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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#311

Post by nmeagent »

bonoboTP wrote: post #253
surgical_fire wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.

The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is. Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately und…

I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#312

Post by dwarhl »

rpastuszak wrote: post #272
dwarhl wrote: post #267

I do it, on purpose: it teaches people to do basic research by themselves, and not hit me with questions they could have gotten with a simple chat with their llm. It's a kind of RTFM for current days.

I can imagine it makes things easier for you but I find it hard to imagine it teaches anyone anything. Just offloading social effort to an LLM (fair enough but let’s call a spade a spade)

I don't mean to paint myself as the smart one for doing that. It's a coping mechanism. But I disagree: it teaches... something. The risk is that it's not what I thought it would be, eventually.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#313

Post by bonoboTP »

nmeagent wrote: post #311
bonoboTP wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is. Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately und…

I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.

Mweh, I'm not a native English speaker. It's a definitely existing archetype, though, just like "Spießbürger" points at a thing in German.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#314

Post by Jensson »

nmeagent wrote: post #311
bonoboTP wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is. Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately und…

I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.

People who uses the word "obnoxious" are also obnoxious. There are many unpleasant words, you have to use some of them and people don't like any of them.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#315

Post by zmgsabst »

Applejinx wrote: post #249
denis-stable wrote: post #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.

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 nobo…

If you use the definition from On Bullshit, then bullshit is a statement made without regard for truth value because of its utility to the speaker.

As such, LLMs can only bullshit.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#317

Post by ForHackernews »

ffsm8 wrote: post #56
eddythompson80 wrote: post #8

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…

On the contrary, I kind of love this as form of malicious compliance. I'd wager money that the PO/BAs have been demanding "comprehensive documentation" for a very long time, and now they are getting what they've asked for good and hard.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#318

Post by grey-area »

mlrtime wrote: post #300
jasonkester wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Let me give you a scenario and see if it is in this same fireable offense line: An Ops person who deals with company code base but is not a SWE in the code base regularly has to work around issues with this software (They are OPs). However they have read access to the source. In the past, they see a bug and open a jira with how it was found for the dev team, and it may or may not ever get looked at. Now ops can point…

Without understanding they have no way of judging the competence of Claude and the slop it generates. So yes they should just file a ticket the old way, after doing the actual hard work, which is reproducing the bug.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#319

Post by gste »

Of course you can relay the output. Dumb to say you can't. In the same way you can relay the output of anything, if it's useful.

But it should form part of your own judgment, not, as you say, just pasted into a chat without any thought.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#320

Post by bravetraveler »

Don't come to me with something your mandated rubber ducky can handle; never in my life have I worked so hard to achieve so little.

The only reason I don't do an equivalent of this, shared convo links, is that I simply don't use Claude directly. I use it through hundreds of other people. Meat proxies all the way down.

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