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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#451

Post by cautiouscat »

I am so tired of this. It’s even getting to the point where people without the full context and understanding are meat proxying incorrect information. Reading a bunch of slop that isn’t helpful hinders.

If they instead read it, and distill it down to “have you checked X?” Someone with the full understanding can easily go: “Yes, X doesn’t fit because of this other reason.” within seconds. Sometimes this happens without asking a teammate. However, when I do ask I’m not asking for you to ask Claude and paste the results, I have my own tokens for that. I’m asking you because I think your knowledge will be helpful in finding the answer.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#452

Post by al_borland »

> Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words

In the past, avoiding this process was called plagiarism, and it was frowned upon, to put it mildly. Now, because the LLMs say it's OK, it's become the norm.

The, "this is what Claud said", response also comes off like an appeal to authority. When these LLMs have no authority and get the basics wrong constantly.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#453

Post by tofuziggy »

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…

the other day I had an "official" career conversation with my boss. They took some notes during the talk and later sent me a page summary of the conversation to see if it looked right. It immediately smelled of AI, and had some things completely opposite to what I said. jeeze I guess this is where we are headed...

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#454

Post by [deleted] »

jvanderbot wrote: post #429
ungreased0675 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.

Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10? I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.

[deleted]

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#455

Post by carlosjobim »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #291
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?

I get it’s annoying and I personally hate it but firing someone for it is ridiculous. Are you expecting everyone to rewrite everything from an AI before they share it because that doesn’t sound a good use of company time either.

Firing somebody for it is ridiculous? If you say that, then you are also obliged as a customer to keep giving your money to companies who do not perform as expected. You have no right to choose a different lawyer if your lawyer makes an AI-generated report for your case. You have no right to walk past a restaurant which is using AI-generated billboards, you shall eat there.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#456

Post by 72deluxe »

datakan wrote: post #351
chii wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's basically asking other people to do his job for him, because he knows that the AI doesn't truly do it well enough. I would say to him that if he wants me to do his job, he needs to pay me his salary.

My VP boss calls me 6 times a day to help him understand his copilot responses and asks why we aren't doing what copilot says we should do. I then have to spend multiple hours explaining why. His peers call him to understand their copilot responses which he then copilots and calls me to help interpret. On and on and on

This sounds like true hell. I am very sorry.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#457

Post by bigfishrunning »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #143
maccard wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way

I know exactly the persona you’re describing. It’s unfortunate because they have a great learning tool now. I always felt bad for over eager engineers who were not strong. They had the right attitude but I thought lacked the learning resources and perhaps the learning skills others stronger engineers had. Before if you found yourself in an area you don’t understand. Some people make it all the way through school with…

So, in other words, the pipeline that's producing engineers is not filtering out people without talent. It used to be that people who "didn't know how to learn" couldn't make it through the early engineering courses and moved over to some other field.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#458

Post by al_borland »

dstanko wrote: post #430

My pet peeve is endless Confluence Wiki pages that are clearly written by Claude (or whatever agent they like to use). I get bombarded with these, like it means something. Usually I say: "let me summarize this with my agent", but people rarely get the point.

I've been running across more and more of these. Many of my co-workers are falling for them. They'll run across one of these pages and start to get impressed by all the work a team has done and how organized they are. I dismiss it as slop and they defend it.

A week goes by and the topic comes back around. They actually took the time to read the page and realized everything was wrong and nothing made sense. They saw the page was updated (daily), went to go check the changes, and saw the whole page was rewritten each time, so they couldn't tell what changed. At this point they start to see the anti-value of all this, but keep falling for it every time they run across a new page.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#459

Post by derrida »

jvanderbot wrote: post #429
ungreased0675 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.

Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10? I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.

while 0:

   x=ctrl-c("output error report")

   eval(ctrl-v(x))

   sleep(10)

   user("Input...")
something like this?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#460

Post by denster »

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…

We had the same problem, now I just ask my colleagues to AR the docs (attentionrequest.com); while the site may be tongue-in-cheek, it helped us build a workflow, where "certificate of having read & thought about it" is conditioned on reading the doc and then writing up a number of questions on it as a human, before sending it off. It's worked reasonably well for us so far, hopefully this becomes one of the new norms.
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