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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#601

Post by jghn »

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?

When Google started taking the world by storm, and for a few years after that, I had the same problem.

The way I solved the problem was by making a big show about the fact that I used Google to type in literally what they asked me word for word, and that I looked at the first couple of hits for a few seconds.

Most of them got the message pretty quick. There were a few holdouts though who took longer.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#602

Post by redsocksfan45 »

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.

[dead]

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#603

Post by bigstrat2003 »

deepsummer wrote: post #155
vaylian wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need to verify that the answer that Claude gave is not hallucinated. That will also cost you some more time. If the answer is wrong and people trust your judgement, then they will take a lot longer to figure out, that your answer is not to be relied upon.

I usually do so I understand what I am replying, but seriously, the latest Opus and Fable versions get it right more often than I would. The time of AI hallucinations is over, as long as they have the context.

That just isn't true. LLMs still hallucinate all the time.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#604

Post by fc417fc802 »

hvb2 wrote: post #435
pelasaco wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so real.. Suddenly managers sending MR, commenting MRs, all AI driven.. 300 lines text, where you don't even know if the premises are correct. I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous. I don't know how to stop them..

> I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous. It's hard to make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious

Unskilled people with foolproof tools or skilled people with powerful tools. Either works. It's unskilled people with powerful tools that poses a problem.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#605

Post by wuliwong »

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…

Feels like some serious hyperbole. I definitely have people at work copy and paste Claude output but I have never once had someone ask me to read it for them and tell them it was correct.

I think this is just the moment we are in, the amount of people using AI in their day to day work changed so quickly that we have a very wide spread range of competencies and experience and really nobody has had enough time to be an expert with AI. We don't have well defined best practices and it feels like the target is moving.

My guess is you were probably complaining about something similar to this before there was AI, this is just the new target for your angst.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#606

Post by hirsin »

wuliwong wrote: post #605
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…

Feels like some serious hyperbole. I definitely have people at work copy and paste Claude output but I have never once had someone ask me to read it for them and tell them it was correct. I think this is just the moment we are in, the amount of people using AI in their day to day work changed so quickly that we have a very wide spread range of competencies and experience and really nobody has had enough time to be an…

It's implicit as a request, not something they literally say (usually).

Namely - I put near zero effort into this response, and deciding if it's correct is on you. -> I'm asking you to read it and figure out if it's correct because I couldn't be bothered to do so

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#607

Post by wuliwong »

kooi wrote: post #504
jvanderbot wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hit a wall with creating a browser based video editor. Up until then, over the last year, I have been taking my hands off the wheel more and more and really have just become more and more productive. This video editor experience has forced me to get more into the code again.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#608

Post by biztos »

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.

That's a great idea.

I've been thinking about how to avoid having AI-isms creep into my own voice, because I see that way too much in my tech-world friends. It's natural enough: if you spend a lot of time talking to somebody, you usually end up mirroring some of their speech patterns.

One idea I had was to start doing my Claude sessions in German. (That happens to be my strongest second language, no other reason.) Thus any Claude-isms I pick up will presumably not wander into my English, which is what I use for most communications.

This would have the added benefits of getting some much-needed German typing practice, and preventing me from ever lazily copy-pasting AI text into an email or a README.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#609

Post by Planktonne »

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?

Organisations typically divide up responsibilities between different teams, and also between different members of each team.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#610

Post by wuliwong »

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

It's interesting to me, I have never once felt this. I have basically just been excited by using AI for coding. I've been a software engineer for 15 years and before that a physics PH.D. student (and 1 year professional scientist) who focused largely on computational work. I love programming and I've felt reinvigorated by the introduction of AI and developing systems around it.

I tend to think it's just different personality types. There are a lot of different type in engineering. There's a significant set of people that really love to just be given detailed, well described set of work and crank it out, they don't really want to be involved in much outside of just implementing the plan. That is not all engineers but certainly a chunk of them. I could see that group feeling a bit sidelined by AI. But that's not me, so I am just speculating.

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