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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#591

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

esafak wrote: post #559
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…

I see no harm with sharing an AI analysis in the ticket; it might save the engineer time.

as long as you've humanly verified the correctness of all the analysis first, yeah

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#592

Post by jmartrican »

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?

Human evolution does not occur in a vecuum. I suspect there will still be preasure to get smarter (how ever way you define that) because of competition with other humans.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#593

Post by zuzululu »

kooi wrote: post #497

It happens outside the developer world as well. People get information from Google AI mode and take it as 100% truth. In reality, blogs, reddit, and junk are often sourced link...which is fine if you inspect the sources...which some people don't! Have has examples of people AI-moding a questing and they get one answer based on how they asked. Then another person asks and they get another answer. Issue: People read wh…

The problem described in the article existed for ages even before the internet.

People just want to pay their bills and don't want to use up their limited cognition beyond what's minimum.

For example, I work for 3 different employers. They don't know and I don't care if they find out. I use AI exclusively. I don't have Kubernetes experience but I am managing their infrastructure without issues. I will just read whatever LLMs give me and repeat it back. It has never failed me and there's no need to learn something that AI will do much better job at.

Sometimes I'm not even at my desk, I go to the gym and exercise instead which is a better use of time only answering on Slack when they ping me.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#594

Post by fusslo »

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

I've been thinking about these kind of interactions a lot lately. I don't know what it says about human communication patterns but I'm not super excited about it.

I've been guilty of acting as a middleman for review comments from difficult coworkers. I farm out my interaction to avoid the confrontation, mental exhaustion, and to avoid negative feelings I got from those reviews. I don't mean 'my work is being challenged', I mean people who: delay, nitpick, blow up architecture after not participating in design, assert false info as truth and require you prove them wrong, require 10x evidence of everyone else. Not people who are like 'Hey, I don't understand this code can you add some comments or lets hop in a room for review'

I've also been on the receiving end. I like to think I'm NOT one of these toxic reviewers.

Now, we have Business Owners and Managers who are now even further away from engineers. Important meetings have 0 engineers in them ( a couple people who think they're engineers because they were for 5 years in the 80s ). Output is an AI generated transcript that gets copy/pasted into copilot to generate jira tasks by the Product Owner.

It seems like we (humans) really don't like working with other people. Or, maybe we like working with people who can advance our careers and want to automate interaction with people who cant?

I think this effort by Business Owners to set up an AI wall may be the closest I've seen to 'digital classism' (maybe there is a better term for it?).

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#595

Post by jmartrican »

danolivo wrote: post #471

A while back, I noticed that using Claude all day left me feeling mentally tired. After thinking it over, I realised the problem was Claude’s complex language. I’ve used English daily for years, so that shouldn’t be an issue. To compare, I switched Claude to my native language and had the same problem the author described. The text still needed to be literally deciphered before I could understand it. After talking wi…

I recently updated Claude to respond with shorter text and in bullet points, and other similar changes. It is an area of active improvements on my end. But early results are in. Now I feel like my mental capicity is not crowded out by the LLM's wall of text. There is now mental capicity to think about the problem at hand and come up with ideas.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#596

Post by mstaoru »

jmartrican wrote: post #595
danolivo wrote: post #471

A while back, I noticed that using Claude all day left me feeling mentally tired. After thinking it over, I realised the problem was Claude’s complex language. I’ve used English daily for years, so that shouldn’t be an issue. To compare, I switched Claude to my native language and had the same problem the author described. The text still needed to be literally deciphered before I could understand it. After talking wi…

I recently updated Claude to respond with shorter text and in bullet points, and other similar changes. It is an area of active improvements on my end. But early results are in. Now I feel like my mental capicity is not crowded out by the LLM's wall of text. There is now mental capicity to think about the problem at hand and come up with ideas.

[flagged]

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#597

Post by bigstrat2003 »

hk__2 wrote: post #142
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone asked you a question, it's most likely because they value you . Whether it's your skills, your domain knowledge, or something else, people ask you questions because they know you can provide some value. When you give them a Claude response, not only are you being rude, but you're devaluing yourself in the eyes of those around you. They learn that you can't be relied upon any more, and so they stop asking y…

Asking the LLM a question _is_ a skill, just like googling. The problem is not asking a LLM, but pasting the 300-chars response without any context.

There is no skill whatsoever in asking the LLM a question.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#598

Post by fc417fc802 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #378
mr_toad wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response Forwarding an AI response (or any canned response) sends the message that they don’t want to interact with you. That could be intentional.

I think you're overthinking it. People generally want to be helpful, and do actions they think are "useful" so most likely; these people think they're actually being helpful and useful when they do things like that. Similarly to "no one thinks they're evil" I suppose.

Specifically they subconsciously think they're special - it doesn't occur to them that everyone else can also query an LLM just as easily.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#599

Post by marliechiller »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #274
marliechiller wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not more akin to asking a handyman to go and do the work for you? They are the ones wielding the hammer, youve just sent them off to go and do it on your behalf without getting your hands dirty. If you then claim to take credit for it, I can see how that might be misinterpreted. As I see said quite often, an LLM is deemed of a similar ability to a junior software engineer. If I were that junior and my work was…

> Is it not more akin to asking a handyman to go and do the work for you? Does your handyman go off the rails and build pipes around the neighbors house because they didn’t know you already have an incoming water pipe? Does your handyman require you to have expertise in plumbing to make sure they don’t use bubble gum to seal the pipes? It’s not taking credit if the “handyman” is a gibbering idiot who needs more handh…

That seems like an extreme interpretation if I'm honest. As ever, its more likely somewhere in between your hammer analogy and the handyman. In any case, there is almost zero downside to listing your sources when answering a question as it provides the person asking the question with more context as to the origin of the answer

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#600

Post by bigstrat2003 »

deepsummer wrote: post #250
globular-toast wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot walk 100 miles in a day, but anyone with a bit of training can cycle that in an afternoon. It's not a matter of effort or laziness, it's simply not possible. The stitching comment is just pedantic. People don't hand stitch like a machine not because they are lazy, it's because it's ineffective and impractical. It's not impossible to drive screws directly into softwood by hand, but you'd never get anything…

Can you write 10k LOC a day without a coding agent? It's the same issue. You can walk 100 miles. Just not in a day. And you can create 10k LOC without a coding agent. Just not in a day. I don't think that coding agents enable technical possibilities. They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.

You can't generate 10k LOC in a day with a coding agent either, not if you want to actually understand it and review it (which you must do if you don't want the quality of your work to go into the toilet).
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