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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#541

Post by LtWorf »

maccard wrote: post #396
LtWorf wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a similar thing and I got reported to HR.

What was the outcome of the report to HR? I think if you work somewhere that this is the result, you're unlikely to have much progress challenging anything directly. In order to actually have change you need to be able to challenge and stamp out these sorts of behaviours.

> What was the outcome of the report to HR?

"Do not make negative assumptions" basically. But also a drop in how often and quickly I did reviews.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#542

Post by tomtomtom777 »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #413
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.

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.

I think the worst is when they are skilled.

You're basically describing my work day. My job went from interesting, highly skilled work to mostly horrible brain rot over the past year.

It's depressing and I don't know a way out. Other then a complete career change, throwing away 30 years of experience and a matching salary.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#544

Post by fc417fc802 »

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…

> Should they not produce the findings for someone else to read/validate?

No, they should not. They should not waste others time with output that they themselves do not fully understand. That is not even remotely helpful. The other party can use claude just as easily as they can. Using claude does not add any value in and of itself.

"Hi claude said this thing that I don't really understand please look at it for me" is never useful.

> Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?

Yes. They should do their damn job while respecting the time of the other people they interact with who have their own different jobs to do.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#545

Post by metabagel »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #85
deepsummer wrote: post #9

In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me. Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?

> Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess? Do you tell people you used a hammer to hit the nails? Do you go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t use your bare, bleeding knuckles to punch in the nails? Give people some credit and don’t treat them like idiots. Also don’t treat your LLM as some “super-power”, it’s just a fancy hammer and still hits your fi…

I generally provide the source for my information. Even if I already know the answer, I will generally provide a reference on the web or in a document. If I asked an LLM, I will provide that as part of my answer, and I'll generally chip in whether the answer makes sense to me or not; in some cases I'll say that I have no clue if the LLM response makes sense.

Needless to say, I have probably not advanced as far as someone who hoards information, because companies tend to value the information hoarders, but this is just the way I'm designed to operate. I despise information hoarding.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#546

Post by jmartrican »

felipeerias wrote: post #482

One way to prevent obvious AI language from sneaking in text destined for other human beings is to ask the model to produce ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English bullet points. This will result in a list of sentences that are clear and explanatory, easier to double-check, and convenient for the user to rewrite into a more readable format with a human voice.

Very cool. How have you liked the results of doing this? Any pitfalls so far with this approach?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#547

Post by ratelimitsteve »

tbf rephrasing the output in my own words has become the best and most important tool in ensuring quality from AI. Whether it's an answer to a question or an implementation of some ACs that I copypasta'd in, the best sanity check is understanding and the best demonstration of understanding is the ability to redo.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#548

Post by jmartrican »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #243

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

The mental model I like to use is something along the lines of the LLM is a firehose and my brain is a mere straw and that we have to eventually get all the important parts to trickle through my straw sized brain. Or another way, the LLM is all the dough shoved into a pasta extruder and all the dough needs to eventually extrude out of my brain into prod-pasta.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#549

Post by englishspot »

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…

You know what's even worse? When they don't even bother to copy-paste. They just have claude code/codex post a slack message, with all the telltale signs of an AI message (caution emojis everywhere!)

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#550

Post by metabagel »

flyingshelf wrote: post #329
neebz wrote: post #193

This 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.

Just FYI, scolding people causes them to resent you. Take great care when giving negative feedback. Courtesy costs you very little and gains a lot.
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