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"ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#91

Post by malfist »

tonyspiff wrote: post #47
einsteinx2 wrote: post #3

I’ve noticed this trend in comments across the internet. Someone will ask or say something, the someone else will reply with “I asked ChatGPT and it says…” or “According to AI…” ChatGPT is free and available to everyone, and so are a dozen other LLMs. If the person making the comment wanted to know what ChatGPT had to say, they could just ask it themselves. I guess people feel like they’re being helpful, but I just d…

Indeed. On the other hand, there's a difference between "I one-prompted some mini LLM" and "A deep-thinking LLM aided me through research with fact-checking, agents, tools and lots of input from me." While both can be phrased with “I asked ChatGPT and it says…” or “According to AI…”, the latter would not annoy me.

LLMs are incapable of fact checking. They have no concept of facts.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#92

Post by purpleshirtdev »

insin wrote: post #26

I'm starting to run into the other end of this as a reviewer, and I hate it. Stories full of nonsensical, clearly LLM-generated acceptance requirements containing implementation details which are completely unrelated to how the feature actually needs to work in our product. Fine, I didn't need them anyway. PRs with those useless, uniformly-formatted LLM-generated descriptions which don't do what a PR description shou…

This absolutely has been my more recent frustration as well, specifically this:

> uniformly-formatted LLM-generated descriptions which don't do what a PR description should do, with a half-arsed LLM attempt at summary of the code changes and links to the files in the PR description. It would have been nice if you had told me what your PR is for and what your intent as the author is, and maybe to call out things which were relevant to the implementation I might have "why?" questions about.

If I want to see what the code changes do, I will read the code. I want your PR description to tell me things like:

- What the tradeoffs, if any, to this implementation are

- If there were potential other approaches you decided not to follow for XYZ reason so that I don't make a comment asking about it

- If there is more work to be done, and if so what it is

- Any impacts this change might have on other systems

- etc.

Sure, if you want to add a handful of sentences summarizing the change at a high level just to get me in context, that's fine, but again if I want to see what changed, I will go look at what changed.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#94

Post by tensility »

sanswork wrote: post #51
lrvick wrote: post #23

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evol…

I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr..... You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you. I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing…

Not at all true, though. You see, I expect the Jr will grow and learn from those off-loaded tasks in such a way that they will eventually become another Sr in the atelier. That development of the society of engineers is precisely what I do not wish to ever outsource to some oligarch's rental fleet of bullshit machines.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#95

Post by tensility »

simonw wrote: post #89
lrvick wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take this one for example https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compa... It took some iteration and hands on testing to get that right across multiple operating systems. Also to pass shellcheck, etc. Even if an LLM -could- do that sort of thing as well as my team and I can, we would lose a lot of the arcane knowledge required to debug things, and spot sneaky bugs, and do code review, if we did not al…

That x86 machine code link reminded me of an LLM project I did just last week - https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount I decided to see if I could get an old Perl and C codebase running via WebAasembly in the browser having Claude brute-force figuring out how to compile the various components to WASM. Details here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassemb... Here are notes it wrote for me on th…

"This tool uses the WebAssembly build of Perl running actual SLOCCount algorithms from licquia/sloccount."

The best form of (AI) plagiarism is to simply wrap the original tool in your own facade and pretend like you built anything of value.

Is this intended to be a bad joke?

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#96

Post by tensility »

sanswork wrote: post #77
satisfice wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FFS stop it with the “it’s just the same as a human” BS. It’s not just like working with a junior engineer! Please spend 60 seconds genuinely reflecting on that argument before letting it escape like drool from the lips of your writing fingers. We work with junior engineers because we are investing in them. We will get a return on that investment. We also work with other humans because they are accountable for their…

I'm not saying it's the same as working with a jr developer. I'm saying that not using something less skilled than yourself for less skilled tasks is stupid and self defeating. Yes, when someone builds a straw man you ignore it. There is a huge canyon between never use AI in engineer(op proposal) and only use AI for all your engineering(op complaint).

There's a very good argument for not using tools vended by folks who habitually lie as much as the AI vendors (and their tools). I don't want their fingers anywhere in my engineering org, quite honestly. Given their ethics around intellectual property in general, I must assume that my company's IP is being stolen every time a junior engineer lazily uses one of these tools.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#97

Post by simonw »

tensility wrote: post #95
simonw wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That x86 machine code link reminded me of an LLM project I did just last week - https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount I decided to see if I could get an old Perl and C codebase running via WebAasembly in the browser having Claude brute-force figuring out how to compile the various components to WASM. Details here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassemb... Here are notes it wrote for me on th…

"This tool uses the WebAssembly build of Perl running actual SLOCCount algorithms from licquia/sloccount." The best form of (AI) plagiarism is to simply wrap the original tool in your own facade and pretend like you built anything of value. Is this intended to be a bad joke?

You're criticizing me for directly crediting the original here. That's the correct and ethical thing to do!

Honestly, I've seen the occasional bad faith argument from people with a passionate dislike of AI tooling but this one is pretty extreme even by those standards.

I hope you don't ever use open source libraries in your own work.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#98

Post by tensility »

ninkendo wrote: post #37
lrvick wrote: post #23

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evol…

Eh… your complaint describes every single piece of information available on the internet. Let’s try it with other stuff: “Looking at solutions on stack overflow outsources your brain” “Searching arxiv for literature on a subject outsources your brain” “Reading a tutorial on something outsources your brain” There’s nothing that makes ChatGPT et al appreciably different from the above, other than the tendency to halluc…

That tendency to hallucinate that you so conveniently downplay is a major problem. I'll take reading the reference manual myself all day rather than sifting through the output of a bullshit generator.

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#99

Post by tensility »

jasonlotito wrote: post #41
lrvick wrote: post #23

I do not use AI for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of thinking for myself is how I maintain the neural capacity for forming my own original thoughts and ideas no AI has seen before. If anyone gives me an opinion from an AI, they disrespect me and themselves to a point they are dead to me in an engineering capacity. Once someone outsources their brain they are unlikely to keep learning or evol…

> I do not use AI for engineering work and never will So, working with CLAUDE doesn't count. Gotcha. > If this pisses you off, ask yourself why. It doesn't piss me off, but your comment is disingenuous at best.

Why do you believe it's disingenuous when a capable person tells you that they don't need the crutches that you are advertising? We've accomplished millennia of engineering without the need for a bullshit generator, but you somehow assume everyone needs such a tool just because you are such a fanboy for it? Talk about disingenuous...

Re: "ChatGPT said this" Is Lazy

#100

Post by tensility »

theamk wrote: post #64
simonw wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that quoting a model's answer to someone else is bad form - you can get a model to say ANYTHING if you prompt it to, so a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation to try and prove a point is meaningless slop. I find models vastly more useful than most technical books in my own work because I know how to feed in the right context and then ask them the right questions about it. There isn't a book on earth that coul…

And as long as you don't copy-paste its advice into comments, that's fine. No one really cares how you found all those .permission_allowed() calls to replace - was it grep, or intense staring, or AI model. All that matters is you stand behind it, and act as an author. Original post said it very well: > ChatGPT isn’t on the team. It won’t be in the post-mortem when things break. It won’t get paged at 2 AM. It doesn’t…

Further, grep (and any of its similar siblings) works just fine for such a task, is deterministic, won't feed you bullshit, and doesn't charge you tokens to do a worse job than existing free tools will do well. Better yet, from my experience with the dithering pace of LLMs, you'll get your answer quicker, too.
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