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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

181–190 of 786 posts

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#181
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold! Actual Intelligence could grasp this was a simple keytranspose typo...

> ... See that way too often in comments like this. Anyway, it was pretty likely they knew it was a typo, it was just a funny response.

[deleted]

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#183
Half of this feels like a communication/empathy problem. "Summarise this for someone without our context" fixes the wall of text, and just asking someone to do that might work.

Validation is harder, as nobody skips it because they weren't told to, but because relaying is faster, and unread output looks like validated output right up until it bites. That's probably not solved by asking nicely, I don't think there's a process fix for that beyond people actually being held to it.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#184
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All machines are for laziness.

I think you are confusing machines with motors. Many machines do things that simply are not possible without. A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking, but it enables you to go faster than you can run. Menually operated sewing machines produce stitches that would be infeasible by hand. Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.

But you could still arrive if you walk instead of using the bicycle. And I am sure you can do the same stitches by hand, it just takes forever.

Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#186
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?

It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engineers has gone down.

But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#187

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!"

Asking someone to ask an LLM is peak laziness.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#188
I got a spreadsheet of requirements for some software from a customer recently.

It was thousands of lines long with repeats and a boatload of conflicting requirements.

When we had a meeting to review it they didn’t know what many of the requirements were. They explained that many people made the spreadsheet but they were all in the meeting and nobody could quite describe some items or how they worked together. The vast majority of the spreadsheet was a mystery.

The phrasing and mishmash of concepts / inability of anyone to explain much of it made me suspect it was largely generated by AI.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#189

In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me. Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?

> Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer?

"I don't know, I could google it or ask Claude for you, but you could do that yourself."

Because saying "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this is nightmare fuel right before I go to bed omg

I have a friend who works in healthcare and he says patients now regularly pull out their phone and ask him to talk to their chatbot. Anything he says to them, they immediately repeat to ChatGPT and ask if it’s correct.

"Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" - Gwen DeMarco, Galaxy Quest
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