I agree but to be fair, often people could have asked an AI to get their answer. Especially seniors are prone to this (thinking the AI could not possibly know this or other biases). The responder wrote they asked Claude so as to not take credit for the answer and also to indicate they did not vet it. Then the person asking can decide if they want to read the answer or not (often a 1 sec glean can reveal if it is promising or completely off track.
Don't be a meat proxy
321–330 of 786 posts
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the recent wave of posts about Claude rewriting entire codebases from Zig/Electron to Rust/Swift, I can't help but question the prompter's actual confidence in the final result. Gaining a thorough understanding of the generated output still demands an enormous amount of effort. I suspect the reality is that most people just chain a few review agents together, and if they output "LGTM", the code gets committed an…
> The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway. but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no sing…
> People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler.
This was OK as long as you understood enough Assembly to debug it. Even though I haven't written much Assembly directly, I can still debug it when there are compiler bugs, which does ocasionally happen.
If you lose the ability to both write and debug code then things get much worse. If no one at a company can do that, then you truly are at the mercy of the LLMs.
As for hardware bugs, those are only possibly to identify (by excluding any other possibility) and work-around, since most engineers don't have the luxury of being able to change the hardware.
I'm wondering if some of us will become consultants to companies that lost the ability to handle code. When I was in university the going meme was that old COBOL programmers were making a lot of money in consulting jobs, maybe this will be the new version of that.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#323I 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've literally seen this in HN responses as well, so many times. What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response
Exactly! When someone does it at work, I get a bit sad because my conclusion is that whoever does it can't like their job very much. But that's ok – not liking your job very much is compatible with an otherwise happy life.
When people start doing it in an entirely voluntary human-to-human situation, like having a conversation online about a topic of interest, I'm gobsmacked.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#324If 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?
Arguably we already have, if you concentrate on intelligence rates since 1975: the reverse Flynn affect. Those who grew up about that time no longer had to generate their own entertainment through storytelling, make their own music, calculate things mentally: everyday they had music, entertainment pumped into their homes, a way to avoid athematic, etc. And now we're evening thinking a lot less in our jobs, not even p…
It makes me so angry that an entire branch of "science" gets to just take data and go "I dunno man, maybe kids are just dumber". There's so much of this in social science. Take some measurable thing, and then just wildly speculate about the cause of it in an entirely untestable way, and then test that theory in ways that absolutely do not justify the conclusions. At the very least, the whole field should get a lesson in how to communicate the certainty of their theories and conclusions. You've got some guys hanging around couching their uncertainty when they're banging sub atomic particles together at the speed of light and then you've got some social science bro being like "If you move that checkbox on that form to the bottom it'll be way more effective, trust me bro I've hacked how people think".
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#325Earlier 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?
It seems that this is largely coming from higher ups who are probably (consciously or not) testing the waters for LLMs being able to replace the people they're dumping the walls of text on. I don't mean in any sort of malicious penny pinching scheme either, but simply people wanting to be able to do things quickly and as close to their own demands as possible, while getting rid of the 'middle man.' It just so happens…
I doubt higher ups wanna babysit agent software engineers all day long, it's not fun and its pretty time consuming and cognitively demanding. They'll let humans handle it - but their dream is way less humans will be needed than before.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#326On 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
You guys are using protection?
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#327I 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…
It's so real.. Suddenly managers sending MR, commenting MRs, all AI driven.. 300 lines text, where you don't even know if the premises are correct. I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous. I don't know how to stop them..
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#328At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though
At my current job I just asked a coworker in chat if the reply was his or LLM. He quickly owned up and the incidence of brokered LLM messages in chat dropped signficantly.
Unfortunately people are being encouraged to use LLM in docs, emails, and presentations so it's probably a losing battle.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#329This is like pre-LLM, you presenting a problem to the team, and they google and send you the top few links thinking they have found the solution and have done their job. I actually banned this and made it part of onboarding. I can google too. You need to read yourself, ground the solution to our setting and then propose a plan.
Here's my plan:
It's gotten to a point where if I see valid `code` in responses I assume it's AI junk output and I scold the commenter.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#330[deleted]