Live data from Hacker News

Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

501–510 of 786 posts

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#501
post #248

> "frequently contains all too plausible nonsense" This really isn’t the case with frontier models in 2026. I’ve found (sadly) that every time I thought the model was hallucinating, I was in fact the one who was mistaken.

N=1, and biased towards the type of questions asked. N+1, If I use one of the search engine sloptools I get frequent inaccurate answers which is I guess what the majority of people do.

[deleted]

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#502

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.

All paradigm shifts and regime changes happen because of a coalition of people that have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the current system. But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.

The incentives for developing juniors have become misaligned as the expected stay in a company dwindled from decades to years to maybe year.

It would make sense to develop juniors if most of their comp was a four year vest but that doesn't happen until later. And in your first year or two you're usually a net negative... This is even more true with AI.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#503

// 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 peop…

I suspect that we will end up with a social convention or understanding around reputation that is tied to whether someone pushes slop on other people. If I need to pass on some AI slop, retyping and copy-editing works well to validate whether it's reasonable while I work it over in my mind.

We already have social patterns for disregarding "Well... Acktchully" Bros who jump into conversations where they're not welcome and I think we can easily build up a new rule for "Well... Claude says 'Acktschully'" Bros

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#504

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.

Any competent developer knows there are limits to prompting.

Personally I've found LLM's suck at multi-threaded applications. (Because I've been tempted by the ~agentic loop~ and been burned. Then I hand code the core logic and all is well).

Woe to the developer who tries to prompt their way through this.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And…

> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too. If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them. I’ve never seen a good example where…

> If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results

Why would it mean that? That's one way of using them, sure. Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects.

> I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow

Alright, does that mean you also believe it's impossible then that anyone out there is using AI in a "net positive" way for their development workflow? Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point So... back to a currency backed by gold?

Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold! Actual Intelligence could grasp this was a simple keytranspose typo...

> Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold!

I don't usually like to gatekeep but knowing that "Au==gold" is one of those basic facts that everybody on a forum like hacker news should know and find unremarkable.

You might even say it's puts on sunglasses periodic table stakes.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#507
"The CI is failing on the main branch"

Don't be a meat proxy!

Lets not be stupid about this. Do whatever works for you, and don't let some moron set the standards for your social interactions because they got the ick one morning, just because they wrote it down and put it on a website.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#508

On 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

A whole new meaning to penetration testing

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#509

On 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?

Yeah bro passwordless sudo for claude all the way...
Post reply on HN