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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#571

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

californical wrote: post #402
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s just a fancy version of previous tools. Imagine a coworker instead does a refactor by grepping the entire codebase and doing a find-and-replace. Do they ensure that it didn’t accidentally overwrite something it shouldn’t have? Or do they just throw up a PR and assume their little refactoring bash command works fine, then expect their coworkers to debug it for them?

The 1st one, of course, that is the whole point. AI is increasing the 2nd one by an order of magnitude. People think they shouldn't have to do the 1st one anymore.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#572

Post by jayd16 »

metabagel wrote: post #523
maccard wrote: post #91

At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though

Would you be OK with someone looking up the answer on the internet?

You mean like when juniors would copy paste Stack Overflow without verifying or even understanding it?

No. We hated that too.

Actual research is, of course, fine.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#573

Post by natsucks »

binary0010 wrote: post #371
skinwill wrote: post #343

Woodworkers often will have a preference for their favorite tool. Once they become comfortable with that tool they will sometimes prefer to use it for things it wasn't designed. For me it was the band saw. When I needed to split a board, bandsaw. When I needed to cut a curve, bandsaw. Cut a horse figure? bandsaw! I once saw a woodworking television show that seemed to do everything on the table saw. Rip, make frames…

Whenever people compare ai to a one real world tool always surprises me tbh. The only equivalent tool in wood working would be a robot that can build an entire table from scratch and you just sit there and tell it what to do and what kinda table you want and watch it autonomously build everything. 1 saw type is not really even remotely equivalent to what ai is to software.

Yeah, AI is a general purpose technology, on a par with the introduction of the computer itself. Analogies to tools seems inappropriate.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#574

Post by dyauspitr »

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?

Well, apparently, our brain sizes have shrunk something like 30% over the last 10,000 years. This is primarily because ancient man needed to be a jack of all trades just to survive in the wilderness. Once civilization and specialization took over we just didn’t need all that processing power since a lot of that work was just outsourced to civilization and society.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#576

Post by throw310822 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #178
throw310822 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh? I don't understand, are you saying that instead of asking Claude myself I should write a question for other people to do it? Which is by the way only the initial part of the work I described?

You can do whatever to get answers to questions, but don't just forward said answers to other people, tell them in your own words / interpretation. Prove that you understand the information you've been given instead of being a meat proxy.

You know what? If you post a question and I get a good answer from Claude, it means you haven't even been able to do the basic job of asking yourself. Not only you weren't able, you also expect me to reformat nicely the answer so you don't feel stupid reading the LLM text you should have generated yourself?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#577

Post by jayd16 »

metabagel wrote: post #524
DanHulton wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I wanted to ask a human who’s job it is to know, instead of an AI that might make things up and waste all our time.

Why is it their job to know, but it's not your job to know?

Different roles and specialties? Different work history?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#578

Post by heaney-555 »

>Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense.

You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#579

Post by AnimalMuppet »

throw310822 wrote: post #569
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every question can be answered by Claude. Not every question can be answered accurately by Claude. When Claude answers inaccurately, it doesn't tell you that it's doing so, so every answer must be considered "maybe inaccurate". In business, a lot of the time, accuracy matters. If you want an accurate answer, and there's a human who knows, don't ask Claude .

> Not every question can be answered accurately by Claude You are assuming that people that send you a Claude answer would send you any Claude answer. This is your assumption- basically a negative prejudice towards those who use LLMs- and has nothing to do with sending a Claude answer per se. Do you understand the difference?

I do. I'm pretty sure that at least some humans will shove any Claude answer at you. And some won't.

You are assuming that I am making an assumption. Your assumption is wrong. I am recognizing that some humans are lazy and will do the minimum, and the minimum is to type in some query and copy-paste the results. If you like, yes, I am prejudiced - prejudiced against that behavior.

(I mean, I still trust a human who knows their stuff more than I trust Claude...)

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#580

Post by jmartrican »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #544
mlrtime wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" i…

I agree, they shouldn't just proxy the Claude output directly to the SWEs. THey can use Claude all they want, but the output of their effort (which goes to the SWEs) should be understood (maybe even written by) the Ops engineer. The Ops eng can use Claude to dumb it down for them to understand and can even be taught by Claude on the issue further... so Claude to the rescue still.
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