> frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense.
Does anyone know how to deal with the jargon part? It is getting hard to use claude and even worse when someone sends you the direct output from claude.
Don't be a meat proxy
261–270 of 787 posts
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I've asked *you* a question, it's because I want to know what *you* think. I don't want to know what Claude thinks. If you don't know the answer, say that. "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer, albeit one which I might follow up with something like "Well why don't you know? This is literally your job to know", which is kind of what 90% of my emails at work for the past three weeks have been.
"I don't know" is an extraordinarily powerful answer, but maybe it's getting ruined. I'm not sure it can be entirely ruined. In a human interaction, when used confidently, it means 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front. I don't have to do the slightest thing to impress you. My foundation is so secure it doesn't need defending or justification at all". Also, 'that turns out to be outside the massive quantit…
I definitely appreciate being told "I don't know", but I've found in business settings that people expect to get reprimanded for saying that more than a couple times a year, and they refuse to say it.
They will invent crazy workarounds to avoid those 3 words.
Even if I ask "Do you know X?" they will not just say "no" most of the time, unless it's really outside their wheelhouse. If they think they should know it, they'll spit out statements worthy of an LLM.
And I admit, I felt the same at first. The first few times I told the CTO (my boss) that, I cringed. But he just told me to put aside time to research it. He knew I couldn't know everything, especially about things that we hadn't done before.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#263At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though
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You took all this time to reformulate the question, add the relevant implicit context, and do back and forth BUT you did not have time to reformulate the answer to something human readable that YOU own and can take responsibility for? This does not make sense to me. Nobody said not to consult an llm while formulating an answer. But if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#264On social media, I saw the much more vulgar “Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod” And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
With the recent wave of posts about Claude rewriting entire codebases from Zig/Electron to Rust/Swift, I can't help but question the prompter's actual confidence in the final result. Gaining a thorough understanding of the generated output still demands an enormous amount of effort. I suspect the reality is that most people just chain a few review agents together, and if they output "LGTM", the code gets committed and pushed.
I have been doing daily agentic coding myself since last November, but lately Im having concerns. We are on the verge of becoming Warhammer 40k Tech-Priests: chanting sacred prompts to appease the machine spirit, praying for a good result. The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Then do it and don't ask questions. I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny, but this is such an unintellectual take that it veers into caricature. Props if that was your purpose.
No, it was a suitably nasty reply to someone who boasted of being nasty to colleagues trying to help.
If your question can be answered by Claude, and you didn't ask Claude yourself, and when other people do it for you, you complain that you could have done it yourself, then my honest reply is that you should just shut up and learn to use Claude.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#266> "frequently contains all too plausible nonsense" This really isn’t the case with frontier models in 2026. I’ve found (sadly) that every time I thought the model was hallucinating, I was in fact the one who was mistaken.
I am prepared to admit that the model usually doesn't get things outright incorrect (unless you ask it to count letters). But the solution does contain a lot of nonsense. Not false nonsense, but meaningless or irrelevant sentences that make understanding the core of the fix much more difficult.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#267I do it, on purpose: it teaches people to do basic research by themselves, and not hit me with questions they could have gotten with a simple chat with their llm.
It's a kind of RTFM for current days.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#268People do this all the time though w "paul graham said" "elon musk said". Why not "Sum Total Avatar of All Human Knowledge Said ..."
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#269> frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. Does anyone know how to deal with the jargon part? It is getting hard to use claude and even worse when someone sends you the direct output from claude.
I'm adding "ELI8" (explain like I'm 8 years old) to the end of my prompts a lot. It helps.
Re: Don't be a meat proxy
#270I like to point out that if all people do is copy paste from an AI, then I can advocate to replacing them with AI directly. Usually wakes people up.