We added this communication rule to our company handbook: "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort" (coming from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609) and it's working well so far.
Don't be a meat proxy
191–200 of 786 posts
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#192The tricky bit is politely conveying this to people that lets call it don't think about things too deeply.
They genuinely think they're helping by shoveling 5 pages of LLM output they didn't even bother reading into teams...
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#193This is like pre-LLM, you presenting a problem to the team, and they google and send you the top few links thinking they have found the solution and have done their job.
I actually banned this and made it part of onboarding.
I can google too. You need to read yourself, ground the solution to our setting and then propose a plan.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#194If I wanted to know what the AI said, I would have asked it myself.
Don't give me AI feedback at all.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#195[dead]
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#196If 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?
It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engi…
And I know fuck all about subsistence farming - something most people's ancestors understood deeply. Different worlds, different requirements.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#198Yes
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone asked you a question, it's most likely because they value you . Whether it's your skills, your domain knowledge, or something else, people ask you questions because they know you can provide some value. When you give them a Claude response, not only are you being rude, but you're devaluing yourself in the eyes of those around you. They learn that you can't be relied upon any more, and so they stop asking y…
Asking the LLM a question _is_ a skill, just like googling. The problem is not asking a LLM, but pasting the 300-chars response without any context.
"I've been asked to confirm that our random number generator satisfies section 14 of the Foo-Bar Accord of 2021. I'm fairly certain it does, and that foorandom.c is a good choice. Assuming I'm broadly correct, write one short paragraph that would confidently assuage anyone of concern without raising any new concerns. Cite the specification and link to it. Afterwards, for my benefit, write a short bullet list with any non-trivial reasons I might be wrong."
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#200Nah, I disagree let them pay for my query dude. I want all the tokens I can get.
PS: Ideally set thinking to max and research mode or whatever anthropic calls it.