Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 419 posts

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#231

Post by hollowturtle »

Narciss wrote: post #141
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

I hear this argument all the time, and I think “this is exactly how people who coded in assembly back in the day thought about those using higher level programming languages.” It is a paradigm shift, yes. And you will know less about the implementation at times, yes. But will you care when you can deploy things twice, three times, five times as fast as the person not using AI? No. And also, when you want to learn mor…

You seem so strong opinionated and sure what the future holds for us, but I must remember you though, that in your example "from assembly to higher level programming languages" the demand for programmers didn't go down, went up, and as companies were able to develop more, more development and more investments were made, more challenges showed up, new jobs were invented and so on... You get where I'm going... The thing I'm questioning is how much lazy new technologies make you, many programmers even before LLMs had no idea how a computer works and only programmed in higher level languages, it was a disaster before with many people claming software was bad and industry going down a road where software quality matters less and less. Well that situation turbo boosted by an LLMs because "doesn't matter i can deploy 100x times a day" disrupting user experience imo won't led us far

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#233

Post by 7bit »

blagie wrote: post #203
latexr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't find anything wrong with this It’s not about being wrong, it’s about being ironic. We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate—we are encouraged to ask them to make our writing “friendlier” or “more professional”—and then one of the companies creating such a tool asks the very people most interested in it to not use it for the exact purpose we’ve been told it’s good at. They are aski…

> It reminded me of the time Roy Wood Jr visited a pro-gun rally where they argued guns make people safe, while simultaneously asking people to not carry guns because they were worried about safety. The cognitive dissonance is worth pointing out. Well, no. It's irony, but it's only cognitive dissonance in a comedy show which misses the nuance. Most pro-gun organizations are heavily into gun safety. The message is tha…

> Well, no. It's irony, but it's only cognitive dissonance in a comedy show which misses the nuance.

Like the nuance between sending out your love and doing the Nazi salute? Or different?

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#235

Post by skydhash »

jack_pp wrote: post #198
hollowturtle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

Let me give you an example from yesterday. I was learning tailwind and had a really long class attribute on a div which I didn't like. I wanted to split it and found a way to do it using my JavaScript framework (the new way to do it was suggested by deepseek). When I started writing by hand the list of classes in the new format copilot gave me an auto complete suggestion after I wrote the first class. I pressed tab a…

I wouldn’t say it’s laziness. The thing is that every line of code is a burden as it’s written once, but will be read and edited many times. You should write the bare amount that makes the project work, then make it readable and then easily editable (for maintenance). There are many books written about the last part as it’s the hardest.

When you take all three in consideration, an llm won’t really matter unless you don’t know much about the language or the libraries. When people goes on about Vim or Emacs, it’s just that it makes the whole thing go faster.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#236

Post by lr4444lr »

radu_floricica wrote: post #115

I'll be the contrarian and say that I don't find anything wrong with this, and if I were a candidate I'd simply take this as useful information for the application process. They do encourage use of AI, but they're asking nicely to write my own texts for the application - that's a reasonable request, and I'd have nothing against complying. sshine reply above is coming from a very conflictual mindset. "Can I still use…

It's like an un-inked tattoo artist or a tee-totaling sommelier.

The optics are just bad. Stand behind your product, or accept that you will be fighting ridicule and suspicion endlessly.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#237

Post by exe34 »

dhruvrajvanshi wrote: post #207
exe34 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Well it's not illegal" What's good for the gander.... I promise you they will use AI to vet your application.

> I promise you they will use AI to vet your application. So?

> What's good for the gander....

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#239

Post by gameshot911 »

Daub wrote: post #135

Half way through a recent interview it became very apparent that the candidate was using AI. This was only apparent in the standard 'why are you interested in working here?' Questions. Once the questions became more AI resistant the candidate floundered. There English language skills and there general reasoning declined catastrophically. These question had originally been introduced to see see how good the candidate…

>There English language skills... declined catastrophically.

Let he who is without sin...

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#240

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

llm_trw wrote: post #128
djtango wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the case where there is a non Native English speaker and they use AI to misrepresent the standard of written English communication. Assume their command of English is insufficient to get the job ultimately. They've just wasted their own time and the company's time in that situation. I imagine Anthropic is not short of applicants...

>Hey Claude, translate this to Swahili from English. Ok, now translate my response from Swahili to English. Thanks. We're close to the point where using a human -> stt -> llm -> tts -> human pipeline you can do real time high quality bi directional spoken translation on a desktop.

Why not just send the Swahili and let them MTL on the other end? At least then they have the original if there’s any ambiguity.

I’ve read multiple LLM job applications, and every single time I’d rather have just read the prompt. It’d be a quarter of the length and contain no less information.

Post reply on HN