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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

tombedor.dev

251–260 of 551 posts

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#251

This is beautiful. I even had people reach out to me with suspiciously long "long time no chat" instant messages until I realised they were AI written (in one case misspelling the name of their own partner). "If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort" is going to be my new answer to that!

This is exactly the same as the ""If you didn't take the time to write something, I'm not going to the take the time to read it" mantra that was floating about HN a few months ago.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#252
post #250

A couple of weeks ago I essentially failed the Turing test (took to be an AI). I found it a bit annoying, so I built Possibly Made By A Human. It tracks your keyboard use (not the content, ms between keystrokes etc) and produces a signature for you. It can of course be spoofed, but that also takes some effort. Actually made by a human, signature: https://possiblymadebyahuman.com/7PuEdZs1i1

a solution waiting for a chrome extension :)

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#253
Perfect. I find myself applying the same principle to online discussion boards and comment threads. Humans post a question looking for other human input and get replies saying "I asked Gemini and it said...". I find that ignorant and rude when the context is a request for human insight.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#254
post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

Gently, as long as you work with humans, you should consider yourself working _for_ those humans. Everyone needs shared state to work from, and that's just the cost of doing business.

That said, sometimes low-trust environments are the issue, not PRs. In a higher trust environment, PR review is a helpful thing you usually desire, not dread.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#255
post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

Comprehensive end-to-end tests and CI can only attest to correctness, most engineers worth their salt won't review code only in regards to that aspect though.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#257
post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents.

Then don't review the code. Ask Agents to review and merge it, also shift the responsibilities to the AI agents as well.

If you think human is a bottleneck, then either optimize for humans, or remove humans. What's the problem?

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#258
That's not correct. If human attention requires human effort, that forces human effort all the way down the chain, with no machine output being possible.

You can't say "you can't feed me machine output directly". Machine output is meant to reduce the cognitive load for human processing.

If your colleague is forwarding AI output directly to you, that means they think the AI has reduced the cognitive load for you, and also you are the best person to process that output, instead of them.

You just need to change your perception about the purpose of AI.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I believe that’s the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0 power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your life. On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sor…

I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market. The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with t…

Whenever I try to articulate this issue to people during more casual AI discussions, I always refer to “study guides” in college.

I don’t know how many of y’all did these, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only person. At my undergrad it was very common for a group of students to all to get together, compare notes from lectures and readings, and basically come up with a group study guide of sorts. People were given specific sections to share, you didn’t just send all of your notes - usually 2 people per section’s take on that portion. You could always tell who just copy and pasted their shorthand (usually indecipherable) and who actually took the time to edit it/clean it up. This was at a time when almost everyone did it on laptops.

The people who took the time to make their portion(s) digestible for others were asked back, the others weren’t.

Re: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

#260
post #34

A very prolific coworker who fully embraced claude has inflicted the team with a flood of AI-generated PRs. About six months later, it is his frequent bemoaning at the standup that their PR don't get reviewed, languishing in inattention. I don't think anyone - including myself - _intentionally_ avoid his PRs. It's just that he doesn't make it easy for the team to look at. This single headline perfectly captures what…

As someone who pushed ~4x the median PRs on my team before LLMs were a thing, I kind of think the problem here is PRs as a concept. Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans, it definitely can't scale to agents. And the exact same things you would need to safely give up on PRs for human developers (auto-formatters, linters, comprehensive end-to-end tests, continuous deployment pipelines, etc), are also things that…

> Code review doesn't scale to prolific humans

I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific humans'. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them

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