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Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

blog.yaelwrites.com

111–120 of 154 posts

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote this by hand but I did run it through an AI for editing. The changes were pretty minor; just a couple of lines.

The first paragraph screamed AI to me. I'll try to dissect each bit, see below. It's hard to put it into words... --- Send an e-mail + pick up the phone . Mismatched analog. First one is outgoing, second is incoming. Yes, I know you can pick up "to make a call". In which case, then we have the classic LLM pattern of eliding details that matter to make it sound "smooth" (like blended cardboard smooth, glug glug). some…

Wrong, those were all me. (I just checked the draft.) The only part I tweaked was the conclusion, plus I broke up a few paragraphs that were too long.

I often leave out details and specifics or make things purposely vague because I am writing about real people.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#112

I 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/

Good post. I'm trying to decide if this is better or worse than people sending their AI Q&A without anybody asking (as Cory Doctorow wrote about here https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-03-02...).

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#113
post #3

One 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.

Agreed, you can also preface the question. I've checked A, B, and C with AI, curious to get your opinion/thoughts? I don't think anyone in any industry regardless of seniority would redirect you back to AI assuming you're having a genuine conversation.

And yet, here we are. :)

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who recommends to ask an LLM in the first situation will do so in the second because they're a shit engineer. "Ask the LLM" is not at all a valid answer in a professional context where part of your job is to educate the less experienced, no matter how little effort is put in the question.

Sometimes part of the education is teaching people how to ask better questions, and that they need to do their research before asking you

Yes, fully agree. "Ask an LLM" does not achieve that.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically what happens is that we have a good conversation, we make progress towards figuring out what they should want to do and how they should try to do it, and the 2000 line PR or 10 page doc gets abandoned. I do read things in detail when I expect I might one day be convinced to approve them, but that fraction has plummeted from 95% to like 20% since January.

Have you noticed an increase in their willingness to “do the right thing first time” during these last 6 months since your approval rate has dropped that much? (Even if the right thing is to have more conversations)? Do you know if there’s a way to incentivize them to lean toward doing the right thing first? Are the company and stakeholder goals and objectives in line with them making progress toward higher quality e…

Unfortunately, I've had a number of people explicitly defend that nothing's going wrong here. Their view is that, if sloppy code is cheap, everyone might as well produce some to illustrate their ideas before having a conversation. I'm skeptical of that position but haven't had much luck in fighting it.

> Are the company and stakeholder goals and objectives in line with them making progress toward higher quality engineering? That is, are these juniors protected from randoms asking them to circumvent good process, etc?

In my personal experience yes, but I've seen a few teams and heard stories of many more where the juniors are not protected and they just ship regressions and outages all the time now. I think the trend towards AI cost controls will mitigate this, although the impact will of course be uneven as companies behind the curve discover powerful agentic coding for the first time.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#116
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then don’t answer it? Or just give a seconds worth of context into why you think it’s not important?

Context switches are not free.

Dozens of "quick questions" over the course of a day will drag down your productivity to about one third or worse.

I know that for me, it takes about 45 minutes of focus to enter a flow state, when I'm at my most productive. If I can never enter the zone, then I'm not really doing the thing that made me such a valuable player in the first place, am I?

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#117
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if this is the experience in a team, then the team already has a problem. i expect these things to be made clear up front. when someone joins a team they should be assigned a mentor whom they can ask any question, no matter how dumb, and the mentor then guides the new team member in how to approach such a question, which at that point can include asking the LLM. it is the mentors responsibility to point out when it i…

Alternative take: the assumption that senior engineers get pressured into agreeing to mentor without it formally being an acknowledged part of their job - that is, that a significant percentage of their time is supposed to be allocated to making themselves available to juniors - is fundamentally a problem. There is so much stigma associated with being an senior engineer that simply wants to spend 95% of their day wor…

mentoring juniors should always be part of the job. sharing your experience and knowledge is part of the common job description. the idea that you just write code and never need to share your experience with others is a fundamental misunderstanding of what your work is about. you would have expressly negotiate an exception into your contract if you want that, not the other way around.

what doesn't work is the assumption that mentoring doesn't take any of your time and that you are expected to manage the same workload with and without mentoring. that's not ok. and spending 70% of your time mentoring may also be a bit to much, but if that is what the company needs then it is still your job.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#118

I 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…

Your prose curves from line to line very elegantly, not sure if its intentional

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#119
post #110

You clearly used AI pretty heavily to write this - so whats the point?

There are a lot of parallels between "just ask an LLM" in response to a thoughtful, well-researched question and spurious accusations of heavy LLM use that never happened in response to a post, so that's actually a pretty astute point, just not the one I think you were trying to make.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#120
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative take: the assumption that senior engineers get pressured into agreeing to mentor without it formally being an acknowledged part of their job - that is, that a significant percentage of their time is supposed to be allocated to making themselves available to juniors - is fundamentally a problem. There is so much stigma associated with being an senior engineer that simply wants to spend 95% of their day wor…

mentoring juniors should always be part of the job. sharing your experience and knowledge is part of the common job description. the idea that you just write code and never need to share your experience with others is a fundamental misunderstanding of what your work is about. you would have expressly negotiate an exception into your contract if you want that, not the other way around. what doesn't work is the assumpt…

It seems as though you want things both ways.

The notion that an experienced person should automatically consider mentorship to be part of their job is not backed by any code or contract that I'm aware of. It's just increasingly been pushed on people who haven't pushed back enough to keep a new generation from feeling as though they are entitled to it.

You can sample as large a pool of senior devs as you want; I suspect that if you can find 1-in-10 who have specific wording and structure in their employment contracts about the percentage of their time that they should expect to allocate to mentorship, you'll be beating my own estimations. No, what you're doing is attempting to codify a very polite form of exploitation. Yes, those people are usually among the most well-compensated, but it doesn't change the fact that they have their own job to do and a finite time in which to do it.

Please note that I am not suggesting anyone on a team could somehow work in a vacuum. Also, even the most experienced person frequently needs to ask for help, guidance and clarification. Being experienced is pretty much the opposite of knowing everything and is much closer to a measure of how much you have forgotten.

Nor am I implying that senior people have any business being rude or dismissive towards team members who legitimately have good reasons to interrupt someone's flow state. Timely clarification is important to a project regardless of who is doing what.

What I am saying is that if you run a company you might legitimately be horrified to learn that your most critical team members are spending 70% of their productive time mentoring, especially if that remaining 30% of their time is so fragmented that it never resembles a true flow state. You need those people to Build The Thing.

If you don't get that, then you're not living in the same reality I am.

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