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

261–270 of 419 posts

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

#261

Post by ben30 »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #167
ben30 wrote: post #80

This application requirement really bothered me as someone who's autistic and dyslexic. I think visually, and while I have valid ideas and unique perspectives, I sometimes struggle to convert my visual thoughts into traditional spoken/written language. AI tools are invaluable to me - they help bridge the gap between my visual thinking and the written expression that's expected in professional settings. LLMs are essen…

This is an excellent comment and it more-or-less changes my opinion on this issue. I approached it with an "AI bad" mentality which, if truth be told, I'm still going to hold. But you make a very good argument for why AI should be allowed and carefully monitored. I think it was the spell-checker analogy that really sold me. And this ties in with the whole point that "AI" isn't one thing, it's a huge spectrum. I reall…

Exactly - being transparent about AI usage in interviews makes much more sense. Using AI effectively is becoming a crucial skill, like knowing how to use any other development tool. Using it well can supercharge productivity, but using it poorly can be counterproductive or even dangerous.

It's interesting that most software departments now expect their staff to use AI tools day-to-day, yet many still ban it during interviews. Why not flip this around? Let candidates demonstrate how they actually work with AI. It would be far more valuable to assess someone's judgment and skill in using these tools rather than pretending they don't exist.

If a candidate wants to show how they leverage AI in their workflow, that should be seen as a positive - it demonstrates transparency and real-world problem-solving approaches. After all, you're hiring someone for how they'll actually work, not how they perform in an artificial AI-free environment that doesn't reflect reality.

The key isn't whether someone uses AI, but how effectively they use it as part of their broader skillset. That's what companies should really be evaluating.

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

#262

Post by ecocentrik »

latexr wrote: post #166
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…

> 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…

I don't see the cognitive dissonance here. If a model was applying for a position with a cosmetics company, they might want to see what the blank canvas looks like.

Being able to gauge a candidate's natural communication skills is highly useful. If you're an ineffective communicator, there's a good chance your comprehension skills are also deficient.

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

#263

Post by layer8 »

mattigames wrote: post #194
xnorswap wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable". I think I'm just very much out of tune with the…

The ones paying are in their vast majority the most selfish of them all, for example it would be reasonable to say that Jeff Bezos its one of the most selfish people on the planet, so at the end it doesn't boil down to "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat" but more like "Well I can cheat, get away with it and the victim is just another cheater, so therefore I should cheat"

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and it seems weird to me you‘d want to work for such a most-selfish cheater in the first place.

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

#264

Post by einsteinx2 »

myfonj wrote: post #242
muzani wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM companies have always been against this kind of thing. Sam Altman (2023): "something very strange about people writing bullet points, having ChatGPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and the sender using ChatGPT to condense it into the key bullet points" 3 years ago people were poking fun about how restrictive the terms were - you could get your API key blocked if you used it to pretend to be a human.…

Interesting that this quote really contains "sender" where "recipient" was intended, but it had absolutely no impact on any reader. (I even asked Claude and ChatGPT if they noticed anything strange in the sentence, and both needed additional prompting to spot that mistake.) https://x.com/sama/status/1631394688384270336 Thanks for this heads-up, by the way, I've missed this particular tweet, but eventually got into ex…

Wow I completely didn’t notice that until I read your comment. My brain must have automatically filled in the correct word. I had to go back and re-read it to confirm.

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

#265

Post by necovek »

mathieuh wrote: post #84
0x1062 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

I think it's a lot more complicated than that. I think it can be used as a tool for people who already have knowledge and skills, but I do worry how it will affect people growing up with it. Personally I see it more like going to someone who (claims) to know what they're doing and asking them to do it for me. I might be able to watch them at work and maybe get a very general idea of what they're doing but will I actu…

I think you are both right.

AI will let some people conquer skills otherwise out of their reach, with all the pros and cons of that. It is exactly like the example someone else brought up of not needing to know assembly anymore with higher level languages: true, but those who do know it and can internalize how the machines operate have an easier time when it comes to figuring out the real hard problems and bugs they might hit.

Which means that you only need to learn machine language and assembly superficially, and you have a good chance of being a very good programmer.

However, where I am unsure how the things will unfold is that humans are constantly coming up with different programming languages, frameworks, patterns, because none of the existing ones really fit their mental model or are too much to learn about. Which — to me at least — hints at what I've long claimed: programming is more art than science. With complex interactions between a gazillion of mildly incompatible systems, even more so.

As such, for someone with strong fundamentals, AI tools never provided much of a boon to me (yet). Incidentally, neither did StackOverflow ever help me: I never found a problem that I struggled with that wasn't easily solved with reading the upstream docs or upstream code, and when neither was available or good enough, SO was mostly crickets too.

These days, I rarely do "gruntwork" programming, and only get called in on really hard problems, so the question switches to: how will we train the next generation of software engineers who are going to be called in for those hard problems?

Because let's admit it, even today, not everybody can handle them.

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

#266

Post by gosub100 »

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…

My guess is it's more due to insurance at the venue. I don't know who pays in those situations, but I would imagine they require "no guns" posted and announced. And if there is any form of gunshot injury they have very strong teeth to dodge the claim.

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

#268

Post by DiscourseFan »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #245
numbsafari wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the same people that insist we arm elementary school teachers and expect those teachers to someday pull the trigger on a child instead of having proper gun laws. There is no irony.

I don't expect that, so I won't be using public schools. I have no illusion that safety or education is an actual concern in public schools in general.

They do, but safety and social control go hand in hand.

In any case, its not as if your kid is safer at a private school. Kids are violent, no matter where they are; maybe you remember going through school yourself?

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

#269

Post by bambax »

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…

The point of coding is not to tell a machine what to do.

The point of coding is to remove ambiguity from the specs.

"Code" is unambiguous, deterministic and testable language -- something no human language is (or wants to be).

LLMs today make many implementation mistakes where they confuse one system with another, assume some SQL commands are available in a given SQL engine when they aren't, etc. It's possible that these mistakes will be reduced to almost zero in the future.

But there is a whole other class of mistakes that cannot be solved by code generation -- even less so if there's nobody left capable of reading the generated code. It's when the LLM misunderstands the question, and/or when the requirements aren't even clear in the head of the person writing the question.

I sometimes try to use LLMs like this: I state a problem, a proposed approach, and ask the LLM to shoot holes in the solution. For now, they all fail miserably at this. They recite "corner cases" that don't have much or anything to do with the problem.

Only coding the happy path is a recipe for unsolvable bugs and eventually, catastrophe.

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

#270

Post by sarchertech »

0x1062 wrote: post #53
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…

AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.

Copying and pasting from stack overflow is a tool.

It’s fine to do in some cases, but it certainly gets abused by lazy incurious people.

Tool use in general certainly can be lazy. A car is a tool, but most people would call an able bodied person driving their car to the end of the driveway to get the mail lazy.

Post reply on HN