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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

581–590 of 787 posts

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace claude code with your cousin or another employee as a thought exercise. So write to a colleague asking to finish what your cousin/another employee thinks needs to be done. I think most people would say describe the problem clearly so that I can solve it and be responsible for the fix or let your cousin/other employee finish the job and own the solution. This is offloading of accountability while denying credi…

Really, you are comparing the latest claude opus/fable vs my cousin with 0 knowledge of the application (user or developer)? I'm not sure how to reply to that.

Your personal incredulity aside, if you write code and create a PR, you're expected to know and understand the code you're writing, and you're expected to have done at least some means of verifying correctness. If you can't do that, ask for help from someone who can, earlier in the process, and/or give the task to them for normal prioritization.

Your example reveals a common organization smell: work not going through the normal process for prioritization and planning. If you've done that, and the work is deprioritized, that's because the company has decided that your thing isn't as important for engineering to do. Get over it and be patient, or ask a mentor for help selling the business on the value of your thing. Creating a PR bypasses that process and burdens engineering with more work (having to understand and rework slop) than if engineering had coded the thing to begin with.

tl;dr: if a company is internally strategically unaligned, organizational dysfunction is bound to follow

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#582

  NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn. 
He pasted that curious LLM response and never explained it.

would you call that proxy-bait?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#583

>Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.

Regardless of what instructions I put it to try to be terser and all, I still find that the output is of much lower quality.

Even if it uses little words, I often find the reasoning that is quite challenging to understand rather than it was if it was a regular human or colleague that would just explain me something.

Any tips here?

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#584

>Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.

Regardless of what instructions I put it to try to be terser and all, I still find that the output is of much lower quality. Even if it uses little words, I often find the reasoning that is quite challenging to understand rather than it was if it was a regular human or colleague that would just explain me something. Any tips here?

The best tip is to provide a concrete example, or ideally 3+ examples, of the kind of writing/explanations you personally think is great. It's extremely good at matching when provided with these kinds of examples.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#585
post #2

If 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?

Some people use it to think less, some people use it to learn more.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#586

>Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.

> You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.

I agree. Its a skills issue. Get good at using your new LLM tool.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#587
The problem is that people either don't understand how economic value is created, or want to obscure their lack of contribution to it. They see that they can make the AI do some work without revealing what work they put in. They use the AI as a shield. To genuinely and clearly provide value they have to reveal their prompt and verify its response.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#588

I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…

The fact that we’re starting to point these people out gives me great comfort.

I believe in proper breaks, more than enough downtime, work-life balance - but I’ve been hamstrung my entire career by people who seem to be so low-bandwidth that they often seem to be operating on autopilot - while making the same (or far more) as I’m making.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who uses the word "obnoxious" are also obnoxious. There are many unpleasant words, you have to use some of them and people don't like any of them.

Would you refer to someone as a midwit in a typical office environment and expect your professional reputation to remain intact? If you were to do this on an ongoing basis for whatever reason, how long before you're asked to have a little chat with the folks in HR? Would you then attempt to explain it away as one of those unpleasant words that you just had to use? I want to be there for that conversation.

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Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#590

I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?” What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how…

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