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Don't be a meat proxy

gruhn.me

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671–680 of 787 posts

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#671

Post by Obscurity4340 »

autumnstwilight wrote: post #67
eddythompson80 wrote: post #8

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…

I had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"

The cylinder must remain secure

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#672

Post by johsole »

tomtomtom777 wrote: post #542
ungreased0675 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.

I think the worst is when they are skilled. You're basically describing my work day. My job went from interesting, highly skilled work to mostly horrible brain rot over the past year. It's depressing and I don't know a way out. Other then a complete career change, throwing away 30 years of experience and a matching salary.

A lot of the joy I used to have doing this job is gone. I wrote some recursive code to turn nested API parameters into Elastic search queries, it was the last really cool thing I did pre-Ai. Sometimes I look at that code with a fond nostalgia, I'll never write code like that again unless I go out of my way to do it for fun. I don't even know what being a software dev will look like in a year from now.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#673

Post by BubbleRings »

ent001 wrote: post #636
tomtomtom777 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the worst is when they are skilled. You're basically describing my work day. My job went from interesting, highly skilled work to mostly horrible brain rot over the past year. It's depressing and I don't know a way out. Other then a complete career change, throwing away 30 years of experience and a matching salary.

This is my biggest problem with the current state of things. The loss in quality of life out weights the gains in productivity. And they are concentrated on highly conscientiousness individuals, those who already got silently taxed with most of the 80% of the work to get the last 20% of the results. So it is now compounding, if you care your workload will approximate 99,99..% of the total workload divided by the numb…

Someone very close to me is in their second year as a dev. I hope things don’t turn out as bad as it looks like it might. We are all going to need some luck here.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#674

Post by shimman »

ffsm8 wrote: post #56
eddythompson80 wrote: post #8

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…

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…

It's okay, when enough terrible decisions impact a company they tend to do really poorly thought out layoffs so you'll be in the blast radius sooner or later.

Too bad there's no real accountability.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#676

Post by Lt_Riza_Hawkeye »

deathanatos wrote: post #376

All I can say is you're lucky that your meat proxies are still identifying themselves as such. I've had people forward AI responses … sans "Claude said". I'm quite literally talking to Claude via proxy, and I've caught more than one person pulling this stunt. It's a nightmare of negative productivity, though. Just why? And invariably the kicker is they still want me to solve their problem, whatever that might be.

Yep, my VP of engineering does this all day, every day. It's so sad

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#677

Post by flyingshelf »

metabagel wrote: post #649
metabagel wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just FYI, scolding people causes them to resent you. Take great care when giving negative feedback. Courtesy costs you very little and gains a lot.

This doesn't mean that you can't give negative feedback. But, I tend to make suggestions/requests rather than calling someone out. If you're a manager, part of the job is telling someone that they aren't meeting standard, and that's how I would phrase it. Tell them what the expectation is and ask them to work on meeting it. Scolding, calling out, or even yelling at people should be consigned to the past. It's unneces…

To be fair this mostly happens on my OSS repos where I'm bombarded by junk AI PRs by people who never bother to actually read and talk like a human. So I scold them, block them and close everything they open.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#678

Post by mattgreenrocks »

jvanderbot wrote: post #429
ungreased0675 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.

Sure, but even worse, is the state-of-the-art: they use a cli agent and the "copy-paste, try to run, paste error, try to run" loop is called "Agentic engineering." Now we have to believe they're 10/10? I see no difference there except speed at the cost of whatever little understanding may have been gained by the manual inspection between steps.

The industry has always found it strangely taboo to actually talk about the wide variance in developer skill.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#679

Post by DANmode »

tomtomtom777 wrote: post #542
ungreased0675 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.

I think the worst is when they are skilled. You're basically describing my work day. My job went from interesting, highly skilled work to mostly horrible brain rot over the past year. It's depressing and I don't know a way out. Other then a complete career change, throwing away 30 years of experience and a matching salary.

Kids, young folks, anyone reading: this is golden handcuffs.

If you’re unhappy, make a change.

Re: Don't be a meat proxy

#680

Post by munksbeer »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #180
throw310822 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Out of interest, do you pay people extremely well to work with you?
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