No. I think it'll mostly cause a dip in the average intelligence of knowledge workers.
We will recover when we realize the valuable workers in a field are the ones who want to be there and actively increase their knowledge rather than offload work.
I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing or that I don't really understand.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
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.
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 keep cussing at it saying “don’t give me a wall of text ...” it just like eating tokens. It’s trained to eat tokens for anything. No matter what workarounds you use, claude.md/memory/skills what-ever you throw, after 2 exchanges it goes back eating tokens. I cant wait for an open model good enough like opus 4.8 where can control the gregarious factor
In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.
Yeah, I just ignore people who do that. I don’t care what Claude or ChatGPT said. If you cannot be arsed to write yourself then I cannot be arsed to read it.
I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
Last week, I built a search engine as a side project over electoral data.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
I call it BI Slop now [0]. It's everywhere. Usually "claude said" is used a a proxy for authority, as in there is some validity in this statement. But it's disguised as humbleness. i.e. I don't know if this is true, but claude said xyz, with your expertise you might know more than me...
I'll always give people my honest effort and benefit of the doubt initially, but those who violate it are treated likewise. The only way to put down this kind of behavior is to charge it a social cost. If we do not do this, the cost is externalized to everyone else who conducts themselves with care.
That is super actual in my team. The biggest problem is that Claude tends to write long prose and use jargon which is not common for us. Often, to understand the whole idea I have to read all the text. The best if the writer rephrases what Claude has written, as wording/jargon will be familiar for the reader and will make communication easier.
187 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadDo you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
We will recover when we realize the valuable workers in a field are the ones who want to be there and actively increase their knowledge rather than offload work.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
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.
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.
the person that got it, thought it was actually a good idea and they went with it.
that confidence now translates into behavior.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/business-intelligence-slop
It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
Finally I have a word I can use for this
1. It's quick
2. It's not their problem anymore because they've replied.
No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that.