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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#691

Post by globular-toast »

PotatoPrime wrote: post #684
globular-toast wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmm... I guess I don't think saving time is laziness. I think that's clever. Laziness is a quality I don't like. It's not clever, it often ends up creating more problems down the line. Like leaving clutter everywhere or always taking the easy way at every turn without thinking ahead.

Saving time by cycling isn't creating any problems, it's just cleverly using a machine to give you more time to do other things.

The bicycle has been credited as being a part of the liberation of women. It gave them independence they didn't have before. They weren't just being lazy.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#692

Post by ryanackley »

pixl97 wrote: post #628
ibeckermayer wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Luckily, accountability does exist in most professional settings so someone accepting moral responsibility is not required.

It doesn't always land on the right person but it's usually a motivating factor for people to make an effort.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#693

Post by dontparticipate »

wuliwong wrote: post #616
dontparticipate wrote: post #611

We've already started firing people for being meat proxies at my company. Was reviewing a huge and awful slop code base that a vibe coder only had been working on getting started. I started giving my feedback to the developer, and it became quickly clear that I was the only human involved in developing this "software" and the only one that had ever read the code and evaluated it. Cost the company a ton and had to tak…

I was a big distributed, event-driven service guy for years. We used to talk about how it can make things 'faster' but you have to put some infrastructure around it in order to be able to move like that. I'm basically talking about CI/CD stuff, automated tests, security, load test, etc. You use feature flags, blue green deploys, stuff like that. I _think_ that the same concept could apply to agentic code. If you have…

I completely agree. My first intervention with this person was to try to get them to set up a test driven development framework. Unfortunately, that's also when I learned he didn't know what that was. He also just copied "do TTD" into Claude. It was definitely my mistake, and probably over optimism about what AI might be able to do, that we didn't enforce that a lot earlier, and have been working on making sure to enforce a lot more gates going forward.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#694

Post by seanw444 »

pixl97 wrote: post #619
tomtomtom777 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean, we're just the neo-luddites in this case. Or maybe the rust belt when jobs moved elsewhere. The real question isn't if things are going to change around our jobs, its are we going to be able to move fast enough to avoid starving in the streets?

Yeah, the economy wants a dystopia, so we're just gonna have to let that happen industry by industry, calling each group that is exploited for maximal corporate gain a neo-luddite. Inevitability and whatnot. Hell, we're gonna die one day anyway, that's also inevitable, so we might as well all just drink the Kool-Aid too.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#695

Post by seanw444 »

mikebenfield wrote: post #614
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 I’m pretty skilled, or at least I was, but much of my work now looks like this. The fact is in many cases Claude can diagnose and fix the issue quicker than I can even read it. It would be crazy not to take advantage of this. Of course it does get hard to resist the temptation to just become ever lazier over time.

It fixes it at face value, for now. The long-term effects of corporate nearsightedness might be too great to absorb this time around.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#696

Post by ltbarcly3 »

hirsin wrote: post #613
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to suggest you read https://www.amazon.com/Advantage-Disadvantage-History-Hacket... You can't just remember every conversation and ... something useful. Indiscriminate memory buries you. What you need is "monumental" memories, which is also known as documentation. AI can be very effective in helping you manage that. That should be kept tight, just like code. You want to keep enough of a record of how you got t…

While I generally agree for general human living, I've seen impressive "digital hoarder" success using AI because it changes the dimensions of reasonableness. Imagine your hoarder scenario except that the hoarder has unlimited storage space and a team of librarian/warehouse workers to go find and fetch the items needed for the wall hanging task.

AI does not have unlimited storage space and digging through tens of thousands of keyword hits will cost you an unlimited amount of money as your history grows and grows.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#698

Post by millipede »

At my $work, people do this frequently, but instead of it just being insensitive, they have their personal Slackbot responding on their behalf. After I realized I wasn't even talking to a person, I've stopped opening their DMs.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#699

Post by iwontberude »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #678
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.

The industry has always found it strangely taboo to actually talk about the wide variance in developer skill.

True because we have pay bands that everyone has to somehow be hired for and fit within.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#700

Post by attentive »

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…

I am going to guess it's the other way around and a modern day of "let me google this for you"
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