Comment by mcv
23 days ago
I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI.
It makes sense to hate and despise that answer.
And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.
> Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter
Huh, what if I don't want to spend time answering a low-effort question? I will have a look if the default answers/approaches don't work.
What is low effort about "I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus. Not what the textbook says. If five studies conflicted, which would he trust? I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't."?
He checked the consensus, the textbook, and 5 studies. He's asking for an answer from experience and he gets "Ask Claude".
But even if you don't know, "I don't know" is a better answer than "Ask Claude", which blindly assumes that the asker hadn't thought of that, which is a weird thing to assume.
Then don’t answer it? Or just give a seconds worth of context into why you think it’s not important?
Context switches are not free.
Dozens of "quick questions" over the course of a day will drag down your productivity to about one third or worse.
I know that for me, it takes about 45 minutes of focus to enter a flow state, when I'm at my most productive. If I can never enter the zone, then I'm not really doing the thing that made me such a valuable player in the first place, am I?
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You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario.
The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done.
There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively.
Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this:
"What should I do?"
"What do you think you should do?"
"X"
"Do X"
There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro.
Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.
if this is the experience in a team, then the team already has a problem. i expect these things to be made clear up front.
when someone joins a team they should be assigned a mentor whom they can ask any question, no matter how dumb, and the mentor then guides the new team member in how to approach such a question, which at that point can include asking the LLM. it is the mentors responsibility to point out when it is ok to ask another senior developer. daily standups can also help with this sort of thing.
in a close knit team i would also expect that either everyone can ask anything from everyone else, and that everyone learns when it is ok to ask questions. the situation you describe should simply never arise. if it does, then something is going wrong
Alternative take: the assumption that senior engineers get pressured into agreeing to mentor without it formally being an acknowledged part of their job - that is, that a significant percentage of their time is supposed to be allocated to making themselves available to juniors - is fundamentally a problem.
There is so much stigma associated with being an senior engineer that simply wants to spend 95% of their day working on the problems that they were hired to solve. The worst part is that the vast majority of people in this situation are not compensated for this time, and they are expected to keep up with their actual assigned responsibilities.
This state of affairs is a relatively new thing. The idea that you would join a company with the expectation that the most important people to the success of a project should drop what they are doing to context shift to someone else's problem several dozen times a day is not something that would have been remotely normal twenty years ago.
I am not saying that mentoring is bad or that asking for help is bad, just that there's been a change and the unspoken vibe is that if you're not happy to work at ~30% capacity because you need to mentor people, you're some kind of antisocial jerk.
If a company wants seniors to mentor, pay them to mentor. It's very simple.
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Why would you accept a scheduled call if you want to be left alone? That makes no sense.
You're the one projecting bias onto this scenario. You assume people only want to talk to you to waste your time. If you work with professionals, you can assume that when they ask you a question, they have a reason to ask you that question. Assuming that they're just being lazy is bad faith.
Accepting a call and then giving someone this kind of non-answer is extremely disrespectful of their time and their professionalism.
> Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs.
That's not what I wrote. You're being needlessly dishonest and disrespectful right here.
Again: getting a call is enough to knock someone out of deep concentration.
Anyhow, in addition to not hating LLMs, I would add "try not to use dramatic, hyperbolic devices in casual writing, it makes you sound ridiculous" to my advice.