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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#631

Post by projectazorian »

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.

This is a sign of poor harness configuration and/or org level constraints (lack of MCP support, etc.) With properly configured and prompted agents error copy-pasta should be the exception not the norm.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#632

Post by moribvndvs »

Claude’s tone and style has gotten worse with the recent models, not that it was ever very good. It’s both too concise (stringing together a bunch of jargon/acronyms together in weird ways that aren’t familiar even in areas where you have expertise – with no ramp up, context, or clarity) and too verbose (printing out reams of the word salad mentioned above, often just restating things repeatedly). It feels like writing from someone who really doesn’t know where to start or where to end on a topic so they try to cover their ass by saturation. I suppose that’s not far from reality. Asking it a dozen different ways to speak plainly, use STE, ELI5, whatever has little appreciable effect.

I recently started a new consulting gig and got a 36 page architectural white paper that was authored by Claude. It took me an entire business day and a monstrous headache to decipher and distill it down to a 1 pager. This shit is unsustainable.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#633

Post by projectazorian »

nmeagent wrote: post #311
bonoboTP wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is. Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately und…

I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.

If you use it in a work context (or any normal social context really) then yes, that is obnoxious. That doesn't mean it's not a real phenomenon.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#634

Post by metabagel »

jayd16 wrote: post #577
metabagel wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Different roles and specialties? Different work history?

So, you have different roles and specialties, but you know for a fact that this person should know the answer to your question. I think we're speaking past each other, because this doesn't make sense to me.

I don't presume that someone will have an answer I'm looking for. I'm pleased when they do, but often I just get breadcrumbs, and I have to solve the puzzle for myself.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#635

Post by pixl97 »

fusslo wrote: post #594
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 challeng…

>Or, maybe we like working with people who can

https://croissanthology.com/earring

We like whispering earrings. We'll follow a low friction happy path even if it leads us off a cliff.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#636

Post by ent001 »

tomtomtom777 wrote: post #542
ungreased0675 wrote: post #413

Earlier 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.

This is my biggest problem with the current state of things. The loss in quality of life out weights the gains in productivity. And they are concentrated on highly conscientiousness individuals, those who already got silently taxed with most of the 80% of the work to get the last 20% of the results. So it is now compounding, if you care your workload will approximate 99,99..% of the total workload divided by the number of high conscientiousness individuals in your team/organization.

The current hype cycle might even represent a net global gain like some people argue. But it represents yet more externality driven exploitation. Remains to be seen what the new equilibrium will be given that now the population being exploited is not only close to the core of the world system but also already overburdened.

I do think it represents a mere acceleration of the previous trend that resulted since around 2005 in an explosion of average (not median) pay for software developers due to similar dynamics. If the system settles on a new level of pay that manages to convince enough people of enough skill to go along, it might just hum along and not implode. As for the rest of us, welcome to the growing permanent underclass and brace for the impact of the climate wars. We will be the fodder that will insulate the chosen ones under their air conditioned domes.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#637

Post by njovin »

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

We once interviewed a candidate for a senior engineering position and when asked what his primary role was at his current job, he said "I mostly make sure that nobody changes the software".

He wasn't wrong, and his role was still valuable to the company.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#638

Post by projectazorian »

ndriscoll wrote: post #397
nmeagent wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you refer to someone as a midwit in a typical office environment and expect your professional reputation to remain intact? If you were to do this on an ongoing basis for whatever reason, how long before you're asked to have a little chat with the folks in HR? Would you then attempt to explain it away as one of those unpleasant words that you just had to use? I want to be there for that conversation.

Corporate offices are low trust environments where people do not really openly speak directly in any negative way (for basically the reason you've illustrated), so I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction.

> I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction

Workplaces are where many of us spend a large percentage of our waking lives. So, it is "normal," unfortunately. This is why HR language and norms have broken containment into the non-work world. (Whether that's a good thing is another question.)

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#639

Post by metabagel »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #625
metabagel wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depends on what they wrote alongside. Ideally, I get more than just a dump of Claude's response. Ideally, they summarize what they regard to be the key point.

This might be why I'm having difficulty understanding why people are upset about "Claude said..." responses. I would be disappointed too if someone just said "Claude said...", but in general I don't get messages like that in chat. In general, I get some additional input of what the person thinks about Claude's response.

So, yeah, if someone just gives you a dump of what Claude said, that's disappointing.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#640

Post by archagon »

chii wrote: post #309
plutokras wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the recent wave of posts about Claude rewriting entire codebases from Zig/Electron to Rust/Swift, I can't help but question the prompter's actual confidence in the final result. Gaining a thorough understanding of the generated output still demands an enormous amount of effort. I suspect the reality is that most people just chain a few review agents together, and if they output "LGTM", the code gets committed an…

> 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…

An AI is not an abstraction. It is not remotely the same thing as a compiler!
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