Claude's not a person. Claude is just a tool.
Don't be a meat proxy
241–250 of 786 posts
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?
Thousands of miles on foot and tens of thousands on bicycle. Walking is essentially zero effort, so I don't see how cycling can really be easier, unless you are going downhill. People cycle because it's faster, not because it's easier. People drive because it's easier (many people still drive even if it takes longer than cycling).
> People cycle because it's faster, not because it's easier
That may be true, but the fact is that cycling is a more energy-efficient form of transport than walking. It takes literally less effort to go the same distance.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#243On social media, I saw the much more vulgar
“Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod”
And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
> 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. That is not an easily defensible position at all. LLMs cannot give reliable answers, so it makes perfect sense to ask a human instead of the LLM. Any manager who would take the side of someone saying "just ask Claude" is a very foolish manager indeed.
"Do your own research" is definitely a defensible position. No one is saying take Claude's output as fact.
These people would still ask and waste your time without AI. The fact is, they don't even bother trying to find an answer themselves. And it's often something Claude is extremely good at finding out. Which is why my first suggestion was if you used Claude, then let the person asking know that it worked well for you and encourage them to use it. It's their own competency at their job to judge the output, they shouldn't be pushing the hard bit onto someone else.
If someone uses AI or some other research and then comes to you with their findings and other questions then that is infinitely better to me. I absolutely despise people asking me basic questions that involve me literally doing the research job for them.
If they come to me like "Hey, I have X problem, I used Claude like you suggested and it came out with this response. I'm not 100% sure it's correct because of Y. Would you be able to take a quick glance to see if it's on the right track?". I am much happier with this question because it's clear they have actually tried to research themselves.
Ignoring someone who doesn't even do the most basic research is 100% a defensible position. People should be doing their job.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#245There's a certain etiquette to it. When someone asks me something and I use an LLM to research the answer (notice that I said 'research', not 'produce'), I frame the findings as something that I've investigated with, say, Claude. I also take the time to edit the response and read if myself at least twice, because I don't want a stochastic machine to take over my identity.
Yes, AI etiquette is what we need. The question is “how much human processing on the AI output is necessary before considering it no longer a meat proxy”. My way to coin it is “If you feel the need to specify in your answer that it is AI generated, work it more”.
In the end, nobody cares whether you used your memory and expertise alone, asked a peer, googled it, or asked ChatGPT to refine your answer. As long as you verified it, rephrased to match company lingo and can vouch for it, everyone is happy.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#246> Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. I recently got this sentence from Claude: "NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn." Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.
I'm always puzzled when I see this kind of commentary. How are people using LLMs that they find this type of thing problematic? Just do:
- "It's verbose" -> prompt "Explain briefly"
- "plausible nonsense" -> Yes, it happens, but less frequently than with older models, and arguably far less than your average human. Mitigate by prompting "Run a search to check that X, Y, Z is correct".
- "I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this." -> Does this really happen frequently? It doesn't to me. Mitigate by prompting "Breakdown that sentence and explain each term in plain English".
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still need to verify that the answer that Claude gave is not hallucinated. That will also cost you some more time. If the answer is wrong and people trust your judgement, then they will take a lot longer to figure out, that your answer is not to be relied upon.
I usually do so I understand what I am replying, but seriously, the latest Opus and Fable versions get it right more often than I would. The time of AI hallucinations is over, as long as they have the context.
Even Mythos can hallucinate[1] with a codebase to analyze. The argument I often see is that humans are fallible, too, but the issues we're seeing in this topic are about those who should know better—including in senior positions—heeding LLM responses/advice over human and concerningly not actually thinking about things at all. Ie: they're not being treated by many as just useful tools/tentative feedback but as authoritative answers/solutions.
There still needs to be critical thinking involved on the human side, even if there's a high rate of accuracy in certain dimensions.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#248> "frequently contains all too plausible nonsense" This really isn’t the case with frontier models in 2026. I’ve found (sadly) that every time I thought the model was hallucinating, I was in fact the one who was mistaken.
N=1, and biased towards the type of questions asked. N+1, If I use one of the search engine sloptools I get frequent inaccurate answers which is I guess what the majority of people do.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#249That 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.
I was talking to some friends that are heavy Claude users and suggested it was bullshitting, and got some pushback along the lines of it wasn't a person and didn't have agency. I'm not sure it's that simple.
The jargon can be functionally like bullshitting. It's preferentially aping language that's over everybody's heads in hopes of not being criticized. Whether that is a person's toxic habits (it's not, there's nobody in there) or an epiphenomenon of the design of the machine is less important: it's bullshitting if it's a social behavior there to manipulate people.
(jargon included where relevant, in hopes that people who know it will see it's the right word to use :) )
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You cannot walk 100 miles in a day, but anyone with a bit of training can cycle that in an afternoon. It's not a matter of effort or laziness, it's simply not possible. The stitching comment is just pedantic. People don't hand stitch like a machine not because they are lazy, it's because it's ineffective and impractical. It's not impossible to drive screws directly into softwood by hand, but you'd never get anything…
Can you write 10k LOC a day without a coding agent?
It's the same issue. You can walk 100 miles. Just not in a day. And you can create 10k LOC without a coding agent. Just not in a day.
I don't think that coding agents enable technical possibilities. They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.