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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 thi
by eddythompson80 2mo 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 2mo agoHad 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 2mo agoIt’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 2mo agoReading this is nightmare fuel right before I go to bed omg
- Gigachad 2mo agoI have a friend who works in healthcare and he says patients now regularly pull out their phone and ask him to talk to their chatbot. Anything he says to them, they immediately repeat to ChatGPT and ask if it’s correct.
- weatherlite 2mo agoCos patients often don't understand shit from a 3 minute tired and distracted doctor interaction, it's particulary bad in hospitals. I don't really blame them.
- jdub 2mo ago"Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" - Gwen DeMarco, Galaxy Quest
- antisthenes 2mo agoGiven the state of the US healthcare industry and how little shit some doctors give (and some are legitimately overworked), this isn't as absurd as it sounds.
- weatherlite 2mo ago> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
- eddythompson80 2mo agoPoliticians too apparently. There was this gem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlYa8NV5k-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlYa8NV5k-U
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoMy giddy aunt. Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain. Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
- varjag 2mo agoShitgularity is here, it's just unevenly smeared. It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.
- smuemd 2mo agowell put
- layer8 2mo ago> enshittification squared I thought AI is an exponential?
- selimthegrim 2mo agoa sigmoid as in sigmoid colon
- anal_reactor 2mo ago> You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open. The system does NOT reward caring. That's the problem.
- notnullorvoid 2mo ago> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry. It's not a bad time to take a break from it. Keep yourself from cognitive decline, then in 2 or 3 years when the industry has come to its senses you'll be able to impress in a sensible interview. Compared to the slop addicts that won't know how to tie their own shoes without asking Claude each time.
- nor0x 2mo agowill point my phone with an AI app back to process the output
- sparkling 2mo agoI will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.
- jobs_throwaway 2mo agoYep. I'm categorically ignoring messages and PRs that are obviously AI written.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- suslik 2mo ago> and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right? If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
- eddythompson80 2mo agoI wonder if there is something like nohello.net but norawllmoutput.net
- wgd 2mo agoThere is https://noslopgrenade.com/ https://noslopgrenade.com/
- FiddlyPack 2mo agoI was writing slop grenade essays in Slack before LLMs were a thing. To everyone who had to put up with my overly verbose style: I am sorry.
- ffsm8 2mo agoAt my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise. They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him Complete brainrot Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
- prymitive 2mo agoI think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
- surgical_fire 2mo agoMaybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoThe ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is. Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.
- jasonkester 2mo agoI just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense. Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go. Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job. Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
- Gigachad 2mo agoThe psychosis is largely coming from the top.
- girvo 2mo agoFish rot from the head, as they say.
- somenameforme 2mo agoIt seems that this is largely coming from higher ups who are probably (consciously or not) testing the waters for LLMs being able to replace the people they're dumping the walls of text on. I don't mean in any sort of malicious penny pinching scheme either, but simply people wanting to be able to do things quickly and as close to their own demands as possible, while getting rid of the 'middle man.' It just so happens that as LLMs become ever more capable of delivering on e.g. software tasks, software engineers start to become the middle men.
- maccard 2mo agoMy experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way
- eddythompson80 2mo agoI know exactly the persona you’re describing. It’s unfortunate because they have a great learning tool now. I always felt bad for over eager engineers who were not strong. They had the right attitude but I thought lacked the learning resources and perhaps the learning skills others stronger engineers had. Before if you found yourself in an area you don’t understand. Some people make it all the way through school without learning how to learn on their own. Or at least have underdeveloped skills in that area. Once they enter the workforce and no longer have a syllabus that outlines learning plan for a subject, and an instructor and TAs that hand hold them through the learning process, learning becomes really difficult. AI could really solves that. But maybe I misunderstood the original problem.
- autumnstwilight 2mo agoI had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"
- dwedge 2mo agoAsk Claude to generate a few numbers using it and tell you if they are random or not
- layer8 2mo agoThey may be random, but are they secure?
- antisthenes 2mo agoJust ask Claude if they are secure.
- mavelikara 2mo ago“I ask Claude only questions to which I don’t know answers to - which there are plenty of. That saves the company money by avoiding frivolous use of tokens.”
- EFreethought 2mo agoAsking someone to ask an LLM is peak laziness.
- beng-nl 2mo agoBeyond reverse centaur
- Viliam1234 2mo agoDevelopers talk to LLMs. Managers tell the developers to talk to LLMs. CEOs tell the managers to tell the developers to talk to LLMs. The longer the chain, the higher you are in the company hierarchy.
- roadbuster 2mo ago[dead]
- cryo32 2mo agoYeah have this too. I created a spreadsheet called “slop” and add the name to the list and redirect all queries to their engineering manager. I’m not wasting my time on that shit.
- mort96 2mo agoI've literally seen this in HN responses as well, so many times. What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoAt least those (at least the detectable ones) seem to be downvoted en masse, called out, or flagged. They aren't even allowed as per the guidelines[0]: > Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bell-cot 2mo ago> What the hell is the point of human interaction if ... Sadly, the point is validating the human worth of the human who can't do any better than this. But, assuming you're not stuck on that human's Self Esteem Care Team, it can be tricky to tell them that they need to seek validation elsewhere.
- gspr 2mo agoExactly! When someone does it at work, I get a bit sad because my conclusion is that whoever does it can't like their job very much. But that's ok – not liking your job very much is compatible with an otherwise happy life. When people start doing it in an entirely voluntary human-to-human situation, like having a conversation online about a topic of interest, I'm gobsmacked.
- mr_toad 2mo ago> What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response Forwarding an AI response (or any canned response) sends the message that they don’t want to interact with you. That could be intentional.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoI think you're overthinking it. People generally want to be helpful, and do actions they think are "useful" so most likely; these people think they're actually being helpful and useful when they do things like that. Similarly to "no one thinks they're evil" I suppose.
- zombot 2mo agoWhen was the last time that a newly adopted technology revealed that amount of ... potential for improvement in our fellow humans? AI must have really hit some nerve to generate this massive amount of questionable behavior. Or did I fall prey to bias?
- bjackman 2mo agoI think it was reasonable in the very recent past. There was a period where AI had major capabilities that had not diffused fully into the zeitgeist. So often you could see someone struggling with e.g. understanding a crash log, and say "they probably haven't thought of pasting into Claude Code with access to the codebase". That time has now passed though.
- ClikeX 2mo agoThis one kills me. So many forums, and Reddit in particular, now have people just chiming into topics with ChatGPT answers. It gives them the illusion of being helpful, while they don't really have the knowledge of the subject. But people go to communities to converse with others in the field, and this makes it feel dead internet. I'm glad most of my colleagues are still doing things themselves. But honestly, if all you can do is tell me what Claude told you and you didn't even bother to read it yourself. Then I might as well just cut you off the team and go use Claude directly.
- projektfu 2mo agoSo often the sources listed by an LLM are just reddit posts, so this will be an ouroboros pretty soon.
- aquariusDue 2mo agoEh, you always had to filter the chaff too before. Nowadays there's just a second group that replaced knowledge pulled from one's bottom with knowledge pulled from ChatGPT, if you weren't aware of the former group at least now you're forced to be on guard due to the latter.
- gadders 2mo agoI always tell people that if they are not adding value to the AI output, then that person isn't needed.
- whywhywhywhy 2mo ago>you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details This is the worst person to get this from because they literally don’t understand it.
- pelasaco 2mo agoIt's so real.. Suddenly managers sending MR, commenting MRs, all AI driven.. 300 lines text, where you don't even know if the premises are correct. I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous. I don't know how to stop them..
- hvb2 2mo ago> I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous. It's hard to make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious
- fc417fc802 2mo agoUnskilled people with foolproof tools or skilled people with powerful tools. Either works. It's unskilled people with powerful tools that poses a problem.
- titzer 2mo ago> How can someone serious even think that’s ok. Because no one is serious anymore. I hate to say it, but anyone this lazy is absolutely asking to be replaced by AI.
- hoppp 2mo agoIf they can't even read a claude response then how are they still employed?
- DANmode 2mo agoHiring is hard. In some jurisdictions and orgs, firing is harder.
- saidnooneever 2mo agoi learned working in customer support that if you give someone a helpline their brain stop working. they will ask any little stupid thing even if in reality they can know the answer, look it up or reason about it. they are not dumb but the helpline cripples them... AI is a helpline, so for a lot of people it cripples them. they cease to think. simple as that. its something people need to be aware of that their brains work like this, because that awareness is the same thing that solves the problem. (people find it very confronting to learn they have been asking questions they knew the answers too already...)
- wseqyrku 2mo ago> "I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” I would totally lose it if someone come up to me with that shit. Zero chance I would put up with it.
- vitaflo 2mo agoWhere I work we call these people “very expensive keyboards”.
- tofuziggy 2mo agothe other day I had an "official" career conversation with my boss. They took some notes during the talk and later sent me a page summary of the conversation to see if it looked right. It immediately smelled of AI, and had some things completely opposite to what I said. jeeze I guess this is where we are headed...
- denster 2mo agoWe had the same problem, now I just ask my colleagues to AR the docs (attentionrequest.com); while the site may be tongue-in-cheek, it helped us build a workflow, where "certificate of having read & thought about it" is conditioned on reading the doc and then writing up a number of questions on it as a human, before sending it off. It's worked reasonably well for us so far, hopefully this becomes one of the new norms.
- stellamariesays 2mo ago[flagged]
- WillMorr 2mo agoThe thing I think is so frustrating about this is it's the absolute worst case middle ground between two much more productive experiences. Either solve the problem yourself by understanding the code or just give me the full agent context so I can just use a chatbot too. For high stakes debugging efforts I'll dig in with Claude, have it do a bunch of testing and give me a writeup, and then review it to extract any useful findings. When discussing with other people, I give them the 2 sentences I'm confident in and then link them to the giant doc so they can review it with their Claude. IMO once you're working with agents, your whole job is context management. I have a little web server running my Claude markdown docs. When someone sends me a Claude snippet with some partial information I just have them prompt their bot to upload a thorough context dump so I actually know what they did. If someone has had an agent look at a problem they haven't thought about yet, I'd rather just get the info from the bot directly.
- rufasterisco 2mo ago100% with you. Consider just using Claude sessions. Claude has hooks you can use to copy local sessions in the repo. Git LFS can be used to store directly in repo, helping not just with repo size but also with security/privacy/secrets-leaking
- rufasterisco 2mo agoAny non trivial coding task requires a conversation between human and ai. Just have devs commit (or provide however you like) their ai coding sessions. It then becomes obvious if someone has, or has not, reviewed the code, because then they discussed it. Bonus points: on very complex tasks, you can more or less resume the conversation, via session files. Same for schoolwork, research papers, and a lot more. The conversation is not something to throw away: it is arguably as important as the code in the pr.
- ltbarcly3 2mo agoI want to suggest you read https://www.amazon.com/Advantage-Disadvantage-History-Hackett-Classics/dp/0915144948 https://www.amazon.com/Advantage-Disadvantage-History-Hacket... You can't just remember every conversation and ... something useful. Indiscriminate memory buries you. What you need is "monumental" memories, which is also known as documentation. AI can be very effective in helping you manage that. That should be kept tight, just like code. You want to keep enough of a record of how you got to where you are that you are equipped to be effective in future tasks. I would say that your suggestion is basically digital hoarding. Lets say there are 3 kinds of people, the person with OCD who keeps his house almost barren in the name of tidiness, the person who visits his possessions periodically with a critical eye, deciding what to keep and what to throw away, and the hoarder. When it comes time to solve some household problem, say hang a picture, which one of them will have what they need to do it (a hammer and a nail, maybe a little bit of wire) and be able to find it? I think you might consider keeping the session history for a while, maybe a month or 3 months or 6 months, but have something that automatically deletes them after that.
- hirsin 2mo agoWhile I generally agree for general human living, I've seen impressive "digital hoarder" success using AI because it changes the dimensions of reasonableness. Imagine your hoarder scenario except that the hoarder has unlimited storage space and a team of librarian/warehouse workers to go find and fetch the items needed for the wall hanging task.
- paulddraper 2mo ago> “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” It’s the equivalent of choosing words from a conversation and sending you the dictionary entries. I could do that myself. I really didn’t lack the ability to click a button.
- intended 2mo agoI’ve been using V/G as shorthand for this: verification capacity / generation capacity. LLMs have made G extremely cheap, but verification capacity and judgement has not scaled at anything like the same rate. Someone can generate a bunch of PRs or a report quickly, while transferring hours of verification work to everyone downstream. We are on the wrong side of this ratio, because we never had the capacity to extinguish reviewer capacity the way we can today. “Don’t be a meat proxy” needs to be a cultural norm for the larger problem of using cheap generation to externalise verification costs onto someone else.
- ltbarcly3 2mo agoThis is because they don't trust you to do it. If whenever a problem came up you and the rest of the team were able to solve it and it didn't drag on into some forever bug, they wouldn't be second guessing you. Maybe they have long experience where you were too lazy to fix things or you bamboozled them with status updates that were basically fabricated? Don't act offended, it's quite common.
- andai 2mo agoDid they ask Claude to do the job interview too?
- englishspot 2mo agoYou know what's even worse? When they don't even bother to copy-paste. They just have claude code/codex post a slack message, with all the telltale signs of an AI message (caution emojis everywhere!)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mistersquid 2mo ago> But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok. Deciphering error messages can be a bit of an arcane art, at times impenetrable to all except the authors of a system. Understanding the patterns exposed in such messages and, thereby, deriving their meaning is not always clear even to experienced developers. Engineers reaching out to you (humans) to explain the output of an LLM haven't fully internalized how to interact with LLMs. When an LLM's output is beyond one's immediate grasp, one can _ask the LLM_ to further break down its output, to explain the concepts and symbols that inform its response. Personally, I have asked LLMs to draw charts and comprehensively simplify their output, often providing cognitive signposts that "I'm confused" about some aspect of what its reporting. In other words, some people, including engineers with various lavels of experience, don't yet fully understand the implications of the open-eneded interface that language provides with LLM interaction.
- DANmode 2mo agoThe fact that we’re starting to point these people out gives me great comfort. I believe in proper breaks, more than enough downtime, work-life balance - but I’ve been hamstrung my entire career by people who seem to be so low-bandwidth that they often seem to be operating on autopilot - while making the same (or far more) as I’m making.
- boogieknite 2mo ago[dead]
- wuliwong 2mo agoFeels like some serious hyperbole. I definitely have people at work copy and paste Claude output but I have never once had someone ask me to read it for them and tell them it was correct. I think this is just the moment we are in, the amount of people using AI in their day to day work changed so quickly that we have a very wide spread range of competencies and experience and really nobody has had enough time to be an expert with AI. We don't have well defined best practices and it feels like the target is moving. My guess is you were probably complaining about something similar to this before there was AI, this is just the new target for your angst.
- hirsin 2mo agoIt's implicit as a request, not something they literally say (usually). Namely - I put near zero effort into this response, and deciding if it's correct is on you. -> I'm asking you to read it and figure out if it's correct because I couldn't be bothered to do so
- projectazorian 2mo agoI'm not opposed to straight copypasta, but it should be limited to excerpts only or at the very least workshopped with the LLM to reduce verbosity. Certainly it should at least be fully read and grokked. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen LLMs one-shot responses that are fit to paste to Slack verbatim. It does happen though.
- abustamam 2mo ago> People almost acting like no one has thought of it Everyone at my job uses LLMs to code, all day long. People still ask me "why does this bug happen" and I use Claude to find out and the answer is almost always straightforward, and when its not I raise a discussion with the team. The calculus isn't "can I prompt an LLM to find out," it's "do I have a solid enough mental model of the part of the codebase to prompt an LLM specifically enough, and also understand if the LLM is hallucinating or not." > How can someone serious even think that’s ok. I think this is a culture issue. I think every org is different, but we had a similar ramp up at our company. First we trialed cursor. Then some people were committing slop. Then we were like "llms are no excuse for slop." Then we got our skills and context good enough to not require close review. And then everything became LLM driven and now we have become "meat proxies" where everyone asks LLMs to fix things that are part of unfamiliar parts of the codebase and then asks someone else familiar to review the fix. We're tending towards a solution to this because I dont think its a good usage of resources but every org will come up with their own culture and solution to this.
- attentive 2mo agoI am going to guess it's the other way around and a modern day of "let me google this for you"
- notnullorvoid 2mo agoIt'll only get worse unless companies start having strict policies around it, making repeat offenses fireable. Juniors should have a little more wiggle room, but there's no excuse for senior engineers to participate in such carelessness. This is the kind of thing that spreads. If you have to deal with it all the time you're going to start dissociating out of necessity.
- bicepjai 2mo agoI keep cussing at it saying “don’t give me a wall of text ...” it just like eating tokens. It’s trained to eat tokens for anything. No matter what workarounds you use, claude.md/memory/skills what-ever you throw, after 2 exchanges it goes back eating tokens. I cant wait for an open model good enough like opus 4.8 where can control the gregarious factor
- sourcecodeplz 2mo agoits okay because it worked for them once, they actually got valuable info from Claude and passed it along. the person that got it, thought it was actually a good idea and they went with it. that confidence now translates into behavior.