This is the new "Let Me Google This For You".
Don't be a meat proxy
331–340 of 786 posts
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#332If 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…
Yeah it's as old as time to be honest.
When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities.
Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mostly made up for that (in particular our ability to communicate across distances and time, to read Plato's concerns without 100 generations of Chinese whispers), but it was a trade-off, as most technologies tend to be.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#333Earlier 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…
With the crucial difference that these processes deterministically return correct & working results (save for bugs which can be fixed and then stay fixed). Cannot be guaranteed for LLM output, no matter how much effort we put in.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#334On 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?
Raw_Claude can just go straight in prod.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#335It's our absolute obligation to make sure "meat proxy" sticks as hard as "vibe coding" did. It's too good not to.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#336Earlier 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…
> very competent who know when and how to use it and for what.
More productive? Sure, to an extent.
Being merely more productive is a tame claim for what some people unashamedly post here
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!"
Ask Claude to generate a few numbers using it and tell you if they are random or not
They may be random, but are they secure?
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
You guys are using protection?
Raw_Claude can just go straight in prod.
I guarantee that the major players will offer straight-to-CEO interfaces where the user provides ALL info and AI will proceed to orchestrate the entire company, from finances to deployment. We're screwed, without protection.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#339Delegating stuff to Google (more recently AI) and repeating back the result, is one of my core functions at work next to programming.
A co-worker I'd just tell to RTFM when it's bothering me. Higher up the hierarchy, the egos are more fragile and I'm afraid the can't take it.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#340Recent models have had a worrying lean towards longer output. If you're going to serve up some AI slop, at least distil it to the smallest possible footprint possible.