Comment by jacksnipe
6 months ago
Something that really frustrates me about interacting with (some) people who use AI a lot is that they will often tell me things that start “I asked ChatGPT and it said…” stop it!!! If the chatbot taught you something and you understood it, explain it to me. If you didn’t understand or didn’t trust it, then keep it to yourself!
I recently had this happen from a senior engineer. What's really frustrating is I TOLD them the issues and how to fix it. Instead of listening to what I told them, they plugged it into GPT and responded with "Oh, interesting this is what GPT says" (Which, spoiler, was similar but lacking from what I'd said).
Meaning, instead of listening to a real-life expert in the company telling them how to handle the problem they ignored my advice and instead dumped the garbage from GPT.
I really fear that a number of engineers are going to us GPT to avoid thinking. They view it as a shortcut to problem solve and it isn't.
>They view it as a shortcut to problem solve and it isn't
Oh but it is, used wisely.
One: it's a replacement for googling a problem and much faster. Instead of spending half an hour or half a day digging through bug reports, forum posts, and stack overflow for the solution to a problem. LLMs are a lot faster, occasionally correct, and very often at least rather close.
Two: it's a replacement for learning how to do something I don't want to learn how to do. Case Study: I have to create a decent-enough looking static error page for a website. I could do an awful job with my existing knowledge, I could spend half a day relearning and tweaking CSS, elements, etc. etc. or I could ask an LLM to do it and then tweak the results. Five minutes for "good enough" and it really is.
LLMs are not a replacement for real understanding, for digging into a codebase to really get to the core of a problem, or for becoming an expert in something, but in many cases I do not want to, and moreover it is a poor use of my time. Plenty of things are not my core competence or anywhere near the goals I'm trying to achieve. I just need a quick solution for a topic I'm not interested in.
This exactly!
There are so many things that a human worker or coder has to do in a day and a lot of those things are non-core.
If someone is trying to be an expert on every minor task that comes across their desk, they were never doing it right.
An error page is a great example.
There is functionality that sets a company apart and then there are things that look the same across all products.
Error pages are not core IP.
At almost any company, I don't want my $200,000-300,000 a year developer mastering the HTML and CSS of an error page.
>Oh but it is, used wisely.
Sufficiently advanced orange juice extractor is the solution to any problem. Doesen't necessarily mean you should build the sufficient part.
>One: it's a replacement for googling a problem and much faster
This is more to do with the problem that google results have gone downhill very rapidly. It used to be you could find what you were looking for very fast and solve a problem.
>I could ask an LLM to do it and then tweak the results. Five minutes for "good enough" and it really is.
When the cost of failures is low, a hackjob can be economical, like a generated picture for entertainment or a static error page. Miscreating a support for a bridge it is not very economical
I wonder if this is an indication that they didn't really understand what you said to begin with.
If I had a dollar for every time I told someone how to fix something and they did something else...
Let's just say not listening to someone and then complaining that doing something else didn't work isn't exactly new.
I often do this - ask a LLM for an answer when I already have it from an expert. I do it to evaluate the ability of the LLM. Usually not in the presence of said expert tho.
Just using LLMs on the (few) things I have specialist knowledge of it's clear they are extremely limited. I get absurdly basic mistakes and I am very wary of even reading LLM output about topics I don't command. It's easy to get stuck on dead ends reasoning wise even by getting noisy input.
Is it possible that what happened was an impedance mismatch between you and the engineer such that they couldn’t grok what you told them but ChatGPT was able to describe it in a manner they could understand? Real-life experts (myself included, though I don’t claim to be an expert in much) sometimes have difficulty explaining domain-specific concepts to other folks; it’s not a flaw in anyone, folks just have different ways of assembling mental models.
Whenever someone has done that to me, it's clear they didn't read the ChatGPT output either and were sending it to me as some sort of "look someone else thinks you're wrong".
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Definitely a possibility.
However, I have a very strong suspicion they also didn't understand the GPT output.
To flush out the situation a bit further, this was a performance tuning problem with highly concurrent code. This engineer was initially tasked with the problem and they hadn't bothered to even run a profiler on the code. I did, shared my results with them, and the first action they took with my shared data was dumping a thread dump into GPT and asking it where the performance issues were.
Instead, they've simply been littering the code with timing logs in hopes that one of them will tell them what to do.
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Those people weren't engineers to start with.
Software engineers rarely are.
I’m saying this tongue in cheek, but there’s some truth to it.
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You should ask yourself why this organization wants engineering advice from a chatbot more than from you.
I doubt the reason has to do with your qualities as an engineer, which must be basically sound. Otherwise why bother to launder the product of your judgment, as you described here someone doing?
> I really fear that a number of engineers are going to us GPT to avoid thinking. They view it as a shortcut to problem solve and it isn't.
How is this sentiment not different from my grandfather’s sentiment that calculators and computers (and probably his grandfather’s view of industrialization) are a shortcut to avoid work? From my perspective most tools are used as a shortcut to avoid work; that’s kinda the while point—to give us room to think about/work on other stuff.
Because calculators aren't confidently wrong the majority of the time.
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Did you grandpa think that calculators made engineers worse at their jobs?
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It is supremely annoying when i ask in a group if someone has experience with a tool or system and some idiot copies my question into some LLM and paste the answer. I can use the LLM just like anyone, if i'm asking for EXPERIENCE it is because I want the opinion of a human who actually had to deal with stuff like corner cases.
It's the 2025 version of lmgtfy.
Nah, that’s different. Lmgtfy has nothing to do with experience, other than experience in googling. Lmgtfy applies to stuff that can expediently be googled.
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The whole point of paying a domain expert is so that you don't have to google shit all day.
That’s exactly how I feel
If it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading.
Reminds me of something I wrote back in 2023: "If you wrote it with an LLM, it wasn't worth writing" https://jfloren.net/b/2023/11/1/0
There's a lot of documentation out there that I've found was left unwritten but that I would have loved to read
I mean, there is a lot of hand written crap to, so even that isn't a good rule.
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I work in a corporate environment as I’m sure many others do. Many executives have it in their head that LLMs are this brand new efficiency gain they can pad profit margins with, so you should be using it for efficiency. There’s a lot of push for that, everywhere where I work.
I see email blasts suggesting I should be using it, I get peers saying I should be using it, I get management suggesting I should use it to cut costs… and there is some truth there but as usual, it depends.
I, like many others, can’t be asked to take on inefficiency in the name of efficiency ontop of currently most efficient ways to do my work. So I too say “ChatGPT said: …” because I dump lots of things into it now. Some things I can’t quickly verify, some things are off, and in general it can produce far more information than I have time to check. Saying “ChatGPT said…” is the current CYA caveat statement around the world of: use this thing but also take liability for it. No, if you practically mandate I use something, the liability falls on you or that thing. If it’s a quick verify I’ll integrate it into knowledge. A lot of things aren’t.
> I see email blasts suggesting I should be using it, I get peers saying I should be using it, I get management suggesting I should use it to cut costs
The ideal scenario: you write a few bulletpoints and ask Copilot to turn it into a long-form email to send out. Your receiving coworker then asks Copliot to distill it back into a few bullet points they can skim.
You saved 5 minutes but one of your points was ignored entirely and 20% of your output is nonsensical.
Your coworker saved 2 minutes but one of their bulletpoints was hallucinated and important context is missing from the others.
Microsoft collects a fee from both of you and is the only winner here.
It just feels to me like a boss walking into a car mechanic's shop holding some random tool, walking up to a mechanic, and:
"Hey, whatcha doin?"
"Oh hi, yea, this car has a slight misfire on cyl 4, so I was just pulling one of the coilpacks to-"
"Yea alright, that's great. So hey! You _really_ need to use this tool. Trust me, it's gonna make your life so much easier"
"umm... that's a 3d printer. I don't really think-"
"Trust me! It's gonna 10x your work!"
...
I love the tech. It's the evangelists that don't seem to bother researching the tech beyond making an account and asking it to write a couple scripts that bug me. And then they proclaim it can replace a bunch of other stuff they don't/haven't ever bothered to research or understand.
Seriously. Being able to look up stuff using AI is not unique. I can do that too.
This is kind of the same with any AI gen art. Like I can go generate a bunch of cool images with AI too, why should I give a shit about your random Midjourney output.
Comfyui workflows, fine-tuning models, keeping up with the latest arxiv papers, patching academic code to work with generative stacks, this stuff is grueling.
Here's an example https://files.meiobit.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/22l0nqm...
Being dismissive of AI art is like those people who dismiss electronic music because there's a drum machine.
Doing things well still requires an immense amount of skill and exhaustive amount of effort. It's wildly complicated
Makes even less sense when you put it like that, why not invest that effort into your own skills instead?
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I mean… I have a fancy phone camera in my pocket too, but there are photographers who, with the same model of fancy phone camera, do things that awe and move me.
It took a solid hundred years to legitimate photography as an artistic medium, right? To the extent that the controversy still isn’t entirely dead?
Any cool images I ask AI for are going to involve a lot less patience and refinement than some of these things the kids are using AI to turn out…
For that matter, I’ve watched friends try to ask for factual information from LLMs and found myself screaming inwardly at how vague and counterproductive their style of questioning was. They can’t figure out why I get results I find useful while they get back a wall of hedging and waffling.
> It took a solid hundred years to legitimate photography as an artistic medium, right?
Not really.
"In 1853 the Photographic Society, parent of the present Royal Photographic Society, was formed in London, and in the following year the Société Française de Photographie was founded in Paris."
https://www.britannica.com/technology/photography/Photograph...
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How can you be so harsh on all the new kids with Senior Prompt Engineer in their job titles?
They have to prove to someone that they're worth their money. /s
I had to deal with someone who tried to check in hallucinated code with the defense "I checked it with chatGPT!"
If you're just parroting what you read, what is it that you do here?!
I hope you dealt with them by firing them.
Yes, unfortunately. This was the last straw, not the first.
Manage people?
then what the fuck are they doing commiting code? leave that to the coders
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As much as I'm also annoyed by that phrase, is it really any different from:
- I had to Google it...
- According to a StackOverflow answer...
- Person X told me about this nice trick...
- etc.
Stating your sources should surely not be a bad thing, no?
It is not about stating a source, the bad thing is treating chatGPT as an authoritative source like it is a subject matter expert.
But is "I asked chatgpt" assigning any authority to it? I use precisely that sentence as a shorthand for "I didn't know, looked it up in the most convenient way, and it sounded plausible enough to pass on".
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In general those point to the person's understanding being shallow. So far when someone says "GPT said..." it is a new low in understanding, and there is no more to the article they googled or second stackOverflow answer with a different take on it, it is the end of the conversation.
Well, it is not, but the three "sources" you mention are not worth much either, much like ChatGPT.
SO at least has reputation scores and people vote on answers. An answer with 5000 upvotes, written by someone with high karma, is probably legit.
>but the three "sources" you mention are not worth much either, much like ChatGPT.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone lambasted for citing stackoverflow as a source. At best, they chastised for not reading the comments, but nowhere as much pushback as for LLMs.
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...isn't that exactly why someone states that?
"Hey, I didn't study this, I found it on Google. Take it with a grain of caution, as it came from the internet" has been shortened to "I googled it and...", which is now evolving to "Hey, I asked chatGPT, and...."
All three of those should be followed by "...and I checked it to see if it was a sufficient solution to X..." or words to that effect.
The complaint isn't about stating the source. The complaint is about asking for advice, then ignoring that advice. If one asks how to do something, get a reply, then reply to that reply 'but Google says', that's just as rude.
It's a "source" that cannot be reproduced or actually referenced in any way.
And all the other examples will have a chain of "upstream" references, data and discussion.
I suppose you can use those same phrases to reference things without that, random "summaries" without references or research, "expert opinion" from someone without any experience in that sector, opinion pieces from similarly reputation-less people etc. but I'd say they're equally worthless as references as "According to GPT...", and should be treated similarly.
It depends on if they are just repeating things without understanding, or if they have understanding. My issue is that people that say "I asked gpt" is that they often do not have any understanding themselves.
Copy and pasting from ChatGPT has the same consequences as copying and pasting from StackOverflow, which is to say you're now on the hook supporting code in production that you don't understand.
We cannot blame the tools for how they are used by those yielding them.
I can use ChatGPT to teach me and understand a topic or i can use it to give me an answer and not double check and just copy paste.
Just shows off how much you care about the topic at hand, no?
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the first 2 bullet points give you an array of answers/comments helping you cross check (also I'm a freak, and even on SO, I generally click on the posted documentation links).
I agree wholeheartedly.
"I asked X and it said..." is an appeal to authority and suspect on its face whether or not X is an LLM. But when it's an LLM, then it's even worse. Presumably, the reason for the appeal is because the person using it considers the LLM to be an authoritative or meaningful source. That makes me question the competence of the person saying it.
Something that frustrates me with LLMs is that they are optimized such that errors are as silent as possible.
It is just bad design. You want errors to be as loud as possible. So they can be traced and resolved. On the other hand, LLMs optimize human preference (or some proxy of this). While humans prefer accuracy, it would be naive to ignore all the other things that optimize this objective. Specifically, humans prefer answers that they don't know are wrong over those that they do know are wrong.
This doesn't make LLMs useless but certainly it should strongly inform how we use them. Frankly, you cannot trust outputs, so you have to verify. I think this is where there's a big divergence between LLM users (and non-users). Those that blindly trust and those that don't (extreme case is non-users). If you need to constantly verify AND recognize that verification is extra hard (because it is optimized to be invisible to you), it can create extra work, not less.
It really is two camps and I think it says a lot:
Wide range of opinions in these two camps, but I think it comes down to some threshold of default trust or default suspicion.
This happens to me all the time at work. People have turned into frontends for LLM, even when it's their job to know the answer to these types of questions. We're talking technical leads.
Seems like if all you do is forward questions to LLMs, maybe you CAN be replaced by a LLM.
There was a brief period of time in the first couple weeks of ChatGPT existing where people did this all the time on Hacker News and were upvoted for it. I take pride in the fact that I thought it was cringeworthy from the start.
I find that only acceptable (only little annoying) when this is some lead in case we're we have no idea what could be the issue, it might help to brainstorm and note that this is not verified information is important.
most annoying is when people trust chatgpt more that experts they pay. we had case when our client asked us for some specific optimization, and we told him that it makes no sense, then he asked the other company that we cooperate with and got similar response, then he asked chatgpt and it told him it's great idea. And guess what, he bought $20k subscription to implement it.
I do this occasionally when it's time sensitive, and I cannot find a reasonable source to read. e.g., "ChatGPT says cut the blue wire, not the red one. I found the bomb schematics it claims say this, but they're paywalled."
If that's all the available information and you're out of time, you may as well cut the blue wire. But, pretty much any other source is automatically more trustworthy.
> when this is some lead in case we're we have no idea what could be the issue
English please
We’re was autocorrected from where
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I had someone at work lead me down a wild goose chase because claude told them to do something which was outright wrong to solve some performance issues they were having in their app. I helped them do this migration and it turned put that claude’s suggestions made performance worse! I know for sure the time wasted on this task was not debited from the so called company productivity stats that come from AI usage.
I do this, but it’s because I am evangelizing proper use of the tool to developers who don’t always understand what it can and can’t do.
Recently I used o3 to plan a refactoring related to upgrading the version of C++ we are using in our product. It pointed out that we could use a tool built in to VS 2022 to make a particular change automatically based on compilation output. I was not familiar with this tool and neither were the other developers on the team.
I did confirm its accuracy myself, but also made sure to credit the model as the source of information about the tool.
Wow that's a wildly cynical interpretation of what someone is saying. Maybe it's right, but I think it's equally likely that people are saying that to give you the right context.
If they're saying it to you, why wouldn't you assume they understand and trust what they came up with?
Do you need people to start with "I understand and believe and trust what I'm about to show you ..."?
I do not need people to lead on that. That’s precisely why leading on “I asked ChatGPT and it said…” makes me trust something less — the speaker is actively assigning responsibility for what’s to come to some other agent, because for one reason or another, they won’t take it on themselves.
Thanks for this. It's a great response I intend to use going forward.
the problem is that when you ask a ChatBot something, it always gives you an answer...
I can see why this would be frustrating, but it's probably a good thing to have people be curious and consult an expert system.
Current systems are definitely flawed (incomplete, biased, or imagined information), but I'd pick the answers provided by Gemini over a random social post, blog page, or influencer every time.