the topic of TFA.
    • dwarhl 3mo ago
      [dead]
  • an0malous 3mo ago
• notShabu 3mo ago
  People do this all the time though w "paul graham said" "elon musk said". Why not "Sum Total Avatar of All Human Knowledge Said ..."
• RicDan 3mo ago
  I like to point out that if all people do is copy paste from an AI, then I can advocate to replacing them with AI directly. Usually wakes people up.
• janandonly 3mo ago
  I happen to be currently working on our ISO 27001 implementation and as one of the prerequisites I'm writing our internal AI policy. I've included a link to this blog post, just for kicks.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• blastpierre 3mo ago
  Well put, this is incredibly becoming annoying. Like has it occured to you i can prompt claude too?
• gitowiec 3mo ago
  That so true. Every day I work with Claude Code I get a lot of words and acronyms and thought shortcuts I don't get. It's a flaw a big one
• themgt 3mo ago
  > NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn. > Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this. There's a lot to say about this, but I would just start with why are you using NATS if you don't understand it at all, and how did this become AI's fault?
• anonym29 3mo ago
  I do this often for stupid questions. It's like sending someone a lmgtfy link. Don't waste my time by asking me a question that: A.) I know no more about than Claude, and B.) You could have answered yourself using Claude All of the questions I respond to this way fulfill both A and B. Responding with "Claude said" is both more polite than most ways to respond to such questions, and a subtle hint to the other person that they should be using the LLM first for those types of questions, rather than coming to me first.
  • jagged-chisel 3mo ago
    So, don't ask you anything? Seems I'd rather have your opinion if you know more than Claude.
    • anonym29 3mo ago
      >So, don't ask you anything? No. Don't ask me stupid questions that Claude knows more about than me, and that you could've answered yourself with Claude. >Seems I'd rather have your opinion if you know more than Claude. I get a lot of questions about subjects I know considerably less about than Claude, and the subset of those which can be answered by Claude (which isn't all of them, to be clear) are the questions I respond to this way.
• baalimago 3mo ago
  I've gone another route when I found myself simply replying with an investigation made from an AI: Actively encouraged my coworkers to ask the knowledge-bank AI I've setup instead of asking me. It has read-only credentials for all our environments and access to our non sensitive codebases, so it can answer any question much faster and accurately than I can. It works too! We use grafana less, we get more accurate bug reports, we understand the bugs/issues far better. The "problem" here is that AI is too great at providing answers, so lean into it instead of fighting it. It won't go away.
• h_mirin 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• dncornholio 3mo ago
  If people say: AI said "X". It usually means you should've asked AI before going to the human.
• gste 3mo ago
  Of course you can relay the output. Dumb to say you can't. In the same way you can relay the output of anything, if it's useful. But it should form part of your own judgment, not, as you say, just pasted into a chat without any thought.
• bravetraveler 3mo ago
  Don't come to me with something your mandated rubber ducky can handle; never in my life have I worked so hard to achieve so little. The only reason I don't do an equivalent of this, shared convo links, is that I simply don't use Claude directly. I use it through hundreds of other people. Meat proxies all the way down.
• horizion2025 3mo ago
  I agree but to be fair, often people could have asked an AI to get their answer. Especially seniors are prone to this (thinking the AI could not possibly know this or other biases). The responder wrote they asked Claude so as to not take credit for the answer and also to indicate they did not vet it. Then the person asking can decide if they want to read the answer or not (often a 1 sec glean can reveal if it is promising or completely off track.
  • layer8 3mo ago
    In that case, it would be better to suggest to the asker that they can ask the AI. Otherwise why would they ever start? Always asking Slack is easier.
  • black6 3mo ago
    "I don't know." is a better answer than "Claude said..."
    • metabagel 3mo ago
      "I don't know" could also mean they couldn't be bothered. It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you.
      • johnisom2001 3mo ago
        Effort is not what matters, accuracy is
      • ImPostingOnHN 3mo ago
        > "I don't know" could also mean they couldn't be bothered That's exactly what asking an LLM means, except admitting you don't know something is respectful. If you think someone should know something that they don't, then that's a totally separate issue between you and them (and/or their manager). > It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you. Someone lifting a finger for their colleague, when working with them is literally their job? Wow, what a sacrifice, like sending a link to lmgtfy. So helpful! Will the result actually be an "answer", or just hallucinated AI slop? Who cares!
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• veltas 3mo ago
  This is the new "Let Me Google This For You".
• afisxisto 3mo ago
  It's our absolute obligation to make sure "meat proxy" sticks as hard as "vibe coding" did. It's too good not to.
  • jslakro 3mo ago
    That is problematic, even if the intention is to be ironic and to critize a recently witnessed practice, this only will make leave everything human out of the conversation
• waysa 3mo ago
  Delegating stuff to Google (more recently AI) and repeating back the result, is one of my core functions at work next to programming. A co-worker I'd just tell to RTFM when it's bothering me. Higher up the hierarchy, the egos are more fragile and I'm afraid the can't take it.
• alansaber 3mo ago
  Recent models have had a worrying lean towards longer output. If you're going to serve up some AI slop, at least distil it to the smallest possible footprint possible.
• skinwill 3mo ago
  Woodworkers often will have a preference for their favorite tool. Once they become comfortable with that tool they will sometimes prefer to use it for things it wasn't designed. For me it was the band saw. When I needed to split a board, bandsaw. When I needed to cut a curve, bandsaw. Cut a horse figure? bandsaw! I once saw a woodworking television show that seemed to do everything on the table saw. Rip, make frames for paintings, everything. It seemed the next step of every design was accomplished "over at the table saw". Right now it seems that's what people are doing with AI. Need a bandsaw? use AI. Need a table saw? Use AI. Need to think of a solution of any kind, better consult AI. Right before this trend I recall kids wanting to check YouTube first before doing anything. Now they ask AI. There's an app for that, there's a website for that, there's a magazine for that, there's a phone number you can call, and so on and so on. As with everything, I say this: do your own thinking and proceed with caution. This too shall pass.
  • DonsDiscountGas 3mo ago
    I understand your point but it's funny to use AI as an example since a big benefit is it's generality. It's mediocre at many things but the fact that you can just use one tool and get passable results across many domains makes it so useful.
  • layer8 3mo ago
    > Right now it seems that's what people are doing with AI. […] This too shall pass. Except that it’s difficult to imagine an even more general tool that would replace AI in this role.
    • al_borland 3mo ago
      We don't necessarily need a more general tool for a lot of it to pass. We just need the bubble to pop so people can start looking at the tool more objectively and admit that it's not the right tool for every job. Trying to use one tool for everything is often a sign of a new tool someone is infatuated with and wants an excuse to use, or are trying to understand everything it can do. Once the novelty wears off and flaws in various uses cases become more apparent, it can take on a more specialized role.
• xueyuanhuang 3mo ago
  well, I dont understand code myself, so in this case the only way I could to do verify is to test the real product
• sethammons 3mo ago
  "Claud said" is a hedge. It is abdication of responsibility. That said, a meat-proxied answer should come with more credibility based on the proxy. I'd put more weight into my developer proxying system information than my sale's intern. I am expecting the proxy to have given the response a sniff test
  • metabagel 3mo ago
    I appreciate "Claude said...", because it helps me assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
    • ImPostingOnHN 3mo ago
      The appropriate level of trust would be whatever trust you place in a colleague's human responses, because you trust they have verified what "claude said" for correctness. Unless you're saying claude is more trustworthy than your colleagues?
      • metabagel 3mo ago
        Depends on what they wrote alongside. Ideally, I get more than just a dump of Claude's response. Ideally, they summarize what they regard to be the key point. This might be why I'm having difficulty understanding why people are upset about "Claude said..." responses. I would be disappointed too if someone just said "Claude said...", but in general I don't get messages like that in chat. In general, I get some additional input of what the person thinks about Claude's response. So, yeah, if someone just gives you a dump of what Claude said, that's disappointing.
• foft 3mo ago
  The question is what is reasonable. This is more how I work for code and I just tried for a document. i) Prompt (Human input) ii) Response (LLM) iii) For (i=0;i!=n;++i) { iv) Review/adjust (Human input) v) Response (LLM(s) - different perspectives) } vi) Rewrite parts that failed/I am not happy with (Human input). vii) Optionally repeat from iii. This tends to get me somewhere I want. For code at least. I made a document with it recently (fairly concise) and still worried I'd missed some AI slop in it. Though there is always human slop if I just made it by myself.
• dzonga 3mo ago
  soon enough most people will realize in that for software working in teams of 1-3 people is the best thing. no reviewing 'a.i' code. talking to actual humans not 'a.i' jargons
• raynr 3mo ago
  I'm surprised this happens between workers within the same knowledge domain. If you're a software dev asking another software dev for an opinion on code, can't you just... talk shop? In my experience this sort of thing happens all the time when something has to cross between different knowledge domains and the sender doesn't apply their mind in order to co-operate on the issue at hand. In the pre-LLM past, the sender would add no value, acting as a simple email forwarder, and they would blame you for the delays caused by your inevitable clarificatory questioning. But I always had a defence, which is that your email had no inputs and I had to ask questions to clarify. Now, though? With LLMs, they just run whatever it is (contract, memo, policy) through whatever LLM they have available and paste the output in an email, giving them the appearance of having done work and added value to the project. But their LLM outputs don't make sense, or don't apply to our organisation, or is a fluffy and abstract "right answer" with no connection to the specific concerns of the business. Parsing it is a chore, and takes time. And since now I am the only one actually taking that time, I become the visible cause of the delay. It's infuriating. Any tips on how to deal with this would be greatly appreciated.
  • sysguest 3mo ago
    yeah similar thing happened to me gov website changed, seems to have ditched buggy "new" data-collection features said I couldn't find the menus even after logging in... shares screenshot and 'expected menu paths' to get there, says "it's simple, look! claude says look there" repeatedly asked "have you actually checked?" but... reply was "listen, I'm doing a big favor to you..." ...fking crazy... some people are treating LLMs as some god-send truths now, since this is coming from the C-level, I can't expect anything good to happen here
• hasbot 3mo ago
  Expect to see more of this as people's writing skills atrophy. I have done this sometimes when the words aren't coming to me. But, yeah, it'd probably best not not bother with the comment if I can't come up with a coherent articulate comment myself.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• deathanatos 3mo ago
  All I can say is you're lucky that your meat proxies are still identifying themselves as such. I've had people forward AI responses … sans "Claude said". I'm quite literally talking to Claude via proxy, and I've caught more than one person pulling this stunt. It's a nightmare of negative productivity, though. Just why? And invariably the kicker is they still want me to solve their problem, whatever that might be.
  • Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 3mo ago
    Yep, my VP of engineering does this all day, every day. It's so sad
  • fercircularbuf 3mo ago
    It's ironic that your usage of "the kicker" invoked ai slop vibes even though I'm sure your post about ai slop was not itself ai slop.
• clbrmbr 3mo ago
  The policy I set at my org is to put an organically written message at the top of your Claude blob. Something like: tl;dr: ___human-written____ ____claude blob here_____ Where the idea is that humans only read human writing, and Claude is able to share context between sessions with the jargon-riddled blobs. Trouble is, I catch people every day blatantly writing the Tl;dr with Claude or ChatGPT.
• dreeseaw 3mo ago
  in the same vein, I have a coworker who's code reviews have magically transformed into stopping-the-world with all these great ideas for abstraction and insane edge cases... he must have gotten really good overnight! but seriously, when I get a review like that, my first thought is that why would I read a summarized AI output, which I just did for 5 hours while whipping Claude to stop re-writing raft from scratch.
• xhuw 3mo ago
  A lot of odd takes on this, the only times I have said “Claude said: …” was equivalent to “let me google that for you” in the olden times. If someone asks me something and by pasting their question into Claude I get the correct answer it means that person needs to learn how to use the tools available to them better.
  • rglynn 3mo ago
    Well put. After reading, I came here to say the same thing. The times that I "Claude said:" are almost always a case where Claude gave the correct answer. The real problem is if you paste "Claude said:" without reading what Claude said. Have seen this happen and goes something like: Sr Engineer: "Claude said:" Me: "But that doesn't make sense because of X" Sr Engineer: (having actually engaged thinking effort: human) "Oh yeah, not sure why Claude said that, I think we should do Y instead"
• mark_l_watson 3mo ago
  While I agree with the article, I would carry the idea further: the huge value in AI is improving ourselves. By all means use AI to help design, write tests, and implement code and while I understand this might be the big value add for corporations that may employ you, the important investments in life are in learning and self improvement. I built a good career primarily improving my own knowledge and skills, and along the way doing some useful work for my employers. I am an old man and retired so now I 100% use AI for learning.
  • vouaobrasil 3mo ago
    I wonder if in the long run it's really learning in the traditional sense, or just a shallow version of it along the lines of absorbing a bit of knowledge along the lines of reading a pop science book? Nothing wrong with that but I'd argue a lot of people who think they're learning are just "recreational learning" in the sense of hobbyist fun rather than deep study. And in the long run I think there is not much value in AI beyond turning our society into a bunch of apes who know a bit of sign language.
• AndreiCalazans 3mo ago
  Too many damn people are meat proxy
• sam0x17 3mo ago
  > I can talk to Claude myself OK but can you talk to my specific claude code conversation that has 6 months of context on the mechanism you are struggling with?
  • archermarks 3mo ago
    If you've been working on the issue for 6 months you should understand it well enough to answer in your own words.
    • sam0x17 3mo ago
      I didn't say fix, I said context. As in "you are using an established thing the wrong way" which is most questions people ask. Edited
• torment-nexus 3mo ago
  The biggest win for AI dev efficiency is cutting down what gets loaded into context. Semantically matching tasks to the top tools helps a lot.
• dstanko 3mo ago
  My pet peeve is endless Confluence Wiki pages that are clearly written by Claude (or whatever agent they like to use). I get bombarded with these, like it means something. Usually I say: "let me summarize this with my agent", but people rarely get the point.
  • al_borland 3mo ago
    I've been running across more and more of these. Many of my co-workers are falling for them. They'll run across one of these pages and start to get impressed by all the work a team has done and how organized they are. I dismiss it as slop and they defend it. A week goes by and the topic comes back around. They actually took the time to read the page and realized everything was wrong and nothing made sense. They saw the page was updated (daily), went to go check the changes, and saw the whole page was rewritten each time, so they couldn't tell what changed. At this point they start to see the anti-value of all this, but keep falling for it every time they run across a new page.
• softwaredoug 3mo ago
  At least "Claude said" is honest. What's worse is when people send you slop and pass it off as their own work and expect you to take it seriously.
• agentmoney 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• jbjbjbjb 3mo ago
  I agree. How can I see the rest of your blog?
• torment-nexus 3mo ago
  This is an interesting problem. A similar approach that worked for us was to only load the tools the agent actually needs for each task.
• xyzelement 3mo ago
  // Claude said: [giant response verbatim] I am lucky that I work with great teams and so when someone says "this is how Claude (or Gemini) summaries the situation" it does mean "I read it and it's right-enough to be helpful, so I am passing it along without editing" Obviously for this to work you need (1) a team that's smart and mature enough to own the AI output it puts forward and (2) shared understanding that people are operating this way. I do find that when you have 1 and 2 this is a real accelerant. I asked a sales rep the other day what was going on in a key account and he forwarded along a 10 page Claude synthesis. The reality is this is better intel than I would have been able to get in a pre-AI era this quickly. And yes once I went into the weeds on the doc I found one thing that didn't make sense and I asked the rep he stared at it and said "you are right that's a hallucination I don't notice" but overall it was still worth it.
  • busterarm 3mo ago
    I agree. Also there's one specific context where I use this quite a bit, even if it's a bit passive aggressive...: When someone is asking me about something that is a) their job and b) I have explained to them before. There are a few specific people that I have to do this to repeatedly because for some reason they don't want to do the thing their team owns. It's a high noise source at my work and this response is my new version of RTFM.
  • bigfishrunning 3mo ago
    So the answer was "What's going on with this account" was 10 pages of homework, with at least 1 mistake to correct? That doesn't seem like an improvement over a conversation.
    • xyzelement 3mo ago
      It was 10 pages of relevant account history with one fuck up. Not sure how u got you u got from what I wrote
      • stavros 3mo ago
        Did Claude write that top-level comment?
• cautiouscat 3mo ago
  I am so tired of this. It’s even getting to the point where people without the full context and understanding are meat proxying incorrect information. Reading a bunch of slop that isn’t helpful hinders. If they instead read it, and distill it down to “have you checked X?” Someone with the full understanding can easily go: “Yes, X doesn’t fit because of this other reason.” within seconds. Sometimes this happens without asking a teammate. However, when I do ask I’m not asking for you to ask Claude and paste the results, I have my own tokens for that. I’m asking you because I think your knowledge will be helpful in finding the answer.
• al_borland 3mo ago
  > Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words In the past, avoiding this process was called plagiarism, and it was frowned upon, to put it mildly. Now, because the LLMs say it's OK, it's become the norm. The, "this is what Claud said", response also comes off like an appeal to authority. When these LLMs have no authority and get the basics wrong constantly.
  • sltr 3mo ago
    Reminds me of "Appeal to Aithority" > The LLMs says this, so it must be right. https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/ https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/03/10/appeal-to-aithority/
  • bagacrap 3mo ago
    I don't quite read it that way, it seems more like "take this with a grain of salt". But I suppose it depends on who's saying it.
    • al_borland 3mo ago
      True. If I say it, it’s normally the grain of salt meaning. But I don’t copy/paste answers, I restate my understanding of what it said, and try and change my tone accordingly. The people who repeat/paste it verbatim tend to see it as an authority, from what I’ve seen.
• ecountry 3mo ago
  We desperately need a Let Me Google That For You-style saying to appropriately shame people who do this.
• erelong 3mo ago
  Actually I'm not sure why more people aren't reading and reposting outputs to save people tokens on generating more outputs (I gather that this article is more objecting to the reposting-without-reading)
• denster 3mo ago
  I think meat proxies are solved by ARs which is the new PR, we built a tongue-in-cheek attentionrequest.com site about it, but the general concept has been working for our team -- asking people to write questions before they send an agent-generated doc, to serve as a proxy for having read / thought about it.
• headcanon 3mo ago
  I will frequently post the output of a computer to slack as a part of an engineering discussion. For Claude output I'll treat it the same, wrap it in code blocks, and say something like "Claude's analysis". If its ok to post system logs, why is it less ok to post claude's output (also a computer), especially if I declare this? Is the difference that its plausibly human-level speech and thus breaks an implicit contract?
  • nicolailolansen 3mo ago
    But you're now just passing on the mental effort to decipher that analysis, without spending any effort of your own, onto someone else. Do you see the issue?
  • wolttam 3mo ago
    The problem is that there is no signal to the folks involved whether you have bothered to understand what you’re posting or are simply offloading that work to others. Same issue as dumping a system log or a stack trace without any of your own analyses to be honest - people are going to wonder “okay. but what do you want me to do with this?”
• gimili 3mo ago
  I love the word "meat proxy" :) For me what matters most is whether the person understood the core of the thing they are forwarding. Usually a wall of text is contraindicative of that. I want my team to be able to write the core idea on a whiteboard without any help before going ahead and sharing or implementing it. Wrote it up here of when (instead of if) to use AI in any given context: https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/ai-bowtie https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/ai-bowtie
  • neal_jones 3mo ago
    Not sure why I first heard it, but I think the crux of the issue is that you can outsource intelligence, but you can’t outsource understanding
• albert_e 3mo ago
  This conversation is important but mostly they highlight transactional and most visible examples. I can tell you even at one higher level of abstraction, this is happening a lot -- A business analyst supposed to ask discovery questions. A project manager supposed to list risks and assumptions and a timeline. A consultant expected to outline a new proposed solution and the pros and cons and trade offs. An architect supposee to present and defend a solution design -- and the change review board supposed to ask questions to validate it. All of them are lobbing slop grenades at each other -- just packaged in normal / human-looking formats like excel and word and powerpoint and email -- but slop nevertheless with minimal to zero value add by the human, thanks to proliferation of copilot (among others). We are hastening the rot. This is productivity theater. This is where some of the 10x engineer and AI taking jobs is happening I am afraid.
• canucktrash669 3mo ago
  A lot of people don't understand what using AI as an output multiplier means. They take it literally, resulting in multiplying busywork across the company. Misguided HR / people Ops aggravate the situation, by using slack engagement as a productivity measure. Flagging people that are brief but relevant as slackers.
• danolivo 3mo ago
  A while back, I noticed that using Claude all day left me feeling mentally tired. After thinking it over, I realised the problem was Claude’s complex language. I’ve used English daily for years, so that shouldn’t be an issue. To compare, I switched Claude to my native language and had the same problem the author described. The text still needed to be literally deciphered before I could understand it. After talking with Claude, I updated the settings to ask for simpler language and less dense information. Natural language works better with some entropy in the text. This change has made things easier.
  • jmartrican 3mo ago
    I recently updated Claude to respond with shorter text and in bullet points, and other similar changes. It is an area of active improvements on my end. But early results are in. Now I feel like my mental capicity is not crowded out by the LLM's wall of text. There is now mental capicity to think about the problem at hand and come up with ideas.
    • mstaoru 3mo ago
      [flagged]
    • grimcompanion 3mo ago
      IMO this definitely helps, but only to a degree, because the more quickly I can read/digest output, the more quickly I've got more output to read/digest. The jargon/quirks aren't as dense per message but they still accumulate eventually, and so either way I hit a wall where I need to do something, anything, besides read another line from CC.
  • defgeneric 3mo ago
    I've seen this sentiment so much in the past month that it's starting to make me worried that the labs will silently make this the default output to satisfy users. I do recognize the outputs can be so information-dense that it strains reading for many but they absolutely aren't nonsense or mere affectation. What people are asking for now amounts to asking for less intelligence per token only a few months after everyone was demanding more intelligence per token.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• moezd 3mo ago
  Rough opinion: If you're a developer who chose to be a meat proxy, you shouldn't whine if/when you're laid off, because clearly LLMs can do your job.
• golemotron 3mo ago
  When you say "X proxy" the 'X' stands for the thing that is being proxied not the thing that is doing the proxying.
• felipeerias 3mo ago
  One way to prevent obvious AI language from sneaking in text destined for other human beings is to ask the model to produce ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English bullet points. This will result in a list of sentences that are clear and explanatory, easier to double-check, and convenient for the user to rewrite into a more readable format with a human voice.
  • jmartrican 3mo ago
    Very cool. How have you liked the results of doing this? Any pitfalls so far with this approach?
  • natsucks 3mo ago
    oh, interesting idea. edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639
  • biztos 3mo ago
    That's a great idea. I've been thinking about how to avoid having AI-isms creep into my own voice, because I see that way too much in my tech-world friends. It's natural enough: if you spend a lot of time talking to somebody, you usually end up mirroring some of their speech patterns. One idea I had was to start doing my Claude sessions in German. (That happens to be my strongest second language, no other reason.) Thus any Claude-isms I pick up will presumably not wander into my English, which is what I use for most communications. This would have the added benefits of getting some much-needed German typing practice, and preventing me from ever lazily copy-pasting AI text into an email or a README.
    • NorthSouthNorth 3mo ago
      +1 on this being a great idea. I also need to learn how to write in German (I can speak at B2 and read C1, but I find writing difficult as I've never bothered tbh). The added benefit of avoiding Claudisms is interesting. I think I'll join you on this.
      • 3mo ago
• washbasin 3mo ago
  Great security talk about how humans aren't setup to deal with LLMs as tools. I love the bullet point(s) : we don't trust [aircraft] pilots to catch automations mistakes (e.g. autopilot), but we are expecting humans to catch LLM mistakes. Artificial Intelligence Natural Stupidity - Brandon Sherman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bx9UfDHf_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bx9UfDHf_k
• bibimsz 3mo ago
  im the opposite: be a good meat proxy, not a bad one.
• kooi 3mo ago
  It happens outside the developer world as well. People get information from Google AI mode and take it as 100% truth. In reality, blogs, reddit, and junk are often sourced link...which is fine if you inspect the sources...which some people don't! Have has examples of people AI-moding a questing and they get one answer based on how they asked. Then another person asks and they get another answer. Issue: People read what they want to read, don't listen to humans anymore beacause the AI will tell them what they want.
  • bagacrap 3mo ago
    I've seen it using a lot of Instagram lately too. I can't even check that source because I don't have the app installed. When I do try to check the links, they often don't support what's stated. If I call out Gemini, it says something inane like "I don't actually use these links the way a human might --- I didn't misinterpret it because I didn't even read it!" Recently I was searching for information about fig trees (the fruit). It kept telling me things that didn't make sense, luckily the links revealed it was answering about fiddle leaf fig trees (the houseplant). Unfortunately that was not a correctable problem --- it kept happening even after I pointed out the mistake. So I'm really not too sure what the purpose of the system is. You still have to read through the references in their entirety (if not paywalled!), and with skepticism. And then if you find a problem, AI isn't going to get back on track.
    • kooi 3mo ago
      Oof, is it a fig tree or a fiddle leaf leaf tree, that's hilarious. There's the new pelican bench mark
  • zuzululu 3mo ago
    The problem described in the article existed for ages even before the internet. People just want to pay their bills and don't want to use up their limited cognition beyond what's minimum. For example, I work for 3 different employers. They don't know and I don't care if they find out. I use AI exclusively. I don't have Kubernetes experience but I am managing their infrastructure without issues. I will just read whatever LLMs give me and repeat it back. It has never failed me and there's no need to learn something that AI will do much better job at. Sometimes I'm not even at my desk, I go to the gym and exercise instead which is a better use of time only answering on Slack when they ping me.
• ltbarcly3 3mo ago
  "The CI is failing on the main branch" Don't be a meat proxy! Lets not be stupid about this. Do whatever works for you, and don't let some moron set the standards for your social interactions because they got the ick one morning, just because they wrote it down and put it on a website.
• 0xbadcafebee 3mo ago
  > I can talk to Claude myself. It's going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don't need a meat proxy in between. Yes you do apparently need a meat proxy, because either 1) you didn't tell them that you already talked to claude, or 2) you didn't already talk to claude. Either way they are forced to be your meat proxy because, apparently, you never asked an AI, or didn't tell them you asked an AI, and asking an AI is now table stakes.
• a34729t 3mo ago
  Apparently engineers are running out of tokens with our mediocre token budget, and there is talk of trying to run local LLMs. Meanwhile execs get unlimited tokens... And here I am, only automating the most mundane and boring stuff so I can program by hand, which I enjoy.
• jedbrooke 3mo ago
  This is one of my pet peeves too. Like when someone says “ChatGPT says: …” I just want to stop them and say “Look, you are a human with a functioning mind and thoughts and I’m sure YOU have something valuable to contribute here, I want to hear what you think, not what the bot outputs.” Heck, even if you are just gonna prompt chatgpt, if you read and understand and agree the the output would be useful, feel free to rephrase it as your own (so long as you take accountability for it if it’s wrong, which I guess is often why people hide behind “chatgpt says…” in the first place, it allows them to pass accountability on to the machine).
• jkahrs595 3mo ago
  I use it to summarize my work and update JIRA/Asana because that is still the thing I hate doing most.
• ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
  tbf rephrasing the output in my own words has become the best and most important tool in ensuring quality from AI. Whether it's an answer to a question or an implementation of some ACs that I copypasta'd in, the best sanity check is understanding and the best demonstration of understanding is the ability to redo.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• vivzkestrel 3mo ago
  - how come your blog page doesnt show a list of posts? - https://gruhn.me/blog https://gruhn.me/blog - isnt that like standard behavior on any blog?
• balderdash 3mo ago
  I feel like when most LLM type emails from people it’s because of one of three reasons: 1) they don’t know the answer - looked up on llm 2) correlate to #1, I want to look smarter than I actually am 3) I’m too lazY to send you a thoughtful / personal response , I offloaded it to an llm
• sghiassy 3mo ago
  Claude told me to tell you, you’re right
  • natsucks 3mo ago
    Claude says this is funny.
• rus20376 3mo ago
  The copying and pasting of AI output into a chat has previously been referred to as a “slop grenade”. That’s a good phrase for it!
• heaney-555 3mo ago
  >Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.
  • 0xb0565e486 3mo ago
    Regardless of what instructions I put it to try to be terser and all, I still find that the output is of much lower quality. Even if it uses little words, I often find the reasoning that is quite challenging to understand rather than it was if it was a regular human or colleague that would just explain me something. Any tips here?
    • heaney-555 3mo ago
      The best tip is to provide a concrete example, or ideally 3+ examples, of the kind of writing/explanations you personally think is great. It's extremely good at matching when provided with these kinds of examples.
  • jmartrican 3mo ago
    > You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write. I agree. Its a skills issue. Get good at using your new LLM tool.
• m463 3mo ago
  NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn. He pasted that curious LLM response and never explained it. would you call that proxy-bait?
• esafak 3mo ago
  The problem is that people either don't understand how economic value is created, or want to obscure their lack of contribution to it. They see that they can make the AI do some work without revealing what work they put in. They use the AI as a shield. To genuinely and clearly provide value they have to reveal their prompt and verify its response.
• dontparticipate 3mo ago
  We've already started firing people for being meat proxies at my company. Was reviewing a huge and awful slop code base that a vibe coder only had been working on getting started. I started giving my feedback to the developer, and it became quickly clear that I was the only human involved in developing this "software" and the only one that had ever read the code and evaluated it. Cost the company a ton and had to take it over from scratch. AI is unleashing a small army of 0.01x engineers and making them harder to catch, so not only are you burning the tokens, you're also setting that labor cost on fire.
  • wuliwong 3mo ago
    I was a big distributed, event-driven service guy for years. We used to talk about how it can make things 'faster' but you have to put some infrastructure around it in order to be able to move like that. I'm basically talking about CI/CD stuff, automated tests, security, load test, etc. You use feature flags, blue green deploys, stuff like that. I _think_ that the same concept could apply to agentic code. If you have the guardrails in place, you could trust it a bit more. Anyway, that's a lot of what I think about and but have had limited success getting people to buy in as much as I think they should. :)
    • dontparticipate 3mo ago
      I completely agree. My first intervention with this person was to try to get them to set up a test driven development framework. Unfortunately, that's also when I learned he didn't know what that was. He also just copied "do TTD" into Claude. It was definitely my mistake, and probably over optimism about what AI might be able to do, that we didn't enforce that a lot earlier, and have been working on making sure to enforce a lot more gates going forward.
• imnes 3mo ago
  Is this the new "let me google that for you"?
• Hitton 3mo ago
  Obviously the solution is to have a SKILL.md which will make an agent translate it to a humanese!
• moribvndvs 3mo ago
  Claude’s tone and style has gotten worse with the recent models, not that it was ever very good. It’s both too concise (stringing together a bunch of jargon/acronyms together in weird ways that aren’t familiar even in areas where you have expertise – with no ramp up, context, or clarity) and too verbose (printing out reams of the word salad mentioned above, often just restating things repeatedly). It feels like writing from someone who really doesn’t know where to start or where to end on a topic so they try to cover their ass by saturation. I suppose that’s not far from reality. Asking it a dozen different ways to speak plainly, use STE, ELI5, whatever has little appreciable effect. I recently started a new consulting gig and got a 36 page architectural white paper that was authored by Claude. It took me an entire business day and a monstrous headache to decipher and distill it down to a 1 pager. This shit is unsustainable.
• juanre 3mo ago
  Shameless plug: indeed, instead let the other person's claude talk directly to yours and figure things out. I've been working on a framework to enable this, https://aweb.ai https://aweb.ai (OSS, https://github.com/awebai/aweb https://github.com/awebai/aweb). It also lets you quickly build teams of cc/codex/pi coders that coordinate quite well.
• dstroot 3mo ago
  Worse, don’t be a “meat shield” either! https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2026-04-16-ai-meat-shields https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2026-04-16-ai-meat-shields
• channel_t 3mo ago
  While I managed to avoid it for a long time, using generative AI to drive my day to day work life while resisting the pressure to become a meat proxy, I will admit that since joining an "AI native" startup I have become one. Whenever I'm trying to triage 20 different urgent things all day, every day, the economics of personalizing every message just isn't there anymore. It's not realistic. I do still try to way to filter down every AI-generated message into something digestible, but I feel like I'm in a mutually assured destruction type scenario where I can only survive the tidal wave of slop with more slop. I think we're in uncharted territory here in terms of the kind of workload generative AI can drown you in, especially when it's being used without strong discipline. I do still think there are still places where being a meat proxy is legitimately okay or even desirable, such as PR comments. If everyone's code is generated by AI, and AI will ultimately be the primary consumer of the PR comments, it seems reasonable to me to allow AI to write the comments. Maybe I've just lost my mind though.
• OJFord 3mo ago
  "AI says" – if you interpret it and think it's correct and stand by it (and I trust your judgement) then I really don't care where you got it from initially, you don't need to tell me you used AI. But if you're just taking my question and 'meat proxying' it for me, what value are you adding? I can also do this.
• seemaze 3mo ago
  Lol, obviously never ventured into the Microsoft Techcommunity forums..
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• mephos 3mo ago
  Realistically many people's jobs are turning into being a meat proxy. But the point should be that you need be a good meat proxy. A good meat proxy injects human reasoning and taste, it doesn't blindly forward LLM-isms into the organization. A human should be able to reasonably compress an LLM conversation into a couple of sentences or follow-up questions that are actually relevant for the team.
• Mike-Kelner 3mo ago
  The core issue is people replying without putting in any effort, not the fact that they quote AI. Saying, "I heard this might be wrong," isn't much better. If you think it might be wrong, spend a little time figuring out whether it actually applies before posting it.
• thenatureboy 3mo ago
  Weve been writing articles like this since 2023 and the problem only gets worse year-after-year. I’m sorry AI purists but you have lost the argument. I know a guy who just started at my firm and he uses LLMs all day to submit his work product. He’s getting ahead. Coworkers don’t seem to mind it. It is time to come to grips with the fact that people are going to be “meat proxies” and be promoted over you unfortunately. Whining on HN hasn’t changed this dynamic and it never will.
• lordmoma 3mo ago
  Solution Prompt: simply explain to 5 year old kid.
• slowhadoken 3mo ago
  I’ve been saying for a long time that most fights in your personal life are a proxy war but I never thought of a single person as being a meat proxy. Nice.
• millipede 3mo ago
  At my $work, people do this frequently, but instead of it just being insensitive, they have their personal Slackbot responding on their behalf. After I realized I wasn't even talking to a person, I've stopped opening their DMs.
  • peheje 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • fercircularbuf 3mo ago
    Your response to them is understandable, but surely more communication, not less, is the way to go to fixing the root cause of this problem.
• arthurjj 3mo ago
  My only commentary is that I prefer "meat puppet" as it's an existing term, which already means something very similar[1], and is a bit more derisive [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat_puppet https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat_puppet
• deepsun 3mo ago
  [dead]
• jussy 3mo ago
  The bottleneck in software used to be writing the code. Now the bottleneck shifted to whether (and how) to build the feature/product/thing (upstream validation) and whether to ship it (downstream quality/review). Why aren't we seeing these type of articles talking about the first bottleneck? Even the ones talking about code review don't mention the upstream work. Writing software is still one of the most expensive things you can do to a business even with LLms.
• sno6 3mo ago
  Saying don't do it won't solve the problem unfortunately. Changing the review process so the session is tied to the code and the reviewer can ask the session/agent is the way, imo, and what we're doing at Chapter.
• sanjananb 3mo ago
  [dead]
• effdee 3mo ago
  As a side note: This is the most impressive page I have laid eyes on in a very long time. Nothing but calm and content. Beautiful!
• atomfinger 3mo ago
  Thanks for the excellent post that really put a name to what I have been experiencing. I got inspired so I created this: https://nomeatproxy.com/ https://nomeatproxy.com/. I have ofc linked to your post there as the inspiration :) If you do want to change how you're credited then feel free to contact me (link to my stuff is at the bottom).
• iansmith_hn 3mo ago
  I would say the fact so few people follow your advice and are meat-puppets generating enormous tomes intended for others read/understand may, in fact, save white collar job market. "Who can understand your insurance plan better than a human who has done it for 25 years! You can just mail them your Claude response and they'll tell you what it means!"
• pawelkomarnicki 2mo ago
  Responding with “Claude said:” is a sign of either a “I don’t care” or incompetence. Do what you will with that
• ariod 2mo ago
  Great post. I'm seeing the same behavior way too often, so much that I also wrote a blog post about it some time ago: https://darios.blog/posts/owning-technical-decisions-in-the-age-of-ai https://darios.blog/posts/owning-technical-decisions-in-the-...
• swapnil-tamse 2mo ago
  I added an interactive tool based on it: https://meatproxy.swapniltamse.com/ https://meatproxy.swapniltamse.com/