Comment by eddythompson80

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

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.

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?

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!"

> 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.

> 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.

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 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...

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

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 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.

I am going to guess it's the other way around and a modern day of "let me google this for you"

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

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.

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!)

>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.

> 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?

I always tell people that if they are not adding value to the AI output, then that person isn't needed.

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’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.

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

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.