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Don't paste the AI, please

dontpastetheai.com

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Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#621

Post by ltbarcly3 »

tzs wrote: post #486
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "good" news is you won't have to deal with this much longer. Claude, which this person basically admitted through their behavior, will replace 99% of the offshore devs in the next couple years. Then you won't have to get the ick from talking to them and they can go back to having no real economic prospects in a 3rd world country, and most likely lose the social and economic standing they had from having a good jo…

Or you’ve got it backwards. Claude et al. with offshore developers to fix hallucinations and verify answers will replace onshore developers.

Oh a lot of onshore developers are going to be gone too.

I think I've worked with close to 200 software engineers close enough to get a good understanding of their abilities in my 20+ years in the industry. I think the current version of claude and chatgpt are more effective at writing code than about 85%, maybe up to 95% of them. That is to say, if you let me hire any of them for the cost of my Claude Max + Chatgpt subscriptions ($400 a month), I would probably hire less than 5% of them at that cost. I get more done, and with higher quality using Claude by myself than I would with a team of 50 average software engineers, and it takes less of my time to do it.

The industry is going to get rocked.

I think a company that right now has 10-20 full time software engineers will have 2-3 in 5 years, and realistically 2 of those 3 aren't necessary to get the coding done, they are there so you have coverage over vacations and redundancy when someone leaves.

The only reason I think offshore is going to be completely eliminated is it's too high friction to work with them. They are far away, you have to hire a firm to manage them which means hiring a manager on site as overhead, and they are awake when you are asleep (or pretending to be awake when you are awake).

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#622

Post by conductr »

prepend wrote: post #572
conductr wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably differs a bit by your exact profession and circumstances. I could see devs and technical people (most of HN readers) to prefer and have success with this when operating with like minded peers. It doesn’t scale much outside that. If you work with people outside of tech/dev minded people, those who are not used to RTFM type info seeking, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

I think you may be right. Fortunately, I work with like 10k collaborators who are all science/tech oriented and it works quite well. I wouldn’t want to work in an org where people can’t read email and want to talk to everyone instead.

I'm envious, although I think my experience is the rule and your's more of an exception. It might be more common on HN given the demo, but IRL, people mostly want to talk. Or even if they read email, they can't be bothered to search for things themselves. Makes me think of another long standing habit I have, I just ignore people. If they ask me something that has been answered and I know it's in an email somewhere, I ignore the question. If it's something they really need, they will go find it. Obviously this is very YMMV and I was able to start doing this after I reached a higher position/role, I've been a CFO for some time now and I still have certain people and audiences I will promptly answer any question even if I know it's been answered/documented.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#623

Post by blensor »

anotherevan wrote: post #586
blensor wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially I also hate if someone answers with a voice message. I can understand that there are situations where you just can't type out the answer and those exceptions are of course fine, but if you post a voice message or god forbid a video message in a group chat you are forcing everyone to take the time and sit through it.

You just gave me strong memories of using voice messages for a couple of months some years ago. In my defence, I had dropped a circular saw blade through the tip of my finger which slowed down my typing for a while. (I did manage to get surprisingly fast as a nine-finger touch typist, sans the left index finger.) Fortunately my colleagues were very understanding, and I reverted back to text once I could type reasonab…

I absolutely understand that some situations require voice messages, and I think everyone else in a chat would too.

Also, circular sawblades are terrifying.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#624

Post by Grimburger »

wccrawford wrote: post #149
Grimburger wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one suspicious of your comment? > Write as yourself. Unless it's your first day on HN (it's not 2008 account), most people use paragraphs and sentences longer than 2-5 words. Something like "You, directly." in the middle of all that has a certain vibe to it. > Copying and pasting Claude responses... directly shifts the burden of comprehension Most definitely. The problem is we live in a world where peop…

>Most definitely. Isn't that the very thing you just claimed people don't do? For simple, impactful sentences, I often use short ones. They work better.

You also used newlines to write 23 words here, something non-existent above.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#625

Post by mapontosevenths »

queenkjuul wrote: post #601
mapontosevenths wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do. Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above. > I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good: a) Always find them to be bad b) Are always bad at using them

Well my coworkers are the ones sending me the AI text and it's always garbage. And they're using Claude on the newest models. And they're all drastically more enthusiastic about AI than me. So yeah, maybe every single person in my company sucks at Claude, or maybe Claude just actually sucks at writing and you don't know what bad writing looks like

Claude does suck at writing. No argument here. It's for coding, and it's good at that.

So if the goal is "writing" and they are using Claude, then they do in fact suck at it.

Its like using a butter knife instead of a screwdriver. It might work if you waste enough effort, but will never do the same quality of work a screwdriver can.

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#626

Post by rpdillon »

whstl wrote: post #383
biztos wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WhatsApp voice message is very common in Spain. I always find it jarring when I'm there, mostly because I'm not used to it, but also because it seems to defeat the purpose of the messaging app: I can't listen to your voice message on the bus, for instance. It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each oth…

I used to answer this with "I'm not listening to that, not even my parents send me voice messages" but it was called uncivil by some people, so now I just say "I can't listen to that right now" and never listen, eventually ppl send a text message.

Yeah, the perceived friction in a voice message seems to be immense. I sent one voice massage in the past year because I wanted to get a big idea over to someone as I was walking into a meeting, so I recorded a 20-second message and sent it. She ended up responding 9 hours later with "I finally got around to listening to this, thanks!"

Won't be doing that again!

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#627

Post by ninkendo »

lucideer wrote: post #602
ninkendo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I mean… you didn’t come into this comment section saying “hello” and then waiting for someone to say hello back before commenting, right? And you don’t do that in emails either, right? Because that would be super out of place, and you understand that intuitively. That’s all nohello is about. It’s not trying to say “don’t be nice and say hi”, it’s saying “batch your hello and your question in the same message ple…

I've generally seen it used in Slack, which can be sync/async depending on context, but most commonly sync. I've never seen it used in online forums or e.g. email so not really sure what you're getting at with your comment. Either way it was intended as an analogy - being annoyed that a nontechnical user isn't given you everything up front (because they don't know how) is essentially just being annoyed with having to…

> Slack, which can be sync/async depending on context

Right, the nohello people are saying “don’t treat initial communication on Slack as sync.” At least not until after the conversation has started. Since you don’t know if I’m available to reply yet, just batch your question and the pleasantries together. It’s a super easy idea to grasp and it really ought to be universal. Just batch the question and the pleasantries together.

> I've never seen it used in online forums or e.g. email so not really sure what you're getting at with your comment.

Right because forums and email are more generally understood to be async. Slack has a lower latency for a message to be delivered, which can enable synchronous communication (for people who can type really fast at least) but it doesn’t mean you should just assume someone is going to be able to reply at typical synchronous communication times: they may be busy, they may be talking to someone else, they may have stepped away for a second. So until the conversation is “underway”, treat it the same as email and forums. Batch the pleasantries and the question together.

> being annoyed that a nontechnical user isn't given you everything up front (because they don't know how) is essentially just being annoyed with having to talk to somebody

It has zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. To do with technical anything. It would be exactly as important for, I dunno, sales reps to use this communication style between themselves. Or between a clothing tailor and a client. Or between, I dunno, farmers or something. (For scenarios you could imagine them using Slack at least.) In every case, if you have something you need to ask, you can just ask it in the first message. You don’t have to wait for someone in the channel to acknowledge your presence via pleasantries first.

It’s not about being “annoyed with having to talk to someone”, it’s about not wasting people’s time. It matters in every place where people’s time is valuable. So, everywhere.

(To extend an olive branch I’ll posit some places where the hello/pleasantries style is totally acceptable… group chats among friends or family, purely social channels, anywhere where the purpose of the communication is the pleasantness of the communication itself, ie. leisure.)

Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#629

Post by whykislay »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #308

The 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…

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Re: Don't paste the AI, please

#630

Post by whykislay »

rpdillon wrote: post #382
Forgeties79 wrote: post #319

Earlier 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…

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