“Paste this AI generated text to your coworkers telling them not to paste AI generated text to you.”
Don't paste the AI, please
401–410 of 632 posts
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#402The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions? What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated. The underlying problem here is that communication is hard; especially if it's not face to face. People can't read your mind o…
Most times if we just google it, we'd have no conversation. Human interaction over.
Google - even 20 years ago when they were good - is terrible. It often found something that looked good but was wrong in important ways. It often found things that were hard to understand.
There is still value in google first (even today with all the slop), but there is plenty of room for conversation after you have the background needed to understand the deep discussions that result after you have done some early research.
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Back in the day I learned the hard way that sending a long reply to an email just ensures the other side won't read it. You can't assume that you dealt with their request effectively that way Then I guess you didn't deal with much of the empty-headed-managment type much. I learned a different lesson: Write a long email that took time to reason and write, precise and complete text. You get a short reply that is a re…
> "Write a long email that took time to reason and write, precise and complete text." Respectful hard disagree. Emails should be limited to five sentences. "I didn't have time to make a shorter reply" as an apology / disclaimer for rare exceptions. In virtually every case, anything longer belongs somewhere better than email (Slack, wiki / knowledgebase, docs site) or merits a realtime conversation. My PoV is shaped b…
Hard disagree back. Email has multiple contexts when I would say that short form is ideal and should be the default but at times a thoroughly long form email is needed. Or, honestly, you just need to create a document at this point. It could be a slide deck or word/markdown/excel/etc (depends on context) and this should be in the email. But email is key.
My experience is that people search subject lines, conversations, dates, and generally traverse historical conversations much better in email than in chat or a fully external application. They won’t search Slack, or try but can’t find the conversation. They won’t remember it’s on a wiki, you’ll constantly be redirecting them to the url. If the file is attached to an email, sometimes they’ll resurface it from a year+ ago. I find that’s way more common than someone referring to a chat from even a month ago. Chats are semi ephemeral. I’ve used both Teams and Slack and feel neither has really changed the game in terms of how the entire user base of an org use the system, enabling the historical reference points and moving it out of a ephemeral state, so email remains a stalwart for archival purposes and helps provide maximum context after the fact (people tend to elaborate on their choices more when writing an email).
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#404The funny thing is: this website reads like AI.
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#405Fits the topic :)
https://nader.io/posts/ai-dr/
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what’s the equivalent of “google it yourself” these days? Do you actually say that to people? Edit: i’ve hit the comment limit per given time, but all I have to say is “what have you found so far?” And “Google it yourself” are radically different responses man. The former is far more reasonable, it shows you are willing to be helpful and is a productive question. The other is just rude and implies your time is too…
People are lazy as hell, and I've noticed it's getting worse. My old team called this "remote brain execution" (because we work with Bazel and they have something called RBE) where folks would just drop questions in Slack and just ask the team to solve it for them. We were taken aback by how little work people would do before doing this. We developed the phrase: "What have you tried so far?" to try and counteract thi…
In many cases someone else already knows the answer and your interruption of them is less time lost for the company than you looking up the answer.
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#407I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions. Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me. Otherwise…
I agree. Poor communication is one of the most expensive and frustrating things about life and society and business and development. LLMs are helping people better structure their thoughts and that's fantastic. Sure, it can feel impersonal, but once you get past that, I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. The exceptions are spam, advertising, and propaganda. Because the barrier to writing now is effectively ze…
Not just the internet, but written work in general.
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#408The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions? What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated. The underlying problem here is that communication is hard; especially if it's not face to face. People can't read your mind o…
> Back in the day I learned the hard way that sending a long reply to an email just ensures the other side won't read it. You can't assume that you dealt with their request effectively that way Then I guess you didn't deal with much of the empty-headed-managment type much. I learned a different lesson: Write a long email that took time to reason and write, precise and complete text. You get a short reply that is a re…
If it's an emergency, you should call 911, or your country's equivalent. If that is not appropriate, then it's not an emergency.
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
if the response of AI is sufficient to do your job, why do you have a job?
Because the AI isn't autonomous, and cannot vet it's own outputs. If an AI answers a question perfectly, I'll go with it. But if my boss fires me for no longer being needed because of the AI, good luck to him and his new idiot employee.
If your response when someone asks a job-related question is to paste AI, then you're the one telling your boss that AI can do your job.
Asking questions is part of the job. Answering questions is part of the job. Collaborating with other people is the most important part of the job.
Some junior technical folks early in their career might bristle at this: "my job is to write this code I'm writing, and anything else is a distraction", or something along those lines. It's hard to internalize that your job is actually making the company successful, not yourself, and that means making other people successful.
If you can't answer a human question from a colleague, as a human, then the natural conclusion is that you are unable or unwilling to do the job. Like, great, you can write (or generate) code, what about the other 90% of the job?
Re: Don't paste the AI, please
#410Well not sure if I agree fully. On one hand it does make a lot of sense to process and answer w/ your own words. But, sometimes if what the agent says make sense and you just want to handoff findings that is also fine - I legit don't feel the need to be super strict. In startup environment where people are more chill about this, this seems totally fine. It would be more frustrating in a corp/executive environment whe…
I think a lot about a mismatch of effort these days. Here's an extreme example: I spend an hour drafting a doc outlining our engineering strategy for the next few quarters (or if we're in a startup, maybe writing up my product vision.) I share it with you to get feedback and comments. If you plug it into Claude and send me back an AI-formatted list, with sections like "the real insight (read this first)", we have ver…
Nice pov.
I spoke mostly from an engineering perspective.
When revisiting my corp career in executive position I agree!
However when writing strategy documents and stuff like that I think that the AI is mostly corrupting the idea and making it extremely verbose.
If someone manages to make the AI speak straight to the point with the vision based on what they want to communicate, that, to me is completely fine too.
What is kind of sad is that in the old times we would value a lot the folk that went and wrote a memo, put a lot of thought to it and so on.. Now literally you just plug claude in your notion and you have the document. To me, this kind of speaks about "the value was never really in the document itself"and more in the understanding of the doc. You can delegate a lot of stuff to the AI but you can't delegate understanding. So when you're presenting it to the exec committee, or circulating it, does not matter what claude/gemini/gpt wrote down, it matters if you understood it, agrees with it and understand that this represents your positioning.
What I see w a lot of juniors, on the other hand, is that people really just copy and paste or shallow understand what was wrote. Delegating too much like that removes the human-seed and makes it kind of worthless