Obviously the solution is to have a SKILL.md which will make an agent translate it to a humanese!
Don't be a meat proxy
621–630 of 786 posts
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So, people are using AI to answer questions about tribal knowledge? Is that really the assertion which is being made here? Because I find that hard to believe.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#623On 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
Describes how I feel.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
IQ is a measure that tests how well people can do IQ tests, I don't think it's an objective measure at all.
People love to say this, but the whole point of IQ is that it happens to correlate well with many other, more practical measures of cognitive capability. That’s why it is used.
Other things also correlate well with many practical measures of cognitive ability, but you wouldn't be so quick to say that they're privileged the way IQ is, so there must be more to the explanation.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#625"Claud said" is a hedge. It is abdication of responsibility. That said, a meat-proxied answer should come with more credibility based on the proxy. I'd put more weight into my developer proxying system information than my sale's intern. I am expecting the proxy to have given the response a sniff test
I appreciate "Claude said...", because it helps me assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
The appropriate level of trust would be whatever trust you place in a colleague's human responses, because you trust they have verified what "claude said" for correctness.
Unless you're saying claude is more trustworthy than your colleagues?
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably we already have, if you concentrate on intelligence rates since 1975: the reverse Flynn affect. Those who grew up about that time no longer had to generate their own entertainment through storytelling, make their own music, calculate things mentally: everyday they had music, entertainment pumped into their homes, a way to avoid athematic, etc. And now we're evening thinking a lot less in our jobs, not even p…
Yeah it's as old as time to be honest. When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities. Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mos…
But displacing individual ability is a feature, not a bug.
How else could mind-virus like philosophy or religion or science or political legitimacy transit highly-variable humans for generations?
Religious organizations, governments, corporations all far outlive their founders and maintainers. Heroes at best only stretch or squeeze the dogma or methodology to grow the organization by better fitting to the culture.
And because organizations accumulate control over resources, individuals can have little effect outside them.
We are disposable by design.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I don't know." is a better answer than "Claude said..."
"I don't know" could also mean they couldn't be bothered. It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you.
Effort is not what matters, accuracy is
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway. but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no sing…
Trusting the output of an abstraction explicitly designed, engineered, and tested by other humans with an actual understanding of the layer beneath you is not comparable to trusting a non-deterministic, statistical next-word-predictor with no mind or ability to be morally responsible for what it produces.
Assuming most humans accept moral responsibility seems rather dangerous in itself. Especially as they climb the corporate ladder.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#629Earlier 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.
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.
I'm in the same boat as you... 30 years of experience writing software, and now I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs without reading the PR. I'm just supposed to press a button. I'm looking for a new job, but it's going to be difficult to find one in tech that isn't a complete AI-psychosis shitshow.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's basically asking other people to do his job for him, because he knows that the AI doesn't truly do it well enough. I would say to him that if he wants me to do his job, he needs to pay me his salary.
My VP boss calls me 6 times a day to help him understand his copilot responses and asks why we aren't doing what copilot says we should do. I then have to spend multiple hours explaining why. His peers call him to understand their copilot responses which he then copilots and calls me to help interpret. On and on and on
Sounds to me like developer jobs are not going away after all. Somebody needs to understand what the AI communicates.
Sounds more like job security to me.