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Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

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Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#121

Post by mcv »

amelius wrote: post #69
mcv wrote: post #34

I 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.

What is low effort about "I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus. Not what the textbook says. If five studies conflicted, which would he trust? I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't."?

He checked the consensus, the textbook, and 5 studies. He's asking for an answer from experience and he gets "Ask Claude".

But even if you don't know, "I don't know" is a better answer than "Ask Claude", which blindly assumes that the asker hadn't thought of that, which is a weird thing to assume.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#122

Post by mcv »

peteforde wrote: post #116
anon7000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

He scheduled a call specifically to ask this question. What does context switching have to do with anything? Don't accept the call if you can't afford to switch context.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#123

Post by mcv »

peteforde wrote: post #64
mcv wrote: post #34

I 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 seni…

Why would you accept a scheduled call if you want to be left alone? That makes no sense.

You're the one projecting bias onto this scenario. You assume people only want to talk to you to waste your time. If you work with professionals, you can assume that when they ask you a question, they have a reason to ask you that question. Assuming that they're just being lazy is bad faith.

Accepting a call and then giving someone this kind of non-answer is extremely disrespectful of their time and their professionalism.

> Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs.

That's not what I wrote. You're being needlessly dishonest and disrespectful right here.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#124

Post by em-bee »

peteforde wrote: post #120
em-bee wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 susp…

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.

every job i had, every developer i hired. it is also backed by german law for example, refusing to mentor/train others in the work you do is a fireable offense in germany. in any job. not just software development. i doesn't need to be explicit in the contract. it is a natural and expected part of your job. and in the US with at-will employment, what's in your contract doesn't matter as much either. if it seems like a reasonable request they can just let you go if you refuse. the idea that you should not ever have to pass on your knowledge to others in your company seems very entitled to me.

that's my opinion on the matter. you can find more diverse opinions here:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8627...

some even fully agree with you.

i already acknowledged the 70% problem you mention. that should not happen unless it is known and intentional. i'd be horrified too if i were surprised by that.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#125

Post by Charon77 »

mlinhares wrote: post #56
voxgen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Here's the problem, countering a lie or hallucination takes much more energy than asking Claude something and saying its true. Its the same as trying to fight misinformation on the internet, the amount of energy you have to spend to prove someone is lying or fabricating data is very high. And having to do this on the corporate environment saps the energy and time of people that could be doing something productive by…

[flagged]

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#126

Post by nozzlegear »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #115
t-writescode wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engin…

You're fighting the good fight.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#127

Post by peteforde »

mcv wrote: post #122
peteforde wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

He scheduled a call specifically to ask this question. What does context switching have to do with anything? Don't accept the call if you can't afford to switch context.

I wish I was there with you to witness the look on your face as you slowly begin to realize that something as simple as a call can and often will absolutely pull you out of the flow state.

Someone sneezing nearby can pull you out of the flow state.

The idea that the onus is on the person who you're trying to distract to distract themselves to tell you not to distract them is just so broken if you think about it even just a little bit.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#128

Post by peteforde »

em-bee wrote: post #124
peteforde wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 susp…

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. every job i had, every developer i hired. it is also backed by german law for example, refusing to mentor/train others in the work you do is a fireable offense in germany. in any job. not just software development. i doesn't need to be explicit in the contract…

That's really interesting about German law. I didn't know that, so I appreciate learning.

I suspect that if we were having this debate over dinner, we would agree on far more than we disagree on. I think we're speaking past each other because we're operating with slightly different notions of what mentoring implies.

From my perspective, I think that there's an obvious and reasonable expectation that you make best efforts to be a good team player. That means doing your part to participate in planning, knowledge transfer, group morale and of course making yourself available to work through tough problems with people regardless of their skill level.

What I think is far more dubious is the relatively recent slippery slope towards the notion that someone should reasonably be expected that career progress dovetails with some sort of natural law that says you are not being a good human if you aren't willing-to-excited to spend 70% of your productive time in a semi-permanent state of continuous partial attention because the people around you demand priority access to your time and attention, above any of your personal priorities or job responsibilities, often without compensation beyond a rote "thanks".

If you can't ship inside of a deadline because your ephemeral "mentoring" took implicit priority over your actual job, then something is very wrong with people's expectations of how key talent's time should be allocated.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#129

Post by peteforde »

mcv wrote: post #123
peteforde wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seni…

Why would you accept a scheduled call if you want to be left alone? That makes no sense. You're the one projecting bias onto this scenario. You assume people only want to talk to you to waste your time. If you work with professionals, you can assume that when they ask you a question, they have a reason to ask you that question. Assuming that they're just being lazy is bad faith. Accepting a call and then giving someo…

Again: getting a call is enough to knock someone out of deep concentration.

Anyhow, in addition to not hating LLMs, I would add "try not to use dramatic, hyperbolic devices in casual writing, it makes you sound ridiculous" to my advice.

Re: Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

#130

Post by Cilvic »

jeffnash wrote: post #108
Aurornis wrote: post #11

The 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…

I agree 100%. I've been the resident 'tech guy' among my friends and family for as long as I can remember, and I thought that LLMs would be the definite end to all 'blurry picture of computer screen captioned with "what should I do"' texts, yet that didn't seem to be the case. In fact, LLMs made it worse, as it actually made me seem more knowledgeable; I would be the one asking AI on their behalf and responding with…

>turns out moms of nerds sometimes ask their children tech questions because they miss their voice

Thanks, I'll to remember this.

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