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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#681

Post by 20k »

plutokras wrote: post #264
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

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…

Most developers by any metric haven't hopped onto the full agentic AI bandwagon. People who want to stop understanding code will indeed largely lose their technical skills, but they're a minority of developers. Its one of the reasons why I think its a terrible idea to invest in personally, being skilled at something has never once been a negative for me in my entire life even if it requires work

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#682

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

metabagel wrote: post #540
black6 wrote: post #365

Earlier 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.

> "I don't know" could also mean they couldn't be bothered

That's exactly what asking an LLM means, except admitting you don't know something is respectful. If you think someone should know something that they don't, then that's a totally separate issue between you and them (and/or their manager).

> It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you.

Someone lifting a finger for their colleague, when working with them is literally their job? Wow, what a sacrifice, like sending a link to lmgtfy. So helpful! Will the result actually be an "answer", or just hallucinated AI slop? Who cares!

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#683

Post by rng-concern »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #332
tarkin2 wrote: post #282

Earlier 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…

Honestly curious why you're being downvoted, but I think about this all the time. We always focus on the positives of any new technology and the negatives are either invisible (till later) or glossed over.

Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot: Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#684

Post by PotatoPrime »

globular-toast wrote: post #299
hk__2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking Of course it is, at equivalent distance.

I did not say anything about distance. I said cycling enables you to go faster than you could possibly travel without it (ie. faster than you can sprint). What you do with that speed is up to you, but most use it to get to places in less time or get further in the same amount of time. The point is it's not about laziness, it's about unlocking new capabilities. If cycling were just about laziness then you'd see people…

This sorta scratched my brain - Isn't more speed, at least partially, laziness driven? There's a grocery about 1.5 miles from my house, and I can and do walk it, but when I don't want to commit all that time, I jump on my bike. I don't feel like I spend more energy on that trip when biking vs walking, but I may. The driver there, for me, is lesser time commitment to the task.

Framed another way - Is laziness defined as only 'spending less energy on it', or could there also a time commitment component?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#685

Post by lukeschlather »

ffsm8 wrote: post #56
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…

At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise. They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him Complete brainrot Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point Thankfully I'm a dev…

How correct is the documentation? You seem to be coming from the same standpoint as a lot of people in this thread which is "don't make me read AI output, I can prompt the model myself" but what this person is doing sounds much more sane - have highly skilled subject matter experts prompt the AI once, generate all the answers you might want, and review them carefully for correctness using all available context.

That sounds far preferable to individuals independently asking questions that are not covered by the documentation and independently reviewing a bunch of potentially hallucinated slop that no one else will ever read.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#686

Post by StableAlkyne »

xyproto wrote: post #529
bigfishrunning wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...

Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.

There's a reason games like Factorio or Exapunks are so popular among engineers!

Especially if you get a little burned out and can't bring yourself to contribute to a side project, but still want to do programming-ish things that get your brain moving

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#687

Post by nomel »

GrinningFool wrote: post #328
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

At my current job I just asked a coworker in chat if the reply was his or LLM. He quickly owned up and the incidence of brokered LLM messages in chat dropped signficantly. Unfortunately people are being encouraged to use LLM in docs, emails, and presentations so it's probably a losing battle.

We had an exec show how he was using AI to write interview feedback from his very sparse notes, in front of a few thousand people.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#688

Post by VitaliyKorbut »

rglover wrote: post #369
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?

I think we're going to see a sort of "intelligence caste" form. People who overuse AI and atrophy their brain's ability to think will be on the bottom, while the inverse of those people will be on top. This is somewhat good news because it means the end (to some extent) of the Peter Principle. My hope, though, is that this doesn't turn into an actual caste system, but I'm not holding my breath. I think that's where t…

Heavy LLM users still have to spot bad assumptions and catch errors. Scrolling social media seems like a much better example of mental atrophy.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#689

Post by grimcompanion »

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.

IMO this definitely helps, but only to a degree, because the more quickly I can read/digest output, the more quickly I've got more output to read/digest. The jargon/quirks aren't as dense per message but they still accumulate eventually, and so either way I hit a wall where I need to do something, anything, besides read another line from CC.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#690

Post by leptons »

icedchai wrote: post #667
leptons wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same. I'm being forced into a position where I'm supposed to do everything with AI agents, not write any manual code, and only act as a reviewer. It sounds like you know the drill. It may push me into early retirement.

The last straw (of many last straws) was over the weekend a co-worker sent me a chat "hey can you click approve on this PR real quick?". This only makes me click "Apply" (jobs) instead of "Approve".
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