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 to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
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 and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
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.
True because we have pay bands that everyone has to somehow be hired for and fit within.
Any competent developer knows there are limits to prompting.
Personally I've found LLM's suck at multi-threaded applications. (Because I've been tempted by the ~agentic loop~ and been burned. Then I hand code the core logic and all is well).
Woe to the developer who tries to prompt their way through this.
I hit a wall with creating a browser based video editor. Up until then, over the last year, I have been taking my hands off the wheel more and more and really have just become more and more productive. This video editor experience has forced me to get more into the code again.
Skill issue /s
But seriously, lots of apps are just glorified NextJS apps which have tons of training data. Something like rust would likely churn out nonsense that compiles eventually but isn't optimal.
sKiLl IsSuE - some redditor XD
Agreed with the caveat that I think if you know what you're doing and are very cognizant, LLM generated Rust is amazing. I feel like it's hard compilation requirements gives a guardrails for a LLM and if it compiles, you're pretty safe against memory issues.
while 0:
something like this?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.
Maybe it's because my org gave us permission to fail and make mistakes, but I transitioned to AI driven development pretty quickly and am having fun learning how to best drive the AI to produce good quality code, with harnesses and patterns to prevent mistakes and a process to learn and rollback. It's a different kind of engineering now. I find myself thinking more product level and system level than if else branches. I think I've been able to upskill in ways that I wouldn't have been able to if I were still writing code by hand, mainly because I have the bandwidth to do so now.
I only have 10 years of experience, so I'm not trying to say that your lived experience is invalid, but personally I figure if this is the way the industry is heading then I may as well try to learn how to thrive within the new environment.
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.
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 number of high conscientiousness individuals in your team/organization.
The current hype cycle might even represent a net global gain like some people argue. But it represents yet more externality driven exploitation. Remains to be seen what the new equilibrium will be given that now the population being exploited is not only close to the core of the world system but also already overburdened.
I do think it represents a mere acceleration of the previous trend that resulted since around 2005 in an explosion of average (not median) pay for software developers due to similar dynamics. If the system settles on a new level of pay that manages to convince enough people of enough skill to go along, it might just hum along and not implode. As for the rest of us, welcome to the growing permanent underclass and brace for the impact of the climate wars. We will be the fodder that will insulate the chosen ones under their air conditioned domes.
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.
Kids, young folks, anyone reading: this is golden handcuffs.
If you’re unhappy, make a change.
I mean, we're just the neo-luddites in this case. Or maybe the rust belt when jobs moved elsewhere.
The real question isn't if things are going to change around our jobs, its are we going to be able to move fast enough to avoid starving in the streets?
Yeah, the economy wants a dystopia, so we're just gonna have to let that happen industry by industry, calling each group that is exploited for maximal corporate gain a neo-luddite. Inevitability and whatnot. Hell, we're gonna die one day anyway, that's also inevitable, so we might as well all just drink the Kool-Aid too.
I'm in the same boat as you... 30 years of experience writing software, and now I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs without reading the PR. I'm just supposed to press a button. I'm looking for a new job, but it's going to be difficult to find one in tech that isn't a complete AI-psychosis shitshow.
Same. I'm being forced into a position where I'm supposed to do everything with AI agents, not write any manual code, and only act as a reviewer. It sounds like you know the drill. It may push me into early retirement.
The last straw (of many last straws) was over the weekend a co-worker sent me a chat "hey can you click approve on this PR real quick?". This only makes me click "Apply" (jobs) instead of "Approve".
I'm not a dev and that's exactly what I do but I also have absolutely no skill in coding, and am not paid...
People doing that will be replaced, in best case scenario, by cheap labor, and worst case by computers.
I think I’m pretty skilled, or at least I was, but much of my work now looks like this. The fact is in many cases Claude can diagnose and fix the issue quicker than I can even read it. It would be crazy not to take advantage of this. Of course it does get hard to resist the temptation to just become ever lazier over time.
It fixes it at face value, for now. The long-term effects of corporate nearsightedness might be too great to absorb this time around.
This is my exact process nowadays when debugging some weird Linux wifi driver issue or something that came up after upgrade.
But that's because I don't have any real familiarity with the systems involved and I don't expect that gaining such familiarity will benefit me. If I am working on a system or product I'm responsible for at my job, it should be a different situation.
This is a sign of poor harness configuration and/or org level constraints (lack of MCP support, etc.) With properly configured and prompted agents error copy-pasta should be the exception not the norm.
All paradigm shifts and regime changes happen because of a coalition of people that have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the current system.
But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.
The incentives for developing juniors have become misaligned as the expected stay in a company dwindled from decades to years to maybe year.
It would make sense to develop juniors if most of their comp was a four year vest but that doesn't happen until later. And in your first year or two you're usually a net negative... This is even more true with AI.
It's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.
I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...
Some skills are easy re-pick-uppable, like bicycling. Mathematics is probably more challenging. Not sure about programming, especially "borint" business-like programming.
There's a reason games like Factorio or Exapunks are so popular among engineers!
Especially if you get a little burned out and can't bring yourself to contribute to a side project, but still want to do programming-ish things that get your brain moving
I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.
Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.
> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.
If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them.
I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow. No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools. Because they are great levers that lets you create more with less effort.
Many developers have narrow job descriptions, and the creative, productive uses of AI aren’t really obvious.
Where it shines is glueing systems together or building one-off automations that would take days, or weeks, to figure out. It’s for things you don’t have time to figure out or didn’t think were possible.
> If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results
Why would it mean that? That's one way of using them, sure. Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects.
> I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow
Alright, does that mean you also believe it's impossible then that anyone out there is using AI in a "net positive" way for their development workflow? Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?
> Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?
This one. Only a sith deals in absolute.
I don’t mind experiments to try to find methodologies for those tools. And I believe there are instances where they’ve been successfully used. The issue I have is the kind of generic statements that they are good enough to replace currently established methodologies. Like using AI is a panacea.
> Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects
That’s a bit what I’m talking about. Have you investigated how it has helped you? And if there are other, more economical way to get the same result? Your statement seems more ritualistic than logical.
> Have you investigated how it has helped you? And if there are other, more economical way to get the same result?
No I haven't, but I'm happy to just freeform walk you through my thinking on it: I typically write (wrote?) software for two purposes: consulting/freelancing for others so building what others want, or for simplifying and making my own life easier and more enjoyable. "Stupid" stuff like Home Assistant for example, isn't really life-or-death, or Jellyfin for that matter, both things my family relies on now, but our daily life just gets easier all throughout the day when everything works in sync with what we're doing.
It used to be I had to make a decision what to spend time on, either I work on my professional stuff so we have enough money to survive (maybe more) and I get new challenges and all that, or I spend time improving and maintaining my home infrastructure, or whatever software I feel like I'd need to be better at doing my professional development.
I no longer am making that choice, I'm spending less time in front of the computer, yet the output and quality of my work remains the same, and the code and design when I look at it, even stuff I shipped 6 months ago, I'm still happy with how the code is, which for me I guess is the way I validate if what I produce is good enough.
Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point. Now I just open issues, have a conversation until everything is 100% clear, end up with a PR to review and merge if it looks good, and I can do this while juggling other things.
I agree with you that there are tons of people who are selling LLMs as a panacea to lots of things, and there is so much over-hype in the industry and ecosystem, I also feel like every "new thing" kind of comes with this type of almost scamming, which sucks, and makes it hard to discern from real positive opinions vs just regurgitated opinions someone read somewhere. I'm not sure what the answer to that is, except perhaps as what you say, only a sith deals in absolutes.
What are the exact "currently established methodologies" you're talking about that cannot be replaced by LLMs + a harness today, just as some examples? You're probably right that those exists, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be the most difficult to replace today.
> What are the exact "currently established methodologies" you're talking about that cannot be replaced by LLMs + a harness today, just as some examples? You're probably right that those exists, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be the most difficult to replace today.
I was explaining [0] under another post that programming is mostly translation works. You take a specs and you formalize it using code, like going from sketch to a proper engineering drawing. Software design is more creative, where you take a problem and then comes up with a solution (creating the specs). Software Engineering is ensuring that those two are done well enough while consuming the least resources.
So a program is always a formal system. It's also static. It will be executed by a computer which will actually have a tangible effect in the real world. That effect is what's valuable. The program is the seed which let us control that effect. Aka it's the map that let us plan the journey, but it's not the territory that we will have to travel in.
The issue I keep pointing in most of my comment is thinking that the map is the territory. That the novel are the words and not the story so we need more words. Or that the code is more important than the user' workflows, se we are adding more buggy code, while not ensuring that the workflows are undisturbed.
> Nowadays, my entire home-lab is configured with Nix and almost everything except my workstation and some random stuff, runs NixOS. Everything is hosted on a local Forgejo instance, which also has it's own (custom "written" of course) agent acting on issues and PRs, and I have my harness basically maintain my entire home lab at this point.
It's also highlighted here where you focus more on the process than the output here. The goal is to have a working homelab. NixOS managing it is only the process (accidental complexity). If it's where truly about the goal and not NixOS and using AI, by this point, adding new nodes (software, devices,...) should be as easy as selecting it and adding it to the current system, like a strategy game.
You can see that philosophy in OpenBSD, where the focus is to have a working OS, not to work on developing an OS. A lot of software are done and it's mostly just bug fixing every once in a while. You can also see the same attitude in industrial engineering where you develop a solution and then use it for years. You don't spend all your time tweaking it and thus disturbing the production flow.
So yes, when I see a LLM methodology, it's mostly about the work itself, not the output of the work. There is no definition of done or even the idea of having one. It's work for the purpose of working.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157720
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I think many people did argue against these things when they were new. Compilers, for instance, were seen as a waste of the computer's resources and produced less than optimal code.
Eh. The useful LLM usage I see is in internal tools (bugs don’t matter because the output or UI is the only thing that counts and they are throw away) or personal projects that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Both of these can be quite invisible. But the benefit is there.
> No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools.
Uhm ... I've heard quite alot arguing against IDEs. And I feel IDEs are too much of a lock in.
Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
Infinitely, that's a stretch.
Over the past year maybe 1.5x to 2.0x for me. As in: I can work on two projects at the same time with reduced amount of context switch. But that's it for me.
Maybe I don't have the brains for 1000x terminal agent coding, but 2 parallel projects seems like my saturation point.
I do believe there's a tiny subset of people who are more productive with AI, in the same way that Erdős was more productive with amphetamine.
But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.
this is a great metaphor precisely because (outside those with paradoxical stimulant response) everyone thinks they're more productive on amphetamines and there's some naive evidence to that effect. the number of things you've actually done is significantly higher. the change in value created, as measured by the decrease in distance between where you are and the the goal you're shooting for, is unpredictable at best and slowly degrades as reliance increases.
AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.
The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is.
Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.
I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.
If you use it in a work context (or any normal social context really) then yes, that is obnoxious. That doesn't mean it's not a real phenomenon.
Mweh, I'm not a native English speaker. It's a definitely existing archetype, though, just like "Spießbürger" points at a thing in German.
Is he wrong though?
More cringe than obnoxious, but yeah.
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.
The word “obnoxious” does not carry the connotation of smug superiority that “midwit” does.
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.
Engaging in direct open conflict in a sanitized environment like an office is shooting yourself in the foot. Different norms for different rooms.
Corporate offices are low trust environments where people do not really openly speak directly in any negative way (for basically the reason you've illustrated), so I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction.
> I wouldn't use them as any kind of standard for normal social interaction
Workplaces are where many of us spend a large percentage of our waking lives. So, it is "normal," unfortunately. This is why HR language and norms have broken containment into the non-work world. (Whether that's a good thing is another question.)
Different context, different politeness rules. I bet you're fun at parties. An online forum is a relaxed space, like a town pub. HR isn't breathing down our necks here. Personal attacks are a different sort of thing. Using a word to describe in a comment some abstract situations and kinds of characters you see at the office is not a personal attack.
There is not one single discourse norm to rule them all and calling out every little thing as too offensive is just annoying. Yeah, yeah there are no midwits, everyone is a unique little genius flower, yeah.
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> very competent who know when and how to use it and for what.
More productive? Sure, to an extent.
Being merely more productive is a tame claim for what some people unashamedly post here
People apparently can get a very different picture of the same site. Anti-AI people think this site's commenters are mostly pro-AI and vice versa. I'm generally pro-using-AI-in-proper-ways, and mostly have the impression that people on here tend to complain and grumble about AI mostly and are generally skeptical and dismissive of everything which is right in the HN tradition (the famous Dropbox comment etc).
Karpathy, Carmack, Terence Tao, Simon Willison etc. are all smart people and manage to use AI effectively and productively because it doesn't hurt their ego.
Except I am not anti-AI.
You can see my comment history.
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Everyone I know, including myself, is simultaneously extremely pro-AI and anti-AI for this reason.
I always put myself in the shoes of the reader when relaying Claudeslop. I either use it as a reference and write it by hand or make Claude edit it 10+ times until it's conveying only the needed information, and in simple, clear words, and without annoying Claudeisms.
we've been calling it meatware at work.
i just like dont read peoples md files they send me from claude anymore
He's basically asking other people to do his job for him, because he knows that the AI doesn't truly do it well enough.
I would say to him that if he wants me to do his job, he needs to pay me his salary.
My VP boss calls me 6 times a day to help him understand his copilot responses and asks why we aren't doing what copilot says we should do. I then have to spend multiple hours explaining why. His peers call him to understand their copilot responses which he then copilots and calls me to help interpret. On and on and on
This sounds like true hell. I am very sorry.
No, that's not hell yet. The boss in this case knows their own limitations and asks the technical person to help. True hell is when the boss thinks AI most be more knowing than the human. 'But Claude said it, do it!'
Sounds to me like developer jobs are not going away after all. Somebody needs to understand what the AI communicates.
Sounds more like job security to me.
Being a priest or imam is a job for life. I think i agree.
Have you tried putting those explanations into your repo?
wow. what a nightmare.
I am that person on the blast radius. The most effective response I have found is dumping the documents into the AI, and asking it to review them, then posting back the AI response.
Any resistance to this is met with a "But I'm also using AI as the board demands!"
Diabolical. I’m not sure if I’m frightened or fascinated… , I’m thinking of where can this lead if applied iteratively. Like, slop supernova followed by by a slop brown dwarf?
> Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
So... back to a currency backed by gold?
As an Au stralian I am offended you went with gold psychosis instead of whatever the aussie zeitgeist is cooking up with extra crazy. Our equivalent of "Florida man" is "queensland man" or "western suburbs man"- about half the country at this point. Its cooked.
In all seriousness, actual AI psychosis is my 3rd risk behind 1. public interactive agents and 2. whatever devs are doing with agents to prod
All that trickles is not slop.
Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold! Actual Intelligence could grasp this was a simple keytranspose typo...
> Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold!
I don't usually like to gatekeep but knowing that "Au==gold" is one of those basic facts that everybody on a forum like hacker news should know and find unremarkable.
You might even say it's puts on sunglasses periodic table stakes.
I disagree...
Actual intelligence might be[0] to know what typos (of any kind) are fun to riff off.
Maybe this didn't hit the mark for you, but it got a chuckle out of me (especially considering the last hype before AI was crypto).
-----
[0] I don't even try to figure that out anymore, in a few years I'll pick the definition that I think best captures my thoughts
> ...
See that way too often in comments like this. Anyway, it was pretty likely they knew it was a typo, it was just a funny response.
My mistake, I was under the impression Reddit was the place for facetious "funny" comments.
LinkedIn is the place for mid-intellectual condescension with an ellipsis at the end.
I think you missed that the actual intelligence knew that it was a typo, and that the joke they made riffed on pretending that they did not know.
How correct is the documentation? You seem to be coming from the same standpoint as a lot of people in this thread which is "don't make me read AI output, I can prompt the model myself" but what this person is doing sounds much more sane - have highly skilled subject matter experts prompt the AI once, generate all the answers you might want, and review them carefully for correctness using all available context.
That sounds far preferable to individuals independently asking questions that are not covered by the documentation and independently reviewing a bunch of potentially hallucinated slop that no one else will ever read.
I kinda dislike where your comment leads, but I can’t argue with the logic either. Time for self-reflection I suppose.
Maybe a better way of doing this is to ask the experts to do the work? But then again, someone who does not understand the subject could ask better or at least different and more approachable questions.
I guess one reason I object to this is asymmetry - it takes someone a minute to take an hour of my life with no back pressure mechanism. Previously asking a question required effort and signified commitment.
On the contrary, I kind of love this as form of malicious compliance. I'd wager money that the PO/BAs have been demanding "comprehensive documentation" for a very long time, and now they are getting what they've asked for good and hard.
AI be used to make reviewing it easy, eh?
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.
>Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
yes you are
When some people call this "Verification Debt" or something similar, that is setting the Overton Window upon this phenomena adversely upon the verifiers. I call it an application of Brandolini's Law:
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.""
Until you put in at least the same amount of energy required to verify the AI output as you are asking others to put in to verify it, the AI output you are wielding must be considered bullshit. Really, it should be based upon the verification requestor's historical trust score and how many human verifiers are looped in. A Verification Tax, so to speak:
The energy the creator must spend (Ec) is determined by a function of the number of reviewers requested (N) and the historical trust score of that creator's AI outputs (T).
Ec = N * (1 - T)
The thing I think is so frustrating about this is it's the absolute worst case middle ground between two much more productive experiences. Either solve the problem yourself by understanding the code or just give me the full agent context so I can just use a chatbot too.
For high stakes debugging efforts I'll dig in with Claude, have it do a bunch of testing and give me a writeup, and then review it to extract any useful findings. When discussing with other people, I give them the 2 sentences I'm confident in and then link them to the giant doc so they can review it with their Claude.
IMO once you're working with agents, your whole job is context management. I have a little web server running my Claude markdown docs. When someone sends me a Claude snippet with some partial information I just have them prompt their bot to upload a thorough context dump so I actually know what they did. If someone has had an agent look at a problem they haven't thought about yet, I'd rather just get the info from the bot directly.
100% with you.
Consider just using Claude sessions. Claude has hooks you can use to copy local sessions in the repo.
Git LFS can be used to store directly in repo, helping not just with repo size but also with security/privacy/secrets-leaking
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!"
Asking someone to ask an LLM is peak laziness.
Beyond reverse centaur
“I ask Claude only questions to which I don’t know answers to - which there are plenty of. That saves the company money by avoiding frivolous use of tokens.”
Ask Claude to generate a few numbers using it and tell you if they are random or not
They may be random, but are they secure?
Just ask Claude if they are secure.
The cylinder must remain secure
"Is Claude secure?"
Better get a Codex subscription to check!
I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense.
Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.
Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.
Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
what is often overlooked in corporate culture: if you take a step back, two coworkers refusing to cooperate, regardless of the reason, is a typical "corporate kindergarten" scenario for the manager to take care of.
To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.
They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.
The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.
This, I totally agree with you having a call and letting them explain the changes. One of my coworker used claude to write and push PR's and the message was so cryptic, it's not really understandable. I got him on a call and let him explain the PR. He also actually couldn't really interpret the PR message. I warned him not do this again. Now he writes by hand. I think communication between humans should be written by only humans. AI is not really good at communication.
That here.
I once worked in a place where a guy would pick on me in code reviews, he wasn't really higher position, but had been with the company longer than I was.
He was just an asshole asserting his dominance and needed to be taken a notch down by a manager and it turned out he didn't understood (or more likely didn't try to understand) the PR when confronted.
You are absolutely right to push back...
Because engineers don’t decide on hiring and firing. The managers all have KPIs to transform the org into AI-native. This is the kind of behavior that organizations encourage right now.
The psychosis is largely coming from the top.
Fish rot from the head, as they say.
I get it’s annoying and I personally hate it but firing someone for it is ridiculous. Are you expecting everyone to rewrite everything from an AI before they share it because that doesn’t sound a good use of company time either.
No. I’m expecting everyone to answer direct questions that they are the only one who can answer by thinking up the answer with their own brain then writing or speaking that.
If someone asks you a question at work, you answer them, or explain why you won’t/can’t.
If they wanted an AI answer they could have asked it themself.
I think that’s not an unreasonable expectation. Don’t share raw LLM output with other people.
Firing somebody for it is ridiculous? If you say that, then you are also obliged as a customer to keep giving your money to companies who do not perform as expected. You have no right to choose a different lawyer if your lawyer makes an AI-generated report for your case. You have no right to walk past a restaurant which is using AI-generated billboards, you shall eat there.
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It’s just a fancy version of previous tools. Imagine a coworker instead does a refactor by grepping the entire codebase and doing a find-and-replace.
Do they ensure that it didn’t accidentally overwrite something it shouldn’t have?
Or do they just throw up a PR and assume their little refactoring bash command works fine, then expect their coworkers to debug it for them?
The 1st one, of course, that is the whole point. AI is increasing the 2nd one by an order of magnitude. People think they shouldn't have to do the 1st one anymore.
It seems that this is largely coming from higher ups who are probably (consciously or not) testing the waters for LLMs being able to replace the people they're dumping the walls of text on. I don't mean in any sort of malicious penny pinching scheme either, but simply people wanting to be able to do things quickly and as close to their own demands as possible, while getting rid of the 'middle man.' It just so happens that as LLMs become ever more capable of delivering on e.g. software tasks, software engineers start to become the middle men.
My experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way
I know exactly the persona you’re describing. It’s unfortunate because they have a great learning tool now. I always felt bad for over eager engineers who were not strong. They had the right attitude but I thought lacked the learning resources and perhaps the learning skills others stronger engineers had. Before if you found yourself in an area you don’t understand. Some people make it all the way through school without learning how to learn on their own. Or at least have underdeveloped skills in that area. Once they enter the workforce and no longer have a syllabus that outlines learning plan for a subject, and an instructor and TAs that hand hold them through the learning process, learning becomes really difficult. AI could really solves that. But maybe I misunderstood the original problem.
So, in other words, the pipeline that's producing engineers is not filtering out people without talent. It used to be that people who "didn't know how to learn" couldn't make it through the early engineering courses and moved over to some other field.
That's why we have courses and certifications!
Yeah that’s exactly the person I’m talking about.
Those engineers are annoying but I'm so sad about the previously great engineers who are doing this and now contributing slop everywhere.
Anecdotally, there are no engineers who I considered “great engineers” before who are now just posting slop. The great engineers are still great engineers - and I don’t know (or care) if they’re LLM assisted.
I doubt higher ups wanna babysit agent software engineers all day long, it's not fun and its pretty time consuming and cognitively demanding. They'll let humans handle it - but their dream is way less humans will be needed than before.
Because it's harder to fire managers. And even harder to fire executives.
Who goes when companies need to downsize? Rarely executives; they'll always find a way to be retained...hell, they're the ones with the power to decide who goes.
How can it be a fireable offense when it's actively encouraged and rewarded?
Let me give you a scenario and see if it is in this same fireable offense line:
An Ops person who deals with company code base but is not a SWE in the code base regularly has to work around issues with this software (They are OPs). However they have read access to the source.
In the past, they see a bug and open a jira with how it was found for the dev team, and it may or may not ever get looked at.
Now ops can point claude to the repo and it can most likely [but not always] find the issue.
So this ops person can do most of the work of reproducing the bug and finding the problem/solution but doesn't understand the code. Should they not produce the findings for someone else to read/validate? Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?
> Should they not produce the findings for someone else to read/validate?
No, they should not. They should not waste others time with output that they themselves do not fully understand. That is not even remotely helpful. The other party can use claude just as easily as they can. Using claude does not add any value in and of itself.
"Hi claude said this thing that I don't really understand please look at it for me" is never useful.
> Should they go back and just open the ticket the old way?
Yes. They should do their damn job while respecting the time of the other people they interact with who have their own different jobs to do.
I agree, they shouldn't just proxy the Claude output directly to the SWEs. THey can use Claude all they want, but the output of their effort (which goes to the SWEs) should be understood (maybe even written by) the Ops engineer. The Ops eng can use Claude to dumb it down for them to understand and can even be taught by Claude on the issue further... so Claude to the rescue still.
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 credit.
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.
I am comparing it with a skilled cousin or another employee, as a thought exercise.
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
Yes, just file a ticket and let the people with relevant expertise and context handle it - obviously. Do software engineers ask Claude for recommendations on handling network outages and bug IT with “AI” slop? Do accountants bring “AI” slop advice to electricians wiring a building? Do lawyers use Claude to try helping physicians diagnose illnesses?
By providing a bad “AI” slop solution that you can’t evaluate, you’re actually creating more work for the people responsible for doing the thing. Now they have to understand the slop you’ve given them, explain why it’s wrong/won’t fit in the existing architecture/has other issue you can’t see without deep context. Or, they have to play politics to ignore your slop without angering you and creating more problems down the line. Either way, it’s harder than just letting them do their job.
Without understanding they have no way of judging the competence of Claude and the slop it generates. So yes they should just file a ticket the old way, after doing the actual hard work, which is reproducing the bug.
I see no harm with sharing an AI analysis in the ticket; it might save the engineer time.
as long as you've humanly verified the correctness of all the analysis first, yeah
That would make execs who asked staff to tokenmaxx look even sillier than they already are.
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> But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
Deciphering error messages can be a bit of an arcane art, at times impenetrable to all except the authors of a system. Understanding the patterns exposed in such messages and, thereby, deriving their meaning is not always clear even to experienced developers.
Engineers reaching out to you (humans) to explain the output of an LLM haven't fully internalized how to interact with LLMs. When an LLM's output is beyond one's immediate grasp, one can _ask the LLM_ to further break down its output, to explain the concepts and symbols that inform its response.
Personally, I have asked LLMs to draw charts and comprehensively simplify their output, often providing cognitive signposts that "I'm confused" about some aspect of what its reporting.
In other words, some people, including engineers with various lavels of experience, don't yet fully understand the implications of the open-eneded interface that language provides with LLM interaction.
> and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?
If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
I wonder if there is something like nohello.net but norawllmoutput.net
There is https://noslopgrenade.com/
I was writing slop grenade essays in Slack before LLMs were a thing. To everyone who had to put up with my overly verbose style: I am sorry.
i learned working in customer support that if you give someone a helpline their brain stop working. they will ask any little stupid thing even if in reality they can know the answer, look it up or reason about it. they are not dumb but the helpline cripples them...
AI is a helpline, so for a lot of people it cripples them. they cease to think. simple as that.
its something people need to be aware of that their brains work like this, because that awareness is the same thing that solves the problem. (people find it very confronting to learn they have been asking questions they knew the answers too already...)
the other day I had an "official" career conversation with my boss. They took some notes during the talk and later sent me a page summary of the conversation to see if it looked right. It immediately smelled of AI, and had some things completely opposite to what I said. jeeze I guess this is where we are headed...
It'll only get worse unless companies start having strict policies around it, making repeat offenses fireable. Juniors should have a little more wiggle room, but there's no excuse for senior engineers to participate in such carelessness.
This is the kind of thing that spreads. If you have to deal with it all the time you're going to start dissociating out of necessity.
I've literally seen this in HN responses as well, so many times. What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response
> What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response
Forwarding an AI response (or any canned response) sends the message that they don’t want to interact with you. That could be intentional.
I think you're overthinking it. People generally want to be helpful, and do actions they think are "useful" so most likely; these people think they're actually being helpful and useful when they do things like that. Similarly to "no one thinks they're evil" I suppose.
Specifically they subconsciously think they're special - it doesn't occur to them that everyone else can also query an LLM just as easily.
At least those (at least the detectable ones) seem to be downvoted en masse, called out, or flagged. They aren't even allowed as per the guidelines[0]:
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Exactly! When someone does it at work, I get a bit sad because my conclusion is that whoever does it can't like their job very much. But that's ok – not liking your job very much is compatible with an otherwise happy life.
When people start doing it in an entirely voluntary human-to-human situation, like having a conversation online about a topic of interest, I'm gobsmacked.
> What the hell is the point of human interaction if ...
Sadly, the point is validating the human worth of the human who can't do any better than this.
But, assuming you're not stuck on that human's Self Esteem Care Team, it can be tricky to tell them that they need to seek validation elsewhere.
I'm not opposed to straight copypasta, but it should be limited to excerpts only or at the very least workshopped with the LLM to reduce verbosity. Certainly it should at least be fully read and grokked.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen LLMs one-shot responses that are fit to paste to Slack verbatim. It does happen though.
I think it was reasonable in the very recent past. There was a period where AI had major capabilities that had not diffused fully into the zeitgeist. So often you could see someone struggling with e.g. understanding a crash log, and say "they probably haven't thought of pasting into Claude Code with access to the codebase".
That time has now passed though.
Any non trivial coding task requires a conversation between human and ai.
Just have devs commit (or provide however you like) their ai coding sessions.
It then becomes obvious if someone has, or has not, reviewed the code, because then they discussed it.
Bonus points: on very complex tasks, you can more or less resume the conversation, via session files.
Same for schoolwork, research papers, and a lot more.
The conversation is not something to throw away: it is arguably as important as the code in the pr.
I want to suggest you read https://www.amazon.com/Advantage-Disadvantage-History-Hacket...
You can't just remember every conversation and ... something useful.
Indiscriminate memory buries you. What you need is "monumental" memories, which is also known as documentation. AI can be very effective in helping you manage that. That should be kept tight, just like code. You want to keep enough of a record of how you got to where you are that you are equipped to be effective in future tasks.
I would say that your suggestion is basically digital hoarding. Lets say there are 3 kinds of people, the person with OCD who keeps his house almost barren in the name of tidiness, the person who visits his possessions periodically with a critical eye, deciding what to keep and what to throw away, and the hoarder. When it comes time to solve some household problem, say hang a picture, which one of them will have what they need to do it (a hammer and a nail, maybe a little bit of wire) and be able to find it?
I think you might consider keeping the session history for a while, maybe a month or 3 months or 6 months, but have something that automatically deletes them after that.
While I generally agree for general human living, I've seen impressive "digital hoarder" success using AI because it changes the dimensions of reasonableness.
Imagine your hoarder scenario except that the hoarder has unlimited storage space and a team of librarian/warehouse workers to go find and fetch the items needed for the wall hanging task.
AI does not have unlimited storage space and digging through tens of thousands of keyword hits will cost you an unlimited amount of money as your history grows and grows.
> "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?”
I would totally lose it if someone come up to me with that shit. Zero chance I would put up with it.
Had a senior exec pick up his phone, punch some words into AI, then as-it-was-generating-a-response flip it around and put it in front of me.
This shit has progressed well past seriousness and into the absurd
It’s truly unhinged behavior that has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry. You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
Reading this is nightmare fuel right before I go to bed omg
I have a friend who works in healthcare and he says patients now regularly pull out their phone and ask him to talk to their chatbot. Anything he says to them, they immediately repeat to ChatGPT and ask if it’s correct.
"Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" - Gwen DeMarco, Galaxy Quest
Cos patients often don't understand shit from a 3 minute tired and distracted doctor interaction, it's particulary bad in hospitals. I don't really blame them.
Given the state of the US healthcare industry and how little shit some doctors give (and some are legitimately overworked), this isn't as absurd as it sounds.
> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
Politicians too apparently. There was this gem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlYa8NV5k-U
> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry.
It's not a bad time to take a break from it. Keep yourself from cognitive decline, then in 2 or 3 years when the industry has come to its senses you'll be able to impress in a sensible interview. Compared to the slop addicts that won't know how to tie their own shoes without asking Claude each time.
> You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
The system does NOT reward caring. That's the problem.
My giddy aunt.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
Shitgularity is here, it's just unevenly smeared.
It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.
well put
> enshittification squared
I thought AI is an exponential?
a sigmoid as in sigmoid colon
Where I work we call these people “very expensive keyboards”.
This one kills me. So many forums, and Reddit in particular, now have people just chiming into topics with ChatGPT answers. It gives them the illusion of being helpful, while they don't really have the knowledge of the subject. But people go to communities to converse with others in the field, and this makes it feel dead internet.
I'm glad most of my colleagues are still doing things themselves. But honestly, if all you can do is tell me what Claude told you and you didn't even bother to read it yourself. Then I might as well just cut you off the team and go use Claude directly.
So often the sources listed by an LLM are just reddit posts, so this will be an ouroboros pretty soon.
Eh, you always had to filter the chaff too before. Nowadays there's just a second group that replaced knowledge pulled from one's bottom with knowledge pulled from ChatGPT, if you weren't aware of the former group at least now you're forced to be on guard due to the latter.
I am going to guess it's the other way around and a modern day of "let me google this for you"
>you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details
This is the worst person to get this from because they literally don’t understand it.
You know what's even worse? When they don't even bother to copy-paste. They just have claude code/codex post a slack message, with all the telltale signs of an AI message (caution emojis everywhere!)
I always tell people that if they are not adding value to the AI output, then that person isn't needed.
> People almost acting like no one has thought of it
Everyone at my job uses LLMs to code, all day long. People still ask me "why does this bug happen" and I use Claude to find out and the answer is almost always straightforward, and when its not I raise a discussion with the team. The calculus isn't "can I prompt an LLM to find out," it's "do I have a solid enough mental model of the part of the codebase to prompt an LLM specifically enough, and also understand if the LLM is hallucinating or not."
> How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
I think this is a culture issue. I think every org is different, but we had a similar ramp up at our company. First we trialed cursor. Then some people were committing slop. Then we were like "llms are no excuse for slop." Then we got our skills and context good enough to not require close review. And then everything became LLM driven and now we have become "meat proxies" where everyone asks LLMs to fix things that are part of unfamiliar parts of the codebase and then asks someone else familiar to review the fix. We're tending towards a solution to this because I dont think its a good usage of resources but every org will come up with their own culture and solution to this.
If they can't even read a claude response then how are they still employed?
Hiring is hard.
In some jurisdictions and orgs, firing is harder.
When was the last time that a newly adopted technology revealed that amount of ... potential for improvement in our fellow humans? AI must have really hit some nerve to generate this massive amount of questionable behavior. Or did I fall prey to bias?
Did they ask Claude to do the job interview too?
It's so real.. Suddenly managers sending MR, commenting MRs, all AI driven.. 300 lines text, where you don't even know if the premises are correct. I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous. I don't know how to stop them..
> I guess untrained people with better tools are super dangerous.
It's hard to make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious
Unskilled people with foolproof tools or skilled people with powerful tools. Either works. It's unskilled people with powerful tools that poses a problem.
I’ve been using V/G as shorthand for this: verification capacity / generation capacity.
LLMs have made G extremely cheap, but verification capacity and judgement has not scaled at anything like the same rate. Someone can generate a bunch of PRs or a report quickly, while transferring hours of verification work to everyone downstream.
We are on the wrong side of this ratio, because we never had the capacity to extinguish reviewer capacity the way we can today.
“Don’t be a meat proxy” needs to be a cultural norm for the larger problem of using cheap generation to externalise verification costs onto someone else.
We had the same problem, now I just ask my colleagues to AR the docs (attentionrequest.com); while the site may be tongue-in-cheek, it helped us build a workflow, where "certificate of having read & thought about it" is conditioned on reading the doc and then writing up a number of questions on it as a human, before sending it off. It's worked reasonably well for us so far, hopefully this becomes one of the new norms.
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.
This is because they don't trust you to do it. If whenever a problem came up you and the rest of the team were able to solve it and it didn't drag on into some forever bug, they wouldn't be second guessing you. Maybe they have long experience where you were too lazy to fix things or you bamboozled them with status updates that were basically fabricated? Don't act offended, it's quite common.
> “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?”
It’s the equivalent of choosing words from a conversation and sending you the dictionary entries.
I could do that myself. I really didn’t lack the ability to click a button.
> How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
Because no one is serious anymore.
I hate to say it, but anyone this lazy is absolutely asking to be replaced by AI.
Yeah have this too.
I created a spreadsheet called “slop” and add the name to the list and redirect all queries to their engineering manager. I’m not wasting my time on that shit.
I will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.
Yep. I'm categorically ignoring messages and PRs that are obviously AI written.
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Feels like some serious hyperbole. I definitely have people at work copy and paste Claude output but I have never once had someone ask me to read it for them and tell them it was correct.
I think this is just the moment we are in, the amount of people using AI in their day to day work changed so quickly that we have a very wide spread range of competencies and experience and really nobody has had enough time to be an expert with AI. We don't have well defined best practices and it feels like the target is moving.
My guess is you were probably complaining about something similar to this before there was AI, this is just the new target for your angst.
It's implicit as a request, not something they literally say (usually).
Namely - I put near zero effort into this response, and deciding if it's correct is on you. -> I'm asking you to read it and figure out if it's correct because I couldn't be bothered to do so