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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

61–70 of 786 posts

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#61

I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…

I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense.

Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.

Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.

Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#62
post #7

I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing…

I often use it to simplify & target my responses, and avoid over-sharing technical details.

At the same time, I use the Q&A cycle to improve my vetted knowledge base, which I also share (and can reference in answers).

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#63

I append "sound kinda dumb but be factually correct" to my Claude requests and get much less jargony responses.

I'll try that. I'm constantly telling it to be "brief, plain and on the point" or something similar. Tried caveman, but I think it had it's own issues.

But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey, here's what I found. By the way I used Claude to get this info. It might be worth trying that yourself if you have similar questions, it's quite good at this in my experience. Give it a go" Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

I did that the first time. But how often do you want to say that (in a public chat that their supervisors can read)?

Literally just ignore these people if they don't get the message. Let them complain to their supervisor and hopefully their supervisor will bring up the fact that you asked them to use AI instead. It's an easily defensible position. Some people need to learn the hard way.

Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#65
post #56

I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…

At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise. They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him Complete brainrot Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point Thankfully I'm a dev…

I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#66
post #33

Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.

Yes, stupid and lazy people will be stupid and lazy.

AI is just another tool they can use to be stupid and lazy while pretending to contribute.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#67

I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…

I had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#68
post #2

If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid. Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?

All machines are for laziness.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#69
That is super actual in my team. The biggest problem is that Claude tends to write long prose and use jargon which is not common for us. Often, to understand the whole idea I have to read all the text. The best if the writer rephrases what Claude has written, as wording/jargon will be familiar for the reader and will make communication easier.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#70

I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…

I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense. Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go. Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job. Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?

The psychosis is largely coming from the top.
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