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Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is: Write as yourself. You’re

Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is: Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)

mscbuck 2mo ago
Just want to say, "Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else" is something that I don't think I really internalized until you wrote it in that way. Which I think is evidence of what you are talking about.
- nchmy 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jorisboris 2mo ago
    You bring up a good point. Maybe it doesn't matter whether an ai or a person wrote it, as long as it is concise. And because most ai's are not concise we blame ai's for faults we don't like in humans either: being longwinding
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      Well, I'd say concision is not the key - sometimes you should be verbose or something else. In fact, my tendency is to be far too long-winded, with lots of perhaps-unnecessary parantheticals etc. Ai is often shockingly useful at reining me in and focusing on the issue at hand, as well as removing my worst tendencies towards meanness etc... Im a good writer, when I want to be. But having Ai review, edit, write drafts etc undoubtedly makes me a better writer/communicator. But only because I'm actively thinking about it all, rather than just saying "respond to this" and then providing copy pasta.
    - Hugsbox 2mo ago
      You're missing the whole entire point.
  - lurking_swe 2mo ago
    > But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... I think it can be OK if AI is used to polish up one’s message or to help structure it. Basically help with grammar, formatting, and wording. But copy pasting an AIs response to a question? Not at all. People earn a reputation over time. TRUST is earned. An AI cannot earn trust. If you copy paste an AI response verbatim, i need to read everything in your message with a big grain of salt. Imagine doing this all the time as a reader? Exhausting and a waste of others time. If i want to read raw AI output i’ll ask the AI directly, thanks. If you write something in your own words, or at least synthesize an AI response before sharing it with me, then i know i’m reading something that has at least passed the smell test. It’s the difference between reviewing a pull request from an intern and a principal software engineer.
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      I don't disagree at all. But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts. Though, I think such a writing partner can only really be useful if you know how to write yourself, which also requires knowing how to think (because writing is really just thinking). So, again, in the end all that really matters is whether you are effectively communicating what needs to be communicated, Ai-assisted or not. It's quite apparent to other thinking people when someone is not doing that, and that hurts their reputation, undermines trust and ultimately leads to losing your job, connections etc... So, again, the policy really should just be something to the effect of "you're being paid to help us be effective and correct. If you can't do that, we don't need you. Take that into consideration with regards to the tools that you use.". That's obviously not an adequate policy - Ai could surely be helpful in polishing it! But it most definitely couldn't get to the root of the matter on its own.
      - chronid 2mo ago
        > But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts. There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email. You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to articulate what the LLM found in your own words. If you don't you have just offloaded all the work to someone else: someone else will have to check, verify, investigate what could very well be an hallucination (bad context, random bit flips, whatever the cause doesn't matter). Your effective contribution to the discussion will be negative.
  - coldtea 2mo ago
    >But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... Not the same burden. The value of the person is digesting and giving the materially important stuff in the answer (including their expertise and opinion). Not the AI diarrhea.
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying. The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. Whether the final words were authored by Ai or not is largely irrelevant.
      - jorisw 2mo ago
        My problem isn't who wrote it, but the pretense of something having written by a person while it wasn't. There's something profoundly disrespectful about it towards the receiver.
        nchmy 2mo ago
        Oh very much agreed. It fundamentally destroys someone's reputation when they refuse to acknowledge that Ai wrote something. Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, sometimes I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
        ModernMech 2mo ago
  - lelanthran 2mo ago
    > But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... I think your linked chat demonstrates quite well why you are wrong. The sender's burden is a few lines of text "Write me $FOO, conclude with $BAR". The recipients burden is an order of magnitude greater, trying to find your conclusion in hundreds of lines of text. After all, your initial line: > But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... Is concise and clearly understandable in 21 words . I understand your point even if I don't agree with it. The linked chat has 1424 words. Your point is in there somewhere, but now you want the recipient to play "Where's Waldo" to find your point. (BTW: I can't believe just how effectively you argued against your own point! I have never seen someone do it as effectively as this in all the time I have been reading HN)
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      [flagged]
    - hobom 2mo ago
      OP's point was not that pasting AI output is great. It's rather that it depends on the quality of the output, and that it's on the sender to ensure it is good.
      - lelanthran 2mo ago
        > OP's point was not that pasting AI output is great. It's rather that it depends on the quality of the output, and that it's on the sender to ensure it is good. And yet, he was unable to do the same (see his link). He demonstrated that he was able to more clearly articulate his point than the LLM he conversed with.
        nchmy 2mo ago
        Again, youve missed the point entirely
      - nchmy 2mo ago
  - MrGilbert 2mo ago
    > But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... From my experience, AI tends to sugarcoat and be very verbose in its' responses. Theses two combined mean I need to peel away a lot of text before I can get to the "real" point as a reader. So while I could use AI to craft a response, and then rework it to be more concise, I wonder if it wouldn't be faster (and more rewarding) to simply type it myself.
    - nchmy 2mo ago
      Agreed that AI's default voice is unproductive. But you can set/give instructions. And, yes, it would be foolish and inefficient to try to get Ai to write absolutely everything. But it can certainly be helpful in many ways. What is needed is discernment.
- knorker 2mo ago
  This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. Because if you want 100 people to read it, then every second you waste for the reader is worth you fixing up your message for over a minute. It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader, then it doesn't matter than not using them is faster to type. I'm sure we've all gotten that big stream of consciousness email that's a 15 line blob of lower case text, with no punctuation or line breaks. I don't mean every ephemeral message needs to be perfect, of course. Just, you know, readable.
  - latexr 2mo ago
    > This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. You can also teach those people about text expansion software. macOS and iOS have it natively, though if I’m not mistaken it doesn’t work properly in non-native apps such as Slack. Alternatives like Alfred should work anywhere. That way they can keep using their abbreviations to type faster, but others won’t have to deal with them. > It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader Can confirm. Not using proper punctuation and capital letters makes reading less fluid. I’ve stopped caring about posts and comments that do that—if you don’t care enough about what you wrote to do the most basic of courtesies (and sometimes even fighting the auto-capitalisation that’s done for you) then why should anyone else expend the effort?
  - bonoboTP 2mo ago
    That's a good use for AI. Type loosely and ask it to fix up the spelling, capitalization and punctuation.
    - dnemmers 2mo ago
      Fixing spelling, capitalization, and punctuation...that's just a spell checker, no fancy LLM needed.
      - prepend 2mo ago
- ipython 2mo ago
  Agreed and it’s more than that. Comprehension, understanding, and validation. It also erodes trust in the person pasting the information. You asked a human for their advice- based on their judgment. If they don’t take the time to validate the answer provided by ai, they literally have no judgment. A transparent proxy has zero value.
  - nullc 2mo ago
    They're acting as a meatbot being piloted by the AI. Could call them skroders. It should be the other way around-- you give the AI instructions and it does stuff. Any time the AI is giving you instructions and you do stuff, that should be a big red flag.
    - al_borland 2mo ago
      This was posted a couple weeks ago, the term “meat proxy” was used. https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
    - _dwt 2mo ago
      I've been thinking about the Blight and [spoilers!] the skroderiders a lot lately. If you have read Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories, I have also been thinking a lot about "goodlife" when I see some of the things that get posted. If you haven't, you might like them.
- AbsurdCensor 2mo ago
  I want to use this as internal AI guidelines, I am so tired of people in my workplace simply copying and pasting whatever garbage AI gives them and expecting everyone to just go along with it and try to decipher what crap they were provided.
  - 21asdffdsa12 2mo ago
    Its a excellent competency filter though..
- blensor 2mo ago
  Tangentially I also hate if someone answers with a voice message. I can understand that there are situations where you just can't type out the answer and those exceptions are of course fine, but if you post a voice message or god forbid a video message in a group chat you are forcing everyone to take the time and sit through it.
  - mapontosevenths 2mo ago
    Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.
    - oldmanhorton 2mo ago
      I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either
      - mapontosevenths 2mo ago
        It's hard to talk about it in a very general way without being wrong a significant percentage of the time. I suspect we're both right, just on different occasions.
      - ragequittah 2mo ago
        I always wonder why people generalize AI writing like this. If it's giving you responses like this that you don't like it's as simple as prompting it to give more succinct answers that aren't full of jargon and abstract nouns. I have chatgpt set to 'Efficient (concise and plain)' in the settings which works well to prevent this. And if efficient isn't enough some brief custom instructions will do wonders.
        abustamam 2mo ago
        Because this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.
numlock86 2mo ago
Nice. This is exactly how I mostly use AI. Doesn't matter if it's code or an e-mail. I have the AI do the tedious work of ... well, uh, "working", and then ideally learn from it and then transform it into my own work, as I would have done it without AI, but just being much faster now. It also establishes a natural threshold of time/work ratio for me that keeps me from using AI for every little thing. Also it feels like I am learning something new with every prompt/response.
thewhitetulip 2mo ago
It's sad that there is a chance people put your guide into AI and ask it to "summarize"
- jeppester 2mo ago
  They will paste it to their agent and ask it to live up to those requirements
  - siva7 2mo ago
    Sharp idea. Thanks.
- criddell 2mo ago
  Summarize 9 short sentences?
  - elmo-shrugged 2mo ago
    yes - this is what people are doing in my workplace, unfortunately. you can write the most concise and effective documentation possible for a feature of some complexity, and people will still be asking their chatbot to make a soundbite out of it. it's infuriating.
    - metalliqaz 2mo ago
      atrophy of the thinking muscle
    - cindyllm 2mo ago
      [dead]
  - thewhitetulip 1mo ago
    I've had a conversation with a person and 2 messages in, I stopped replying. As I realized that they were replying with markdown formatted text and I am sure that wouldn't do that for every other word. They were putting every question I asked into AI and pasting it in slack Very sad
mmikeff 2mo ago
Any chance you would publish that guide and share here?
- Pentamerous 2mo ago
  Seconding this request... Our team is going through AI adoption without a clear direction and we're getting to the point we need to sit and come up with some guidelines. It would be awesome to have some human-made examples as inspiration
- disillusioned 1mo ago
  Here are the rest. I wrote these to specifically be principles that can be easily internalized and pointed to for accountability: 2. Own the Output. Everyone is encouraged to use these tools to accelerate the pace of their work and to take the toil out of their daily output. But that doesn’t mean you simply defer to the model and skip your own careful review step. Part of the paradox of these models is that they’re wordy and it can feel exhausting to read through everything they’re writing and confirm its validity. But that’s an enormous part of the job: you’re the human-in-the-loop to make sure what it’s saying is correct, and that you’ve reviewed it before you’ve shared it with the rest of the class. Read all of the words before they reach the rest of your team or a client, and make sure you stand behind having your name attached to them. In situations where a full review isn’t possible for expediency, disclose it directly! “Hey, I haven’t had a chance to review, this is pure Claude, but here’s what it says.” This isn’t a get out of jail free card, but it can be used occasionally when the situation dictates. Most of the time, you need to review and adjust the output before other people see it. 3. Be the expert. Have an opinion. This is a big one. Do not offload your role as expert to the model. The model is an assistant. You need to internalize the work being asked of you, and apply your education, instincts, and specific expertise to form your own opinion. You can use models to work to adversarially challenge things, but part of being an expert is knowing when to discard irrelevant feedback. Use this skill daily. Don’t let it atrophy. 4. Don’t Slop-Bomb. This is an amalgamation of all of the above, but again, don’t just spew large volumes of model slop into comms channels. Bring your own perspective, internalize the problem in front of you. And be judicious about what you share, and how wordy these things are. Put another way: edit for clarity and concision. It’s too easy to generate busy-work-seeming reports and outputs, and that burden shift to everyone else is multiplicative. Use fewer words, distill things into insights (backed with longer form deep dives), but make sure you’re not just making the rest of the team read a bunch of useless pablum. I don’t want to have to make my model read your model’s output to glean what I’m supposed to out of it. Do that for your coworkers and your clients. Think in terms of information hierarchy.
keybored 2mo ago
> You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. For purposes of training the AI (enablement firm)?
Grimburger 2mo ago
Am I the only one suspicious of your comment? > Write as yourself. Unless it's your first day on HN (it's not 2008 account), most people use paragraphs and sentences longer than 2-5 words. Something like "You, directly." in the middle of all that has a certain vibe to it. > Copying and pasting Claude responses... directly shifts the burden of comprehension Most definitely. The problem is we live in a world where people try to pass off copy pastes as their own all the time, many even smart enough to remove the em-dashes now. So I don't think that's going away soon. Your first sentence seems human, the rest doesn't match the tone at all.
- wccrawford 2mo ago
  >Most definitely. Isn't that the very thing you just claimed people don't do? For simple, impactful sentences, I often use short ones. They work better.
  - Grimburger 1mo ago
    You also used newlines to write 23 words here, something non-existent above.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- physPop 2mo ago
  Trained writers and journalists know that short sentences are an important tool. They convey directness. Perhaps that speaks more to your education and that of "most poeple on hn"
beklein 2mo ago
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. One of the best frameworks I have encountered, and one I point people to whenever I can, is the AI Fluency framework by Anthropic, Prof. Joseph Feller (University College Cork), and Prof. Rick Dakan (Ringling College): https://www.anthropic.com/learn/claude-for-you https://www.anthropic.com/learn/claude-for-you This framework provides a more abstract way of thinking when working with AI systems. Especially valuable to me is the pattern of the 4 D's: Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence, which I have now internalized whenever I use AI systems. It helps me understand my own and others' (mis)use of AI systems a bit better.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
altmanaltman 2mo ago
Why write all that when just: we do not use AI in client or intercompany communications? Like is your insight that copying and pasting something is not understanding it? Do people seriously not known this? There is no need to Socrates when writing policy docs. Maybe this is why people ignore reading your actual voice messages that you feel a need to also justify this basic request. Sometimes the human voice thinks too highly of itself also.
- darkwater 2mo ago
  Because if you think and act as your colleagues are just disposable soldiers that must follow direct, simple orders, then your org will eventually be made of that kind of people. And maybe GP doesn't want that.
  - altmanaltman 2mo ago
    "That kind of people"? What do you mean? People who communicate clearly, don't over intellecutlize or wank their ego and actually get things done? Why is a soldier bad?
    - darkwater 2mo ago
      People blindly following orders (aka policies) because they must follow them. A (company) policy should always has well explained rationale behind it, if you want to treat fellow employees like thinking adults.
      - altmanaltman 2mo ago
        What? How does "copying and pasting " mean you are not reading and understanding "orders"? Furthermore, why is that required to be stated? If you're treating fellow employees like thinking adults, you don't want to explain everything as if they are children or that they don't know the obvious thing you're parading around as an insight important enough to warrant a reading by everyone.
darkwater 2mo ago
Good luck with that, I hope you are in a better org that I am in that regard. I wanted to do that, proposed it in a directors' meeting and got push back from directors already using the Slack MCP to post normal conversations on their behalf (90% of time, pure slop). What you wrote just seems common sense to me, and I'm hopeful it will emerge as such given enough time.
- wasdly 1mo ago
  Convincing some of the older generations not to blindly paste LLM output might be a lost cause. I’m sure we’ll be teaching LLM etiquette to Gen Alpha/Beta, if that isn’t already starting to happen in schools.
kerkeslager 2mo ago
The problem with AI is deeper than this, though. The anchoring effect[1] is stronger than most people realize. It's hubris to think that you can read AI output and then come up with your own ideas. The human brain simply doesn't work that way. We anchor to the first idea we come across, and it immediately becomes difficult to change our minds. The effect of this over time is cumulative. Cervantes said (in translation), "Show me who you spend time with, and I'll show you who you are." I realized as a teenager that the books I was reading and people I was listening to were shaping my ideologies in ways that were outside my control. It's prohibitively difficult to pause when presented with every idea and analyze it to see whether it makes sense. If you're cautious you'll catch some ideas and analyze them, but a lot of the time, you won't even consciously recognize that you've been presented with a new idea, and you'll simply integrate it unconsciously. Time passes and it becomes difficult to remember where our ideas came from or why we thought they were true. This was a problem before AI: if you surrounded yourself with people who thought poorly, you thought poorly. Now with AI, millions of people have let a "thinker" into their lives which has massive information and no wisdom. Frankly, when I find out someone uses AI in any way, I lose respect for them. The best case scenario is they use it similarly to the post I'm responding to, filtering the ideas they get from AI through their own intelligence. But that doesn't really work==original thought it harder than that. And that's the best case scenario--most AI users don't have anywhere near the discipline for that, and just regurgitate what AI tells them. Rewording it doesn't help--it's still not your idea, from your experience and logic. And once you use AI at all, it's very hard not to be just rewording. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect
- whattheheckheck 2mo ago
  Yeah look at the rust ai usage policy, if the text was initially generated with ai the structure feels like its ai generated even if you change it up a bit
woliveirajr 2mo ago
I'd love the link to all those Principles
r3trohack3r 2mo ago
I’m interested in the rest of the document, is it something that can be shared publicly?
SoftTalker 2mo ago
I think it's already a lost cause. The average person will see a request to not use AI or to "rewrite an AI answer in your own voice" as like asking them to learn to spell instead of using a spell checker. I hate spell checkers, I disable them and I do manually double-check words that I'm unsure about. But I'm under no illusions that most people are going to see automatic spell-checking as useful and time-saving, and I'm not going to waste my breath trying to convince anyone otherwise.
wanderingmind 2mo ago
This is excellent. Would love to see the rest of the principles of AI usage.
Tenoke 2mo ago
That's a good formalization of it. I will think you are a bit of a fool if you dont use AI but you guarantee you'll be a fool if you only use AI with no value added by yourself.
- zmgsabst 2mo ago
  People all agree on that sentiment. Where they disagree is if you add value on the knowledge that makes the prompt possible or add value in rewriting AI to pretend you wrote it.
ako 2mo ago
If the response of AI is sufficient, why would i retype it in my own words? Just a waste of time. Most of what i have AI generate is based on my words and input anyways. I'll often write a draft note, and then have AI generate multiple formats, e.g., technical wording, marketing wording, management wording. Almost like taking raw content and using AI to rephrase it for specific channels.
- ImPostingOnHN 2mo ago
  if the response of AI is sufficient to do your job, why do you have a job?
  - RIMR 2mo ago
    Because the AI isn't autonomous, and cannot vet it's own outputs. If an AI answers a question perfectly, I'll go with it. But if my boss fires me for no longer being needed because of the AI, good luck to him and his new idiot employee.
    - ImPostingOnHN 2mo ago
      If your response when someone asks a job-related question is to paste AI, then you're the one telling your boss that AI can do your job. Asking questions is part of the job. Answering questions is part of the job. Collaborating with other people is the most important part of the job. Some junior technical folks early in their career might bristle at this: "my job is to write this code I'm writing, and anything else is a distraction", or something along those lines. It's hard to internalize that your job is actually making the company successful, not yourself, and that means making other people successful. If you can't answer a human question from a colleague, as a human, then the natural conclusion is that you are unable or unwilling to do the job. Like, great, you can write (or generate) code, what about the other 90% of the job?
      - ako 2mo ago
        I see it differently: if you’re not willing to consider how you could be better/faster/more productive with AI, you’re unwilling to adapt to the future, and not flexible enough. You’re going to slow down your employer. Most business text does not benefit from a user spending time on phrasing it, it’s not literature.
Jamesbeam 2mo ago
Your whole handwritten Principles of AI document is a testament to failed leadership. That’s all it is. The only reason someone needs to write this is because leadership is not smart enough to solve the problems it showcases, in a way that is respectful to how the employees with years of experience learned their craft. They have a tried and tested thought pipeline that makes them capable of what you hired them for, and you try to introduce a magic eightball to that and then force them to research that whatever the statement that shows up on the ball is true before they relay it to someone else. It’s unnatural nonsense. Ingenuity comes from that spark in your brain that happens when you really dig into something because you’re interested in it. A machine will never be capable of that. AI didn’t invent a single thing, it’s simply finding stuff in all the data the labs stole that is already there and humans overlooked. Now you force people to start working with whatever the magic word generator put out and go from there. They have zero incentive for that, because those thoughts come out of a black box and are not their own. I find it ethically troublesome you somehow see the need to force behavioral change down the employees’ throats because company leadership is collectively failing to address the core of why people paste AI into everything. They have nothing but disrespect for the technology, because it makes their job harder and them as a person dumber and less satisfied with their work. Hire an external company to do interviews with each employee about their use of AI in your company and how the way your company is using those tools annoys them. You’d be surprised what you find out, when people have no repercussions to fear and anonymity. There is huge resistance if you see it necessary to write a document for the whole company that forces behavioural changes. Sure, you can hit the dog until it does what you want, but if you do that long enough, you get your head bitten off. You need to find out why people are doing all these things, and then fix them. No extra paperwork is needed.
- physPop 2mo ago
  I think you need to get out and see what life is like. This isn't a leadership problem at all, it is human nature. No one does sums anymore, we use calculators. We've outsourced computation. But now many workers outsource thinking and communication, which is hugely problematic. So yes, good companies should have AI usage guidance documents, in fact providing clear expectations might be labelled ... leadership.
Forgeties79 2mo ago
> Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Seriously so many people need this tattooed on their forehead so they’re reminded when they look in the mirror. I am so sick of it. The only thing worse is people who literally just copy and paste a link to their ChatGPT session. Wild behavior.
arcanemachiner 2mo ago
You should out an emdash in there just to mess with people.
gh5000 2mo ago
I’m curious if you’d share there rest of your principles. This is so well articulated.
- disillusioned 1mo ago
  Thanks for the compliment! I just posted the other 3 in another reply!
throwforfeds 2mo ago
I was having a Slack convo with a dev on another team a month ago as I had a question about that system's support for OTEL, and it became clear really quick that I was just having a convo with an LLM proxied through this person. It was wild, as it had never even occurred to me to just copy/paste out of an LLM while having a convo with someone else.
- selcuka 2mo ago
  Those people exist. What is worse is that they don't even bother to provide the correct context to the model, or even use the same model to answer your questions. So, for example, they submit a PR using an LLM, and when you ask them to justify an engineering decision, another LLM responds with a completely nonsensical reply because it doesn't have the same context as the first one.
bazmattaz 2mo ago
Is the problem that the response sounds like AI? Or the response is incorrect? Or too verbose? Or a mix of all three or something else? What if the response was perfect and sounded exactly like your colleague. Would you care if it was AI generated then? I think there could be a world where a colleague could just ask its (finely tuned) AI tool of choice to respond for it and colleagues would hardly notice as the output would be so good! I can’t help but think that that world would be so much more productive as we would spend less time in slack answering messages and more time doing more important work. However there are two very important things that need to be in place for this to happen: - colleagues have to have their AI tool know all of the their context on their projects….etc and and in-depth understanding of how they write - colleagues must review (and tweak if necessary) the output My guess is that the problems you are seeing is that your colleagues are failing on one or both of these points
- SamuelAdams 2mo ago
  Its like reading reddit comments now. Many of them are generated by AI and bots, and they sound just like real people. Or advertisers masquerading as regular people recommending specific products. It used to be fairly obvious (using em dashes, etc) but now AI writing, with the correct guidance, is very much the same as regular conversational writing.
- foltik 1mo ago
  If all your colleague does is generate a “response” in a specific writing style based on some context, there’s no reason to talk to them at all. The good ones have some novel human insight that can’t be approximated by a slop generator. And if you really want to record all your work and project context somewhere, just let people ... look at that directly? Or summarize and query it with their own LLM if they want to?

mscbuck 2mo ago

Just want to say, "Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else" is something that I don't think I really internalized until you wrote it in that way. Which I think is evidence of what you are talking about.

nchmy 2mo ago
[flagged]
- jorisboris 2mo ago
  You bring up a good point. Maybe it doesn't matter whether an ai or a person wrote it, as long as it is concise. And because most ai's are not concise we blame ai's for faults we don't like in humans either: being longwinding
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    Well, I'd say concision is not the key - sometimes you should be verbose or something else. In fact, my tendency is to be far too long-winded, with lots of perhaps-unnecessary parantheticals etc. Ai is often shockingly useful at reining me in and focusing on the issue at hand, as well as removing my worst tendencies towards meanness etc... Im a good writer, when I want to be. But having Ai review, edit, write drafts etc undoubtedly makes me a better writer/communicator. But only because I'm actively thinking about it all, rather than just saying "respond to this" and then providing copy pasta.
  - Hugsbox 2mo ago
    You're missing the whole entire point.
- lurking_swe 2mo ago
  > But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... I think it can be OK if AI is used to polish up one’s message or to help structure it. Basically help with grammar, formatting, and wording. But copy pasting an AIs response to a question? Not at all. People earn a reputation over time. TRUST is earned. An AI cannot earn trust. If you copy paste an AI response verbatim, i need to read everything in your message with a big grain of salt. Imagine doing this all the time as a reader? Exhausting and a waste of others time. If i want to read raw AI output i’ll ask the AI directly, thanks. If you write something in your own words, or at least synthesize an AI response before sharing it with me, then i know i’m reading something that has at least passed the smell test. It’s the difference between reviewing a pull request from an intern and a principal software engineer.
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    I don't disagree at all. But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts. Though, I think such a writing partner can only really be useful if you know how to write yourself, which also requires knowing how to think (because writing is really just thinking). So, again, in the end all that really matters is whether you are effectively communicating what needs to be communicated, Ai-assisted or not. It's quite apparent to other thinking people when someone is not doing that, and that hurts their reputation, undermines trust and ultimately leads to losing your job, connections etc... So, again, the policy really should just be something to the effect of "you're being paid to help us be effective and correct. If you can't do that, we don't need you. Take that into consideration with regards to the tools that you use.". That's obviously not an adequate policy - Ai could surely be helpful in polishing it! But it most definitely couldn't get to the root of the matter on its own.
    - chronid 2mo ago
      > But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts. There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email. You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to articulate what the LLM found in your own words. If you don't you have just offloaded all the work to someone else: someone else will have to check, verify, investigate what could very well be an hallucination (bad context, random bit flips, whatever the cause doesn't matter). Your effective contribution to the discussion will be negative.
- coldtea 2mo ago
  >But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... Not the same burden. The value of the person is digesting and giving the materially important stuff in the answer (including their expertise and opinion). Not the AI diarrhea.
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading. You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying. The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. Whether the final words were authored by Ai or not is largely irrelevant.
    - jorisw 2mo ago
      My problem isn't who wrote it, but the pretense of something having written by a person while it wasn't. There's something profoundly disrespectful about it towards the receiver.
      - nchmy 2mo ago
        Oh very much agreed. It fundamentally destroys someone's reputation when they refuse to acknowledge that Ai wrote something. Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, sometimes I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
        ModernMech 2mo ago
- lelanthran 2mo ago
  > But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... I think your linked chat demonstrates quite well why you are wrong. The sender's burden is a few lines of text "Write me $FOO, conclude with $BAR". The recipients burden is an order of magnitude greater, trying to find your conclusion in hundreds of lines of text. After all, your initial line: > But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... Is concise and clearly understandable in 21 words . I understand your point even if I don't agree with it. The linked chat has 1424 words. Your point is in there somewhere, but now you want the recipient to play "Where's Waldo" to find your point. (BTW: I can't believe just how effectively you argued against your own point! I have never seen someone do it as effectively as this in all the time I have been reading HN)
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  - hobom 2mo ago
    OP's point was not that pasting AI output is great. It's rather that it depends on the quality of the output, and that it's on the sender to ensure it is good.
    - lelanthran 2mo ago
      > OP's point was not that pasting AI output is great. It's rather that it depends on the quality of the output, and that it's on the sender to ensure it is good. And yet, he was unable to do the same (see his link). He demonstrated that he was able to more clearly articulate his point than the LLM he conversed with.
      - nchmy 2mo ago
        Again, youve missed the point entirely
    - nchmy 2mo ago
- MrGilbert 2mo ago
  > But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is... From my experience, AI tends to sugarcoat and be very verbose in its' responses. Theses two combined mean I need to peel away a lot of text before I can get to the "real" point as a reader. So while I could use AI to craft a response, and then rework it to be more concise, I wonder if it wouldn't be faster (and more rewarding) to simply type it myself.
  - nchmy 2mo ago
    Agreed that AI's default voice is unproductive. But you can set/give instructions. And, yes, it would be foolish and inefficient to try to get Ai to write absolutely everything. But it can certainly be helpful in many ways. What is needed is discernment.
knorker 2mo ago
This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. Because if you want 100 people to read it, then every second you waste for the reader is worth you fixing up your message for over a minute. It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader, then it doesn't matter than not using them is faster to type. I'm sure we've all gotten that big stream of consciousness email that's a 15 line blob of lower case text, with no punctuation or line breaks. I don't mean every ephemeral message needs to be perfect, of course. Just, you know, readable.
- latexr 2mo ago
  > This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. You can also teach those people about text expansion software. macOS and iOS have it natively, though if I’m not mistaken it doesn’t work properly in non-native apps such as Slack. Alternatives like Alfred should work anywhere. That way they can keep using their abbreviations to type faster, but others won’t have to deal with them. > It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader Can confirm. Not using proper punctuation and capital letters makes reading less fluid. I’ve stopped caring about posts and comments that do that—if you don’t care enough about what you wrote to do the most basic of courtesies (and sometimes even fighting the auto-capitalisation that’s done for you) then why should anyone else expend the effort?
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  That's a good use for AI. Type loosely and ask it to fix up the spelling, capitalization and punctuation.
  - dnemmers 2mo ago
    Fixing spelling, capitalization, and punctuation...that's just a spell checker, no fancy LLM needed.
    - prepend 2mo ago
ipython 2mo ago
Agreed and it’s more than that. Comprehension, understanding, and validation. It also erodes trust in the person pasting the information. You asked a human for their advice- based on their judgment. If they don’t take the time to validate the answer provided by ai, they literally have no judgment. A transparent proxy has zero value.
- nullc 2mo ago
  They're acting as a meatbot being piloted by the AI. Could call them skroders. It should be the other way around-- you give the AI instructions and it does stuff. Any time the AI is giving you instructions and you do stuff, that should be a big red flag.
  - al_borland 2mo ago
    This was posted a couple weeks ago, the term “meat proxy” was used. https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
  - _dwt 2mo ago
    I've been thinking about the Blight and [spoilers!] the skroderiders a lot lately. If you have read Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories, I have also been thinking a lot about "goodlife" when I see some of the things that get posted. If you haven't, you might like them.
AbsurdCensor 2mo ago
I want to use this as internal AI guidelines, I am so tired of people in my workplace simply copying and pasting whatever garbage AI gives them and expecting everyone to just go along with it and try to decipher what crap they were provided.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo ago
  Its a excellent competency filter though..
blensor 2mo ago
Tangentially I also hate if someone answers with a voice message. I can understand that there are situations where you just can't type out the answer and those exceptions are of course fine, but if you post a voice message or god forbid a video message in a group chat you are forcing everyone to take the time and sit through it.
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago
  Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI. To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.
  - oldmanhorton 2mo ago
    I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either
    - mapontosevenths 2mo ago
      It's hard to talk about it in a very general way without being wrong a significant percentage of the time. I suspect we're both right, just on different occasions.
    - ragequittah 2mo ago
      I always wonder why people generalize AI writing like this. If it's giving you responses like this that you don't like it's as simple as prompting it to give more succinct answers that aren't full of jargon and abstract nouns. I have chatgpt set to 'Efficient (concise and plain)' in the settings which works well to prevent this. And if efficient isn't enough some brief custom instructions will do wonders.
      - abustamam 2mo ago
        Because this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.

numlock86 2mo ago

Nice. This is exactly how I mostly use AI. Doesn't matter if it's code or an e-mail. I have the AI do the tedious work of ... well, uh, "working", and then ideally learn from it and then transform it into my own work, as I would have done it without AI, but just being much faster now. It also establishes a natural threshold of time/work ratio for me that keeps me from using AI for every little thing. Also it feels like I am learning something new with every prompt/response.

thewhitetulip 2mo ago

It's sad that there is a chance people put your guide into AI and ask it to "summarize"

jeppester 2mo ago
They will paste it to their agent and ask it to live up to those requirements
- siva7 2mo ago
  Sharp idea. Thanks.
criddell 2mo ago
Summarize 9 short sentences?
- elmo-shrugged 2mo ago
  yes - this is what people are doing in my workplace, unfortunately. you can write the most concise and effective documentation possible for a feature of some complexity, and people will still be asking their chatbot to make a soundbite out of it. it's infuriating.
  - metalliqaz 2mo ago
    atrophy of the thinking muscle
  - cindyllm 2mo ago
    [dead]
- thewhitetulip 1mo ago
  I've had a conversation with a person and 2 messages in, I stopped replying. As I realized that they were replying with markdown formatted text and I am sure that wouldn't do that for every other word. They were putting every question I asked into AI and pasting it in slack Very sad

mmikeff 2mo ago

Any chance you would publish that guide and share here?

Pentamerous 2mo ago
Seconding this request... Our team is going through AI adoption without a clear direction and we're getting to the point we need to sit and come up with some guidelines. It would be awesome to have some human-made examples as inspiration
disillusioned 1mo ago
Here are the rest. I wrote these to specifically be principles that can be easily internalized and pointed to for accountability: 2. Own the Output. Everyone is encouraged to use these tools to accelerate the pace of their work and to take the toil out of their daily output. But that doesn’t mean you simply defer to the model and skip your own careful review step. Part of the paradox of these models is that they’re wordy and it can feel exhausting to read through everything they’re writing and confirm its validity. But that’s an enormous part of the job: you’re the human-in-the-loop to make sure what it’s saying is correct, and that you’ve reviewed it before you’ve shared it with the rest of the class. Read all of the words before they reach the rest of your team or a client, and make sure you stand behind having your name attached to them. In situations where a full review isn’t possible for expediency, disclose it directly! “Hey, I haven’t had a chance to review, this is pure Claude, but here’s what it says.” This isn’t a get out of jail free card, but it can be used occasionally when the situation dictates. Most of the time, you need to review and adjust the output before other people see it. 3. Be the expert. Have an opinion. This is a big one. Do not offload your role as expert to the model. The model is an assistant. You need to internalize the work being asked of you, and apply your education, instincts, and specific expertise to form your own opinion. You can use models to work to adversarially challenge things, but part of being an expert is knowing when to discard irrelevant feedback. Use this skill daily. Don’t let it atrophy. 4. Don’t Slop-Bomb. This is an amalgamation of all of the above, but again, don’t just spew large volumes of model slop into comms channels. Bring your own perspective, internalize the problem in front of you. And be judicious about what you share, and how wordy these things are. Put another way: edit for clarity and concision. It’s too easy to generate busy-work-seeming reports and outputs, and that burden shift to everyone else is multiplicative. Use fewer words, distill things into insights (backed with longer form deep dives), but make sure you’re not just making the rest of the team read a bunch of useless pablum. I don’t want to have to make my model read your model’s output to glean what I’m supposed to out of it. Do that for your coworkers and your clients. Think in terms of information hierarchy.

keybored 2mo ago

> You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. For purposes of training the AI (enablement firm)?

Grimburger 2mo ago

Am I the only one suspicious of your comment? > Write as yourself. Unless it's your first day on HN (it's not 2008 account), most people use paragraphs and sentences longer than 2-5 words. Something like "You, directly." in the middle of all that has a certain vibe to it. > Copying and pasting Claude responses... directly shifts the burden of comprehension Most definitely. The problem is we live in a world where people try to pass off copy pastes as their own all the time, many even smart enough to remove the em-dashes now. So I don't think that's going away soon. Your first sentence seems human, the rest doesn't match the tone at all.

wccrawford 2mo ago
>Most definitely. Isn't that the very thing you just claimed people don't do? For simple, impactful sentences, I often use short ones. They work better.
- Grimburger 1mo ago
  You also used newlines to write 23 words here, something non-existent above.
deleted 2mo ago
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physPop 2mo ago
Trained writers and journalists know that short sentences are an important tool. They convey directness. Perhaps that speaks more to your education and that of "most poeple on hn"

beklein 2mo ago

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. One of the best frameworks I have encountered, and one I point people to whenever I can, is the AI Fluency framework by Anthropic, Prof. Joseph Feller (University College Cork), and Prof. Rick Dakan (Ringling College): https://www.anthropic.com/learn/claude-for-you https://www.anthropic.com/learn/claude-for-you This framework provides a more abstract way of thinking when working with AI systems. Especially valuable to me is the pattern of the 4 D's: Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence, which I have now internalized whenever I use AI systems. It helps me understand my own and others' (mis)use of AI systems a bit better.

deleted 2mo ago
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altmanaltman 2mo ago

Why write all that when just: we do not use AI in client or intercompany communications? Like is your insight that copying and pasting something is not understanding it? Do people seriously not known this? There is no need to Socrates when writing policy docs. Maybe this is why people ignore reading your actual voice messages that you feel a need to also justify this basic request. Sometimes the human voice thinks too highly of itself also.

darkwater 2mo ago
Because if you think and act as your colleagues are just disposable soldiers that must follow direct, simple orders, then your org will eventually be made of that kind of people. And maybe GP doesn't want that.
- altmanaltman 2mo ago
  "That kind of people"? What do you mean? People who communicate clearly, don't over intellecutlize or wank their ego and actually get things done? Why is a soldier bad?
  - darkwater 2mo ago
    People blindly following orders (aka policies) because they must follow them. A (company) policy should always has well explained rationale behind it, if you want to treat fellow employees like thinking adults.
    - altmanaltman 2mo ago
      What? How does "copying and pasting " mean you are not reading and understanding "orders"? Furthermore, why is that required to be stated? If you're treating fellow employees like thinking adults, you don't want to explain everything as if they are children or that they don't know the obvious thing you're parading around as an insight important enough to warrant a reading by everyone.

darkwater 2mo ago

Good luck with that, I hope you are in a better org that I am in that regard. I wanted to do that, proposed it in a directors' meeting and got push back from directors already using the Slack MCP to post normal conversations on their behalf (90% of time, pure slop). What you wrote just seems common sense to me, and I'm hopeful it will emerge as such given enough time.

wasdly 1mo ago
Convincing some of the older generations not to blindly paste LLM output might be a lost cause. I’m sure we’ll be teaching LLM etiquette to Gen Alpha/Beta, if that isn’t already starting to happen in schools.

kerkeslager 2mo ago

The problem with AI is deeper than this, though. The anchoring effect[1] is stronger than most people realize. It's hubris to think that you can read AI output and then come up with your own ideas. The human brain simply doesn't work that way. We anchor to the first idea we come across, and it immediately becomes difficult to change our minds. The effect of this over time is cumulative. Cervantes said (in translation), "Show me who you spend time with, and I'll show you who you are." I realized as a teenager that the books I was reading and people I was listening to were shaping my ideologies in ways that were outside my control. It's prohibitively difficult to pause when presented with every idea and analyze it to see whether it makes sense. If you're cautious you'll catch some ideas and analyze them, but a lot of the time, you won't even consciously recognize that you've been presented with a new idea, and you'll simply integrate it unconsciously. Time passes and it becomes difficult to remember where our ideas came from or why we thought they were true. This was a problem before AI: if you surrounded yourself with people who thought poorly, you thought poorly. Now with AI, millions of people have let a "thinker" into their lives which has massive information and no wisdom. Frankly, when I find out someone uses AI in any way, I lose respect for them. The best case scenario is they use it similarly to the post I'm responding to, filtering the ideas they get from AI through their own intelligence. But that doesn't really work==original thought it harder than that. And that's the best case scenario--most AI users don't have anywhere near the discipline for that, and just regurgitate what AI tells them. Rewording it doesn't help--it's still not your idea, from your experience and logic. And once you use AI at all, it's very hard not to be just rewording. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect

whattheheckheck 2mo ago
Yeah look at the rust ai usage policy, if the text was initially generated with ai the structure feels like its ai generated even if you change it up a bit

woliveirajr 2mo ago

I'd love the link to all those Principles

r3trohack3r 2mo ago

I’m interested in the rest of the document, is it something that can be shared publicly?

SoftTalker 2mo ago

I think it's already a lost cause. The average person will see a request to not use AI or to "rewrite an AI answer in your own voice" as like asking them to learn to spell instead of using a spell checker. I hate spell checkers, I disable them and I do manually double-check words that I'm unsure about. But I'm under no illusions that most people are going to see automatic spell-checking as useful and time-saving, and I'm not going to waste my breath trying to convince anyone otherwise.

wanderingmind 2mo ago

This is excellent. Would love to see the rest of the principles of AI usage.

Tenoke 2mo ago

That's a good formalization of it. I will think you are a bit of a fool if you dont use AI but you guarantee you'll be a fool if you only use AI with no value added by yourself.

zmgsabst 2mo ago
People all agree on that sentiment. Where they disagree is if you add value on the knowledge that makes the prompt possible or add value in rewriting AI to pretend you wrote it.

ako 2mo ago

If the response of AI is sufficient, why would i retype it in my own words? Just a waste of time. Most of what i have AI generate is based on my words and input anyways. I'll often write a draft note, and then have AI generate multiple formats, e.g., technical wording, marketing wording, management wording. Almost like taking raw content and using AI to rephrase it for specific channels.

ImPostingOnHN 2mo ago
if the response of AI is sufficient to do your job, why do you have a job?
- RIMR 2mo ago
  Because the AI isn't autonomous, and cannot vet it's own outputs. If an AI answers a question perfectly, I'll go with it. But if my boss fires me for no longer being needed because of the AI, good luck to him and his new idiot employee.
  - ImPostingOnHN 2mo ago
    If your response when someone asks a job-related question is to paste AI, then you're the one telling your boss that AI can do your job. Asking questions is part of the job. Answering questions is part of the job. Collaborating with other people is the most important part of the job. Some junior technical folks early in their career might bristle at this: "my job is to write this code I'm writing, and anything else is a distraction", or something along those lines. It's hard to internalize that your job is actually making the company successful, not yourself, and that means making other people successful. If you can't answer a human question from a colleague, as a human, then the natural conclusion is that you are unable or unwilling to do the job. Like, great, you can write (or generate) code, what about the other 90% of the job?
    - ako 2mo ago
      I see it differently: if you’re not willing to consider how you could be better/faster/more productive with AI, you’re unwilling to adapt to the future, and not flexible enough. You’re going to slow down your employer. Most business text does not benefit from a user spending time on phrasing it, it’s not literature.

Jamesbeam 2mo ago

Your whole handwritten Principles of AI document is a testament to failed leadership. That’s all it is. The only reason someone needs to write this is because leadership is not smart enough to solve the problems it showcases, in a way that is respectful to how the employees with years of experience learned their craft. They have a tried and tested thought pipeline that makes them capable of what you hired them for, and you try to introduce a magic eightball to that and then force them to research that whatever the statement that shows up on the ball is true before they relay it to someone else. It’s unnatural nonsense. Ingenuity comes from that spark in your brain that happens when you really dig into something because you’re interested in it. A machine will never be capable of that. AI didn’t invent a single thing, it’s simply finding stuff in all the data the labs stole that is already there and humans overlooked. Now you force people to start working with whatever the magic word generator put out and go from there. They have zero incentive for that, because those thoughts come out of a black box and are not their own. I find it ethically troublesome you somehow see the need to force behavioral change down the employees’ throats because company leadership is collectively failing to address the core of why people paste AI into everything. They have nothing but disrespect for the technology, because it makes their job harder and them as a person dumber and less satisfied with their work. Hire an external company to do interviews with each employee about their use of AI in your company and how the way your company is using those tools annoys them. You’d be surprised what you find out, when people have no repercussions to fear and anonymity. There is huge resistance if you see it necessary to write a document for the whole company that forces behavioural changes. Sure, you can hit the dog until it does what you want, but if you do that long enough, you get your head bitten off. You need to find out why people are doing all these things, and then fix them. No extra paperwork is needed.

physPop 2mo ago
I think you need to get out and see what life is like. This isn't a leadership problem at all, it is human nature. No one does sums anymore, we use calculators. We've outsourced computation. But now many workers outsource thinking and communication, which is hugely problematic. So yes, good companies should have AI usage guidance documents, in fact providing clear expectations might be labelled ... leadership.

Forgeties79 2mo ago

> Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Seriously so many people need this tattooed on their forehead so they’re reminded when they look in the mirror. I am so sick of it. The only thing worse is people who literally just copy and paste a link to their ChatGPT session. Wild behavior.

arcanemachiner 2mo ago

You should out an emdash in there just to mess with people.

gh5000 2mo ago

I’m curious if you’d share there rest of your principles. This is so well articulated.

disillusioned 1mo ago
Thanks for the compliment! I just posted the other 3 in another reply!

throwforfeds 2mo ago

I was having a Slack convo with a dev on another team a month ago as I had a question about that system's support for OTEL, and it became clear really quick that I was just having a convo with an LLM proxied through this person. It was wild, as it had never even occurred to me to just copy/paste out of an LLM while having a convo with someone else.

selcuka 2mo ago
Those people exist. What is worse is that they don't even bother to provide the correct context to the model, or even use the same model to answer your questions. So, for example, they submit a PR using an LLM, and when you ask them to justify an engineering decision, another LLM responds with a completely nonsensical reply because it doesn't have the same context as the first one.

bazmattaz 2mo ago

Is the problem that the response sounds like AI? Or the response is incorrect? Or too verbose? Or a mix of all three or something else? What if the response was perfect and sounded exactly like your colleague. Would you care if it was AI generated then? I think there could be a world where a colleague could just ask its (finely tuned) AI tool of choice to respond for it and colleagues would hardly notice as the output would be so good! I can’t help but think that that world would be so much more productive as we would spend less time in slack answering messages and more time doing more important work. However there are two very important things that need to be in place for this to happen: - colleagues have to have their AI tool know all of the their context on their projects….etc and and in-depth understanding of how they write - colleagues must review (and tweak if necessary) the output My guess is that the problems you are seeing is that your colleagues are failing on one or both of these points

SamuelAdams 2mo ago
Its like reading reddit comments now. Many of them are generated by AI and bots, and they sound just like real people. Or advertisers masquerading as regular people recommending specific products. It used to be fairly obvious (using em dashes, etc) but now AI writing, with the correct guidance, is very much the same as regular conversational writing.
foltik 1mo ago
If all your colleague does is generate a “response” in a specific writing style based on some context, there’s no reason to talk to them at all. The good ones have some novel human insight that can’t be approximated by a slop generator. And if you really want to record all your work and project context somewhere, just let people ... look at that directly? Or summarize and query it with their own LLM if they want to?