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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#441

Post by Silamoth »

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…

Yes, just file a ticket and let the people with relevant expertise and context handle it - obviously. Do software engineers ask Claude for recommendations on handling network outages and bug IT with “AI” slop? Do accountants bring “AI” slop advice to electricians wiring a building? Do lawyers use Claude to try helping physicians diagnose illnesses?

By providing a bad “AI” slop solution that you can’t evaluate, you’re actually creating more work for the people responsible for doing the thing. Now they have to understand the slop you’ve given them, explain why it’s wrong/won’t fit in the existing architecture/has other issue you can’t see without deep context. Or, they have to play politics to ignore your slop without angering you and creating more problems down the line. Either way, it’s harder than just letting them do their job.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#443

Post by vouaobrasil »

jpnc wrote: 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?

> Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?

A de-evolution of culture for the sake of efficiency, sure. The entire culture will shift to a greater degree of superficiality, not just because of the lack of deep understanding of what they're doing, but because AI will condition (and is conditioning) people to want the more superficial stuff.

This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to AI - but AI is at the apex of it and is the worst we've seen so far because it, much more than anything else, targets the mental domain whereas most previous automations have targeted the physical but the mental as well to a lesser extent.

The end result is a huge amount of technical debt that simply can't be recovered and a huge increase in myopia that will prevent us from truly understanding and solving serious problems that will undoubtedly occur.

Most people can't see this because they're already addicted to the dopamine hit of the tech, but it's one reason I'm 100% anti-AI and I hate it with an immense passion.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#444

Post by vouaobrasil »

jayd16 wrote: post #68
jpnc wrote: 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?

All machines are for laziness.

Not exactly. A drawing program could just create a new "blank slate" that substitutes some old skill requirements for new skills. The key point is that SOME machines create a sufficient mass of "blank slate"-like environments for active creativity and others (like AI) only diminish that room for creatvity to flourish. The danger is creating and using machines of the latter type.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#445

Post by xyzelement »

// Claude said: [giant response verbatim]

I am lucky that I work with great teams and so when someone says "this is how Claude (or Gemini) summaries the situation" it does mean "I read it and it's right-enough to be helpful, so I am passing it along without editing"

Obviously for this to work you need (1) a team that's smart and mature enough to own the AI output it puts forward and (2) shared understanding that people are operating this way.

I do find that when you have 1 and 2 this is a real accelerant. I asked a sales rep the other day what was going on in a key account and he forwarded along a 10 page Claude synthesis.

The reality is this is better intel than I would have been able to get in a pre-AI era this quickly. And yes once I went into the weeds on the doc I found one thing that didn't make sense and I asked the rep he stared at it and said "you are right that's a hallucination I don't notice" but overall it was still worth it.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#446

Post by cm2187 »

skillina wrote: post #422
cm2187 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engi…

> With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable. That isn't what was asked. The capabilities of "human + machine" clearly are increasing, but the comments above posit that as a result the average capabilities of "human (sans machine)" may decrease. The relative value of each change is far from clear.

Yeah but unless you plan to take the machine away, isn’t man+machine what matters? If you had to develop everything in assembly (or worse), you probably had a much deeper understanding of computers than a modern developer. But the modern developer can setup in minutes what would have taken weeks. To me that’s the definition of progress.

But pre-LLM developers were bogged down in mountain of boiler plate code and unfamiliar APIs. LLM enable to abstract away a lot of the unnecessary complexity that made developers improductive

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#447

Post by 72deluxe »

Havoc wrote: post #192

The tricky bit is politely conveying this to people that lets call it don't think about things too deeply. They genuinely think they're helping by shoveling 5 pages of LLM output they didn't even bother reading into teams...

But if some people lack the understanding ability to even realise that they lack understanding, how do you tell them?

Nightmare.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#448

Post by throw310822 »

freehorse wrote: post #263
throw310822 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You took all this time to reformulate the question, add the relevant implicit context, and do back and forth BUT you did not have time to reformulate the answer to something human readable that YOU own and can take responsibility for? This does not make sense to me. Nobody said not to consult an llm while formulating an answer. But if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.

Why would I reformulate what Claude already explained in a way that I find satisfactory? Only to give you the impression that I came up with it myself?

> if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.

If I send you some text copied and pasted from Claude, it means that I have read it and I think it's worth for you reading it. In this sense I'm already owning it. The problem is not the pasted answer, it's your assumption that a Claude-generated text must be "slop" that I haven't read.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#449

Post by bigfishrunning »

xyproto wrote: post #289
prymitive wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.

It's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.

I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#450

Post by pajamasam »

bonesss wrote: post #140
rishsriv wrote: post #125

This is particularly frustrating on social media, and abases what might be good ideas. Too often, my Twitter experience now is - start reading a post with some kernel of insight - read some claudism in the post - stop reading immediately It seems like people turn over their raw kernel of insight to an LLM to give it polish, likely in order to increase its appeal to the audience. But most of that appeal is lost amongs…

I keep waiting for a company to start pushing an “anti-AI AI”, Apple being my most likely speculative candidate. Flagging, highlighting, filtering, and avoiding AI slop online seems like a very lucrative capability to bake into some consumer hardware. Get your social media, and music services, back to the ‘good old days’.

Kagi does something like this: https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop

LinkedIn also added a button to report AI slop, but I'm doubtful it would be of much help on LinkedIn since every second post seems to be written by an LLM.

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