If you've already done some research then include that up front. I get asked a lot of questions by people who not only haven't asked an AI first they haven't even googled it. So if you've asked Claude and are not satisfied with the response then include that and say what your question is now in the light of that information.
Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
61–70 of 154 posts
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#62OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster. People are really really tired. Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the ", our employers are makin…
We are not in a recession, and we (if you mean the US) recovered our economy from COVID (under Biden).
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#63“ I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus”
Doesn’t that mean his answer was that he, with all of his years of experience, would ask Claude?
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#64I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI. It makes sense to hate and despise that answer. And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.
You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario.
The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done.
There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively.
Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this:
"What should I do?"
"What do you think you should do?"
"X"
"Do X"
There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro.
Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#65OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster. People are really really tired. Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the ", our employers are makin…
We are not in a recession, and we (if you mean the US) recovered our economy from COVID (under Biden).
before COVID everyone on my team travelled once or twice a year to conferences as well as to the home office for get-togethers, on the company dime. Those conferences have been turned into online only and my company hasn't flown me or hardly anyone on my team or any of our related teams anywhere in years. All of that would be considered vastly extravagant and expensive today. So some kind of belt tightening went on that was never un-tightened.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#66"What did you find when you googled it?"
"What did an LLM say about it?"
"What did the docs say?"
These are all better follow-ups than telling someone to do a specific thing.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#67One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question. Compare: — What's the best way of doing X? — Ask Claude. vs: — I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think? I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.
LMGTFY for you was infuriating because it was 100% of the top Google responses to specific searches.
Generally I didn't unleash one of those without already being extremely certain that what they needed would be a top result.
However, search has become enshittified, and I don't think LLM chatbots have achieved a similar level of certainty, so it may just be the end of an era for me.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#68I once wrote a similar essay on this topic. When I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer: https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/
This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and pu…
Beyond mirroring the engineering practices that you yourself want to see other people perform, have you found any techniques to get people to … in short, do their job again? Understand context, understand what they did, why they did it, what they’re doing, etc.
The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it.
And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking points back and forth at each other feels equally harmful.
Are we really tolerating turning ourselves into LLM rubber stamps?
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#69I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI. It makes sense to hate and despise that answer. And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.
> Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter
Huh, what if I don't want to spend time answering a low-effort question? I will have a look if the default answers/approaches don't work.
Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
#70The subtitle is: > I already did. They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article. This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this. For the first case, the s…
There is a third case where the other party doesn't realize that the asker lacks the relevant experience to discern good LLM answers from bad answers for that topic. Same solution as case one though - don't be afraid to say "Claude said X but that doesn't sound right".
Depending on the question that possibility can be quite rare these days. If you ask “How does x work in this codebase?”, it will read a bunch of files and give you a very likely to be accurate answer. If your using a platform without that context and ask it something more abstract, well, your mileage will vary.