... the page never argues that AI is bad or not useful broadly. Not sure if this getting commented again and again is because people are just that bad at understanding that context matters. Not everything has to be evil / slop or pure / virtuous, regardless of context.
Layout, colors, font and especially language all immediately scream AI. It's fascinating how many of these articles make it to the front page. I would think almost everyone here would be an expert at spotting AI generated slop by now, but people keep up-voting it.
Don't be. Read it through a few times and fix anything you think needs fixing. Go simpler if needed. You might just use shorter sentences. They are fine. And then you can use some pre-AI tool like Word that has some suggestions.
Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is:
Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)
Just want to say, "Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else" is something that I don't think I really internalized until you wrote it in that way. Which I think is evidence of what you are talking about.
But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
As such, isn't the question really about
1) whether it was communicated clearly/effectively
2) whether it should have been communicated to others at all (rather than something that you just dealt with yourself)
I'm not defending AI over usage, but the policy doesn't seem to be addressing what it ought to be
Well, I'd say concision is not the key - sometimes you should be verbose or something else.
In fact, my tendency is to be far too long-winded, with lots of perhaps-unnecessary parantheticals etc. Ai is often shockingly useful at reining me in and focusing on the issue at hand, as well as removing my worst tendencies towards meanness etc...
Im a good writer, when I want to be. But having Ai review, edit, write drafts etc undoubtedly makes me a better writer/communicator. But only because I'm actively thinking about it all, rather than just saying "respond to this" and then providing copy pasta.
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
No. People earn a reputation over time. An AI does not. If you copy paste an AI response verbatim, i need to read everything in your message with a big grain of salt. Imagine doing this all the time as a reader? Exhausting and a waste of others time. If i want to read raw AI output i’ll ask the AI directly, thanks.
If you write something in your own words, or at least synthesize an AI response before sharing it with me, then i know i’m reading something that has at least passed the smell test.
It’s the difference between reviewing a pull request from an intern and a principal software engineer.
I don't disagree at all. But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts.
Though, I think such a writing partner can only really be useful if you know how to write yourself, which also requires knowing how to think (because writing is really just thinking).
So, again, in the end all that really matters is whether you are effectively communicating what needs to be communicated, Ai-assisted or not. It's quite apparent to other thinking people when someone is not doing that, and that hurts their reputation, undermines trust and ultimately leads to losing your job, connections etc...
So, again, the policy really should just be something to the effect of "you're being paid to help us be effective and correct. If you can't do that, we don't need you. Take that into consideration with regards to the tools that you use.". That's obviously not an adequate policy - Ai could surely be helpful in polishing it! But it most definitely couldn't get to the root of the matter on its own.
> But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts.
There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email.
You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to articulate what the LLM found in your own words. If you don't you have just offloaded all the work to someone else: someone else will have to check, verify, investigate what could very well be an hallucination (bad context, random bit flips, whatever the cause doesn't matter). Your effective contribution to the discussion will be negative.
Indeed. And if someone then shares that output verbatim, they'll undermine their own credibility. They can guide the AI to tidy it up, or do it themselves. The issue is not in using AI for writing, but in not using it consciously.
>But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
Not the same burden.
The value of the person is digesting and giving the materially important stuff in the answer (including their expertise and opinion). Not the AI diarrhea.
I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading.
You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying.
The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. Whether the final words were authored by Ai or not is largely irrelevant.
Oh very much agreed. It fundamentally destroys someone's reputation when they refuse to acknowledge that Ai wrote something.
Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, sometimes I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
> I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
I agree with everything here, and do the same, but in my experience people will still interpret doing this as “profoundly disrespectful towards the receivers”. The sibling to your comment seems to express that sentiment:
“There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case.”
Yeah, Ive had similar negative responses a few times to things that are obviously Ai assisted, but also obvious that human thought was guiding it. Frankly, it says more to me about that person than it does about me - they seem to be the same sort who were/are staunchly anti-ai for coding, which reveals someone who has little ability for judgment, discernment etc. Just black and white.
Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate.
I had such an experience last week, and in hindsight I probably should have written the issue differently. I used Ai there primarily to help me be more thorough and have the whole thing be better-formatted than I would have otherwise done myself (ain't no one got time for markdown tables etc).
I should have made it less thorough and more plainly formatted, because it did, admittedly, scream AI. That undermined an otherwise thoughtful and important issue. Though, the people who actually mattered didn't take exception and replied thoughtfully - perhaps partly because I had already gained some degree of trust with them, via thoughtful, useful issues and PRs.
In the end, Ai is a magical tool that can be enormously helpful with almost anything. But we have to use it consciously, like anything.
> Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate.
I'm at the point where I don't even want to interact with that mentality. I get it, as I too don't like to see slop so there's got to be a quality bar and standards. But when the standard is set to zero tolerance, the whole vibe of the community plummets as the example I pasted shows.
Originally I was for the policy, as there was a lot of low quality content.
But now people are finding their way around the tools and they have gotten a lot better, none of that can be appreciated. Instead, people post a project, they get hissed at, and banned. It can cause a lot of hurt feelings, the rules are fuzzy and don't match how they're applied while the mods say they're crystal clear and even handed.
Meanwhile you go to a programming language community that is pro AI and people are just talking about programming languages and AI. There's not all these weird witch hunts and purity tests. I'd rather just stay away from all that, I prefer AI slop to that.
Not to mention the coolest people I've met in the past 2 years have all been hacking away at AI tech. Creative, enthusiastic, chill people I'm happy to associate with.
There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case. There's something profoundly disrespectful about forcibly scraping the human corpora without asking for permission first, or considering compensation in anyway, or just setting out that "yeah, we're doing this, and damn the consequences". There's something profoundly disrespectful about then taking this device running on investor money chasing the promise of a value that just can't conceivably be delivered, and employing it to do all the unethical things you could imagine just because you can engineer the "No" out of the model.
Of course the level of moral disengagement that's rife around here generally precludes any recognition of such things, as that might be construed as "harshing the vibe on the innovation, man". So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect until this type of thing hits enough of a critical mass that a societal ethics framework begins to manifest around it and not be ignored.
> So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect
Nope. Because the individual end user still has a choice. A choice to write an email (or whatever) on their own. Be it supported by AI research or whathaveyou, or not.
For me, being quite "dyslectic" - LLM generated sentences have the advantage of being spelled correctly and being grammartically correct.
I rather prefer iterating over LLM text than writing it by myself.
Example: Typing this simple text above by myself was not straight forward.
Agreed that’s a good practice but for some very hardline people even that’s not considered acceptable. It’s very hard to understand what people consider right and wrong so I’ve just stopped listening.
No tolerance policy for 77 of 10k lines, but exceptions made for language with unashamed use of large swaths of LLM code because it’s popular with the author. People just aren’t being consistent at all. Even when they draw hard lines.
Sure. For small changes it would work. However, for larger documents the effort increases a lot. LLM speeds things like "making use of terminolgy" in the document consitent.
Restructuring, combine parapgraphs etc. a lot faster.
In the old days it would take me weeks to get a good document out of door. Now a it is days.
While the absolute number of iterations polishing is higher.
I don’t agree. I have seen many knowledgeable people fall into AI so hard that they are happy that they are not writing code, reading things and using their brains to understand or produce something.
These people know (or knew) what they were talking about so well, and was very passionate about their area as well.
Not knowing something is alright, but surrendering their whole knowledge and passion to a statistical model is not.
It's sad that this has happened, but having knowledge/skill doesn't mean you have wisdom, integrity, discernment, etc... Those are an entirely different plane of understanding, and are what guard against our worst impulses and temptations. Unfortunately there isn't much focus on these things anymore (and, in fact, they're often denigrated and attacked). The result that you've observed is inevitable.
I genuinely worry even more about young people, who are being formed in this anti-thinking, anti-responsibility environment. I'm sure there's some who are strongly resisting it and seeking out genuine knowledge and connections. But surely most are happy to just vibe their way through school and life.
To a degree I can't even blame them. It seems we as a society largely reward those who cheat, steal, and scam, and don't reward integrity and hard work the same way. So "why bother?" I can see it being. It doesn't end well, but none of the anti-intellectualism does.
Maybe I am an outlier, but I never looked to external affirmation as a guide or a goal for my actions.
I have a simple rule: Do whatever makes you sleep in peace with yourself. IOW, My only guiding principles are my own ethics and conscience. I don't care what others are doing. I also don't compete with others. I do what I do and own the consequences of my actions. I might not have a mansion or a fleet of luxury cars, but this is not what makes me happy, anyway.
>I made some ninja edits, so perhaps you didn't see them. But it is entirely possible that both a person and an Ai could produce writing that is both good or bad, useful or misleading.
Theoritically yes. In practice:
- AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise, and who know to edit AI responses and not just paste them.
- I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
> - AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea
Evidently the people you are communicating with are not good writers/thinkers. That's the prerequisite for effectively using AI for writing help. Just as its the prerequisite for using it to produce code. If you can't code, you can't get Ai to produce good code.
So the real issue here, perhaps, is "vibe writing" rather than "Ai assisted writing".
> I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
Agreed. But if people who don't understand the issue are feigning competence via AI then that's a fundamental problem of not just competence across many domains, but also character. As I said in another comment, the policy should be something to the effect of "you're paid for competence, integrity etc. If you don't have that, we don't need you. Take that into account when you use Ai"
> The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner.
While I agree with your overall distinction, I believe the scenario you portray is so unrealistic that you will never encounter it.
Yes; if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years.
The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback, but an AI will at best have some memory/skill/prompt nudge for next time that might have a shallow/localized band-aid effect, but will never stop doing similar mistakes elsewhere.
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
I think your linked chat demonstrates quite well why you are wrong.
The sender's burden is a few lines of text "Write me $FOO, conclude with $BAR".
The recipients burden is an order of magnitude greater, trying to find your conclusion in hundreds of lines of text.
After all, your initial line:
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
Is concise and clearly understandable in 21 words . I understand your point even if I don't agree with it.
The linked chat has 1424 words. Your point is in there somewhere, but now you want the recipient to play "Where's Waldo" to find your point.
(BTW: I can't believe just how effectively you argued against your own point! I have never seen someone do it as effectively as this in all the time I have been reading HN)
There's so much wrong with your comment that I don't know where to start.
You say that my initial line is good, but then that you disagreed with it without saying why/making a counter argument.
As for sending anyone on a where's Waldo adventure, you've fundamentally missed the point, which was completely self-contained in my comment - the postscript link to chatgpt was just, at best, reference material for anyone who cared to look.
As for the fact that chatgpt did a terrible job of it all, that doesn't undermine my point even slightly. Because my point, made very clearly in my post, was that you can't just offload everything to AI. You have to, at the very least, give it context, direction etc. At that point, it can be quite useful. I use it effectively all the time to polish my writing, remove my worst tendencies etc.
If I cared enough, I'd have had it polish this response to make it significantly less aggressive while making the same point. But you don't deserve that, because you didn't put in even the slightest effort to communicate in good faith
OP's point was not that pasting AI output is great. It's rather that it depends on the quality of the output, and that it's on the sender to ensure it is good.
> OP's point was not that pasting AI output is great. It's rather that it depends on the quality of the output, and that it's on the sender to ensure it is good.
And yet, he was unable to do the same (see his link). He demonstrated that he was able to more clearly articulate his point than the LLM he conversed with.
Indeed. Further, that neither human nor AI output is inherently good or bad. The crucial factor is whether a competent, thoughtful human has been involved in one way or another - to guide, review, steer, etc...
Moreover, that a thoughtful human can know their own tendencies and limitations, and have the AI help mitigate them.
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
From my experience, AI tends to sugarcoat and be very verbose in its' responses. Theses two combined mean I need to peel away a lot of text before I can get to the "real" point as a reader.
So while I could use AI to craft a response, and then rework it to be more concise, I wonder if it wouldn't be faster (and more rewarding) to simply type it myself.
This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster. Because if you want 100 people to read it, then every second you waste for the reader is worth you fixing up your message for over a minute.
It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader, then it doesn't matter than not using them is faster to type.
I'm sure we've all gotten that big stream of consciousness email that's a 15 line blob of lower case text, with no punctuation or line breaks.
I don't mean every ephemeral message needs to be perfect, of course. Just, you know, readable.
> This reminds me how I've had to tell people to try to type better and nt us wird abbrvs, even if it means they can type it faster.
You can also teach those people about text expansion software. macOS and iOS have it natively, though if I’m not mistaken it doesn’t work properly in non-native apps such as Slack. Alternatives like Alfred should work anywhere. That way they can keep using their abbreviations to type faster, but others won’t have to deal with them.
> It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader
Can confirm. Not using proper punctuation and capital letters makes reading less fluid. I’ve stopped caring about posts and comments that do that—if you don’t care enough about what you wrote to do the most basic of courtesies (and sometimes even fighting the auto-capitalisation that’s done for you) then why should anyone else expend the effort?
Tell that to ios’ autocorrect that seems to really suck at it lately. I’d like to have an llm that doesn’t screw up and replace actual words with what it probabilistically thought I was saying.
Except that it will get it wrong infrequently but often enough that you should really proof-read the result properly. All of which you end up taking more time than if you wrote proper if the first case.
No, it takes less time. This is the same kind of take as the teacher's "writing a cheat sheet is so much effort that you might as well spend it to learn the material". Lol, no it takes less time, that's why people do it.
Agreed and it’s more than that. Comprehension, understanding, and validation. It also erodes trust in the person pasting the information.
You asked a human for their advice- based on their judgment. If they don’t take the time to validate the answer provided by ai, they literally have no judgment. A transparent proxy has zero value.
They're acting as a meatbot being piloted by the AI. Could call them skroders.
It should be the other way around-- you give the AI instructions and it does stuff. Any time the AI is giving you instructions and you do stuff, that should be a big red flag.
I've been thinking about the Blight and [spoilers!] the skroderiders a lot lately. If you have read Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories, I have also been thinking a lot about "goodlife" when I see some of the things that get posted. If you haven't, you might like them.
I want to use this as internal AI guidelines, I am so tired of people in my workplace simply copying and pasting whatever garbage AI gives them and expecting everyone to just go along with it and try to decipher what crap they were provided.
Tangentially I also hate if someone answers with a voice message.
I can understand that there are situations where you just can't type out the answer and those exceptions are of course fine, but if you post a voice message or god forbid a video message in a group chat you are forcing everyone to take the time and sit through it.
The WhatsApp voice message is very common in Spain. I always find it jarring when I'm there, mostly because I'm not used to it, but also because it seems to defeat the purpose of the messaging app: I can't listen to your voice message on the bus, for instance.
It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each other voice recordings on WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, and I just haven't been to them yet.
It’s funny to me how I judge some cultural aspects as being worse. Of course it’s my own cultural bias, but I think the following things are “bad” for cultures to do:
1) long voice memos over succinctly typed notes
2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc
> 2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc
Also even queueing can have different norms. Here people rush to a newly opened supermarket checkout like their life depended on it. I feel that should be a lot less sociably acceptable than it is, especially for those with overfilled carts that will add huge delays for anyone behind them.
I used to answer this with "I'm not listening to that, not even my parents send me voice messages" but it was called uncivil by some people, so now I just say "I can't listen to that right now" and never listen, eventually ppl send a text message.
Yeah, the perceived friction in a voice message seems to be immense. I sent one voice massage in the past year because I wanted to get a big idea over to someone as I was walking into a meeting, so I recorded a 20-second message and sent it. She ended up responding 9 hours later with "I finally got around to listening to this, thanks!"
The way I handle those, especially with the people who leave me 8 minute long voice notes, is to have WhatsApp transcribe the voice note for me. Or, if that’s not possible, either ignore the voice note or listen to it at 2x speed.
I can't understand why whatsapp does not provide tgat out of the box. Telegram has it on the paid plan, which is nit ideal but at least somewhat out of the box solution.
Same here in Uruguay but only for certain interactions (like contractors). Thankfully there’s a transcription feature that catches 90% of the message generally.
You just gave me strong memories of using voice messages for a couple of months some years ago. In my defence, I had dropped a circular saw blade through the tip of my finger which slowed down my typing for a while. (I did manage to get surprisingly fast as a nine-finger touch typist, sans the left index finger.)
Fortunately my colleagues were very understanding, and I reverted back to text once I could type reasonably well and with minimal pain again.
God forbid...? Our technology has led us to compartmentalize information exchange and relational interaction. We just don't have time for the latter. But in text, tone and context are often lost, and it is also less accessible to type for many people. I'm interested in what it looks like when we normalize the actual friction of being in relationship, not just prioitize the "time savings" to recipients of communication by boiling it down to the information conveyed only by the words.
Nice. This is exactly how I mostly use AI. Doesn't matter if it's code or an e-mail. I have the AI do the tedious work of ... well, uh, "working", and then ideally learn from it and then transform it into my own work, as I would have done it without AI, but just being much faster now. It also establishes a natural threshold of time/work ratio for me that keeps me from using AI for every little thing. Also it feels like I am learning something new with every prompt/response.
yes - this is what people are doing in my workplace, unfortunately. you can write the most concise and effective documentation possible for a feature of some complexity, and people will still be asking their chatbot to make a soundbite out of it. it's infuriating.
I've had a conversation with a person and 2 messages in, I stopped replying. As I realized that they were replying with markdown formatted text and I am sure that wouldn't do that for every other word.
They were putting every question I asked into AI and pasting it in slack
I'm wondering how much data is available in the enterprise admin panel for Claude. If you could somehow tell an employee pasted this text into the AI, that would be useful as grounds for termination.
I'll be surprised if enterprise admin will show this data. Or maybe it will. But the thing is, stupidity is basically encouraged at this point isn't it?
Here are the rest. I wrote these to specifically be principles that can be easily internalized and pointed to for accountability:
2. Own the Output. Everyone is encouraged to use these tools to accelerate the pace of their work and to take the toil out of their daily output. But that doesn’t mean you simply defer to the model and skip your own careful review step. Part of the paradox of these models is that they’re wordy and it can feel exhausting to read through everything they’re writing and confirm its validity. But that’s an enormous part of the job: you’re the human-in-the-loop to make sure what it’s saying is correct, and that you’ve reviewed it before you’ve shared it with the rest of the class. Read all of the words before they reach the rest of your team or a client, and make sure you stand behind having your name attached to them. In situations where a full review isn’t possible for expediency, disclose it directly! “Hey, I haven’t had a chance to review, this is pure Claude, but here’s what it says.” This isn’t a get out of jail free card, but it can be used occasionally when the situation dictates. Most of the time, you need to review and adjust the output before other people see it.
3. Be the expert. Have an opinion. This is a big one. Do not offload your role as expert to the model. The model is an assistant. You need to internalize the work being asked of you, and apply your education, instincts, and specific expertise to form your own opinion. You can use models to work to adversarially challenge things, but part of being an expert is knowing when to discard irrelevant feedback. Use this skill daily. Don’t let it atrophy.
4. Don’t Slop-Bomb. This is an amalgamation of all of the above, but again, don’t just spew large volumes of model slop into comms channels. Bring your own perspective, internalize the problem in front of you. And be judicious about what you share, and how wordy these things are. Put another way: edit for clarity and concision. It’s too easy to generate busy-work-seeming reports and outputs, and that burden shift to everyone else is multiplicative. Use fewer words, distill things into insights (backed with longer form deep dives), but make sure you’re not just making the rest of the team read a bunch of useless pablum. I don’t want to have to make my model read your model’s output to glean what I’m supposed to out of it. Do that for your coworkers and your clients. Think in terms of information hierarchy.
Unless it's your first day on HN (it's not 2008 account), most people use paragraphs and sentences longer than 2-5 words. Something like "You, directly." in the middle of all that has a certain vibe to it.
> Copying and pasting Claude responses... directly shifts the burden of comprehension
Most definitely.
The problem is we live in a world where people try to pass off copy pastes as their own all the time, many even smart enough to remove the em-dashes now. So I don't think that's going away soon. Your first sentence seems human, the rest doesn't match the tone at all.
This is the sharpest point. You genuinely delved into the commenter's prose and found the goblins. It's not just the ground truth–it's a load bearing, belt-and-suspenders approach.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. One of the best frameworks I have encountered, and one I point people to whenever I can, is the AI Fluency framework by Anthropic, Prof. Joseph Feller (University College Cork), and Prof. Rick Dakan (Ringling College):
This framework provides a more abstract way of thinking when working with AI systems. Especially valuable to me is the pattern of the 4 D's: Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence, which I have now internalized whenever I use AI systems. It helps me understand my own and others' (mis)use of AI systems a bit better.
Why write all that when just: we do not use AI in client or intercompany communications?
Like is your insight that copying and pasting something is not understanding it? Do people seriously not known this?
There is no need to Socrates when writing policy docs. Maybe this is why people ignore reading your actual voice messages that you feel a need to also justify this basic request. Sometimes the human voice thinks too highly of itself also.
Because if you think and act as your colleagues are just disposable soldiers that must follow direct, simple orders, then your org will eventually be made of that kind of people.
"That kind of people"? What do you mean? People who communicate clearly, don't over intellecutlize or wank their ego and actually get things done? Why is a soldier bad?
People blindly following orders (aka policies) because they must follow them. A (company) policy should always has well explained rationale behind it, if you want to treat fellow employees like thinking adults.
What? How does "copying and pasting " mean you are not reading and understanding "orders"? Furthermore, why is that required to be stated? If you're treating fellow employees like thinking adults, you don't want to explain everything as if they are children or that they don't know the obvious thing you're parading around as an insight important enough to warrant a reading by everyone.
Well, I think we have fundamentally different opinions. For me a thinking adult should welcome a policy explanation, because it's a way to foster discussion around the policy, even after its deployment.
Good luck with that, I hope you are in a better org that I am in that regard. I wanted to do that, proposed it in a directors' meeting and got push back from directors already using the Slack MCP to post normal conversations on their behalf (90% of time, pure slop).
What you wrote just seems common sense to me, and I'm hopeful it will emerge as such given enough time.
Convincing some of the older generations not to blindly paste LLM output might be a lost cause. I’m sure we’ll be teaching LLM etiquette to Gen Alpha/Beta, if that isn’t already starting to happen in schools.
The problem with AI is deeper than this, though. The anchoring effect[1] is stronger than most people realize. It's hubris to think that you can read AI output and then come up with your own ideas. The human brain simply doesn't work that way. We anchor to the first idea we come across, and it immediately becomes difficult to change our minds.
The effect of this over time is cumulative. Cervantes said (in translation), "Show me who you spend time with, and I'll show you who you are." I realized as a teenager that the books I was reading and people I was listening to were shaping my ideologies in ways that were outside my control. It's prohibitively difficult to pause when presented with every idea and analyze it to see whether it makes sense. If you're cautious you'll catch some ideas and analyze them, but a lot of the time, you won't even consciously recognize that you've been presented with a new idea, and you'll simply integrate it unconsciously. Time passes and it becomes difficult to remember where our ideas came from or why we thought they were true.
This was a problem before AI: if you surrounded yourself with people who thought poorly, you thought poorly. Now with AI, millions of people have let a "thinker" into their lives which has massive information and no wisdom.
Frankly, when I find out someone uses AI in any way, I lose respect for them. The best case scenario is they use it similarly to the post I'm responding to, filtering the ideas they get from AI through their own intelligence. But that doesn't really work==original thought it harder than that. And that's the best case scenario--most AI users don't have anywhere near the discipline for that, and just regurgitate what AI tells them.
Rewording it doesn't help--it's still not your idea, from your experience and logic. And once you use AI at all, it's very hard not to be just rewording.
Yeah look at the rust ai usage policy, if the text was initially generated with ai the structure feels like its ai generated even if you change it up a bit
I think it's already a lost cause. The average person will see a request to not use AI or to "rewrite an AI answer in your own voice" as like asking them to learn to spell instead of using a spell checker.
I hate spell checkers, I disable them and I do manually double-check words that I'm unsure about. But I'm under no illusions that most people are going to see automatic spell-checking as useful and time-saving, and I'm not going to waste my breath trying to convince anyone otherwise.
That's a good formalization of it. I will think you are a bit of a fool if you dont use AI but you guarantee you'll be a fool if you only use AI with no value added by yourself.
If the response of AI is sufficient, why would i retype it in my own words? Just a waste of time. Most of what i have AI generate is based on my words and input anyways. I'll often write a draft note, and then have AI generate multiple formats, e.g., technical wording, marketing wording, management wording. Almost like taking raw content and using AI to rephrase it for specific channels.
Because the AI isn't autonomous, and cannot vet it's own outputs.
If an AI answers a question perfectly, I'll go with it. But if my boss fires me for no longer being needed because of the AI, good luck to him and his new idiot employee.
If your response when someone asks a job-related question is to paste AI, then you're the one telling your boss that AI can do your job.
Asking questions is part of the job. Answering questions is part of the job. Collaborating with other people is the most important part of the job.
Some junior technical folks early in their career might bristle at this: "my job is to write this code I'm writing, and anything else is a distraction", or something along those lines. It's hard to internalize that your job is actually making the company successful, not yourself, and that means making other people successful.
If you can't answer a human question from a colleague, as a human, then the natural conclusion is that you are unable or unwilling to do the job. Like, great, you can write (or generate) code, what about the other 90% of the job?
I see it differently: if you’re not willing to consider how you could be better/faster/more productive with AI, you’re unwilling to adapt to the future, and not flexible enough. You’re going to slow down your employer. Most business text does not benefit from a user spending time on phrasing it, it’s not literature.
> if you’re not willing to consider how you could be better/faster/more productive with AI, you’re unwilling to adapt to the future, and not flexible enough
That's for their manager to judge. You can share your opinion on the matter and let them decide. Until then, collaboration is more important than your personal IC work, and usually more effective than 1 person working heads-down and another struggling.
AI is not a suitable substitute for collaboration – we are discussing the case of sending AI summaries (1 human + 1 LLM + 1 meat proxy), instead of collaboration between 2 humans
As I said the response of AI is very much based on the input and context i give it. It’s not like everyone gets exactly the same answers from AI. Ai is a tool that I control.
Also, if the response of AI is sufficient, what is the added value of you spending more time on it?
Your whole handwritten Principles of AI document is a testament to failed leadership. That’s all it is.
The only reason someone needs to write this is because leadership is not smart enough to solve the problems it showcases, in a way that is respectful to how the employees with years of experience learned their craft.
They have a tried and tested thought pipeline that makes them capable of what you hired them for, and you try to introduce a magic eightball to that and then force them to research that whatever the statement that shows up on the ball is true before they relay it to someone else. It’s unnatural nonsense.
Ingenuity comes from that spark in your brain that happens when you really dig into something because you’re interested in it. A machine will never be capable of that. AI didn’t invent a single thing, it’s simply finding stuff in all the data the labs stole that is already there and humans overlooked.
Now you force people to start working with whatever the magic word generator put out and go from there. They have zero incentive for that, because those thoughts come out of a black box and are not their own.
I find it ethically troublesome you somehow see the need to force behavioral change down the employees’ throats because company leadership is collectively failing to address the core of why people paste AI into everything.
They have nothing but disrespect for the technology, because it makes their job harder and them as a person dumber and less satisfied with their work.
Hire an external company to do interviews with each employee about their use of AI in your company and how the way your company is using those tools annoys them. You’d be surprised what you find out, when people have no repercussions to fear and anonymity.
There is huge resistance if you see it necessary to write a document for the whole company that forces behavioural changes.
Sure, you can hit the dog until it does what you want, but if you do that long enough, you get your head bitten off.
You need to find out why people are doing all these things, and then fix them.
No extra paperwork is needed.
I think you need to get out and see what life is like. This isn't a leadership problem at all, it is human nature. No one does sums anymore, we use calculators. We've outsourced computation. But now many workers outsource thinking and communication, which is hugely problematic. So yes, good companies should have AI usage guidance documents, in fact providing clear expectations might be labelled ... leadership.
Yeah, I am sorry I’m not living in a country where people are treated like animals and have to work three jobs until they collapse in fear of getting murdered by government employees every single day if they have the wrong colour of skin.
If the calculator gave you wrong numbers every third time you use it and you have to calculate yourself anyway, because its results are not to be trusted, it would have been a dead technology.
Weird take. It’s not bad leadership to have policies and there’s not near enough context to go on a rant about failed leadership. Maybe they’re doing fine.
For you there is not enough context, for me it’s sufficient.
Also doing fine for the company doesn’t necessarily mean doing fine for the employees.
Aside from forcing AI down people’s throats and that it annoys me to no end, the main take is you don’t need the policies if you have a company culture where people value each other and have the respect to not treat another human being as an NPC. To create such an environment is the responsibility of leadership.
Instead they put the burden on the employees and tell them please don’t do this or else… that’s dumb. They could just solve the problem.
So if it’s not a leadership failure, which in my opinion there are strong indicators it is, they have a terrible culture at that company.
> Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself.
Seriously so many people need this tattooed on their forehead so they’re reminded when they look in the mirror. I am so sick of it.
The only thing worse is people who literally just copy and paste a link to their ChatGPT session. Wild behavior.
I was having a Slack convo with a dev on another team a month ago as I had a question about that system's support for OTEL, and it became clear really quick that I was just having a convo with an LLM proxied through this person.
It was wild, as it had never even occurred to me to just copy/paste out of an LLM while having a convo with someone else.
What is worse is that they don't even bother to provide the correct context to the model, or even use the same model to answer your questions. So, for example, they submit a PR using an LLM, and when you ask them to justify an engineering decision, another LLM responds with a completely nonsensical reply because it doesn't have the same context as the first one.
Is the problem that the response sounds like AI? Or the response is incorrect? Or too verbose? Or a mix of all three or something else?
What if the response was perfect and sounded exactly like your colleague. Would you care if it was AI generated then?
I think there could be a world where a colleague could just ask its (finely tuned) AI tool of choice to respond for it and colleagues would hardly notice as the output would be so good!
I can’t help but think that that world would be so much more productive as we would spend less time in slack answering messages and more time doing more important work.
However there are two very important things that need to be in place for this to happen:
- colleagues have to have their AI tool know all of the their context on their projects….etc and and in-depth understanding of how they write
- colleagues must review (and tweak if necessary) the output
My guess is that the problems you are seeing is that your colleagues are failing on one or both of these points
If all your colleague does is generate a “response” in a specific writing style based on some context, there’s no reason to talk to them at all. The good ones have some novel human insight that can’t be approximated by a slop generator.
And if you really want to record all your work and project context somewhere, just let people ... look at that directly? Or summarize and query it with their own LLM if they want to?
yes, its all ai writing. A bunch of the metaphors here dont make sense.
"read it all, yes even the bullets. especially the bullets"
if you read one thing from a large wall of text, its gonna be the bullet points, right? thats a big part of what they're for?
"It is the conversational equivalent of forwarding the email."
this is a terrible metaphor. it seems to rely on the idea you would be mad if you sent an email to someone and they forwarded to someone else? but thats useful, theyre literally sending it to someone who is presumably better placed to help you, or raising it to someone more important because they think what youre saying is important
Deeply ironic that it sure looks like taking the original post, pasting it to an AI with the message "make this angrier" and then simply copy-pasting the output back to the website. In direct violation of their own (supposed) principles.
And the result isn't even very angry at all. It's like mildly peeved internal company communication (also in direct violation of "don't send this to your manager")
I actually wrote it all myself... The original version was the angrier one only, but people complained that it was too angry, so I tried to smooth it out with another version people could use.
Yeah looking at the repo it's clear the entire thing is sloppified. I don't know what point the creator is trying to make but sincerity on being human isn't it.
This was actually a small rant from that same day, a colleague had pasted a list of 20 bulletpoints, all of which had some weird stuff in it but overall they were right. This is why I added "Especially the bullets", English is not my main language so I tried to translate myself, but vocabulary sometimes is lacking, sorry about that
Please give one example of a long-form verifiable non-adversarial pangram false positive (e.g., something written before 2022 that gives a result other than 100% human.)
Yeah it seems pretty LLM to me. Even the extra emphasis on stuff via bold/highlights is there. Kinda whack. But it’s total HN bait because the point in general is relatable and true. And there are indeed some fun comments in here.
I actually suspected it from the title, so I didn’t even open TFA.
The advice in the title is a cop-out of someone who thinks writing with AI is fine actually, as long as you just don‘t paste the whole thing. In other words, it sounds like someone who thinks they can outsmart AI-writing by using AI differently.
I was open to the fact that this might be a clickbait (so I read the comments first) but from this post, it looks like my intuition was right.
To clarify, I am a firm believer you should not use AI for any part of your writing, no AI-drafts, no AI-skeletons, no AI-research, no AI-nothing. AI pollutes your writing, and just makes it bad however you use it.
A simpler rule of thumb (which I abide to) is just don‘t use AI at all. It is bad for your brain, and highly addictive, and also bad for society and the environment. When you use AI you are only putting bad stuff out in the world and supporting te AI-companies, who are profiting off of all this damage they are causing.
Pasting a blurb of AI is sometimes a form of "Let Me Google That For You" LMGTFY. If someone asks me a dumb question, I will often resort to giving them an AI answer, that they could have easily looked up themselves.
Agree that it isn’t nice to just copy & paste, but the assumption that your AI generated answers will the same of someone’s else is wrong. Everyone using AI for a while built a different set of preferences, memories and context in general which influence the answers.
Would be interesting if someone said “I spent $2.50 using llm-council with the three top SOTA models and think this reply makes sense: {paste}”
(But better “not sure, though after spending a few bucks on model APIs, perhaps {human-written analysis} is in the right direction”)
Also like you, I did think on the angry version “they have the same AI you do” isn’t likely to be right in the consumer space since their AI is ChatGPT (free version?!) and yours is Claude or something.
Even with the same model results are different. I work in a startup where they went bonks with AI ~1 year ago. Every employee got a Claude account that I don’t even know what tier is (we just have what feels like unlimited tokens), they implemented infamous AI usage leaderboards, people were getting “you’re not using AI enough” feedback and all of that…
Over time, it was impressive to see how much the output of the same prompt would differ between us, and it seems to be heavily influenced by the role of the user. I.e. answers coming from the agent of a Data Engineer, a Backend Engineer and a Domain Researcher would not be the same at all. Some of us use harnessing tools, some not, but regardless it we saw differences.
So, for example, when a backend engineer would send a question to a data engineer, there was *some* added value even when it was a lazy copy & paste.
You're giving too much credit to people. The folks who run an LLM council aren't the ones blindly copy pasting things.
There's responsible AI use (which I think you - and I, and many people here) do, and the "I don't care, I've outsourced my brain to OpenAI" type of people.
Similar thoughts here. My gut tells me "if I wanted AI responses I would just ask AI", but in truth LLMs are not like Google Search. LLMs are more like a slot machine where you put your prompt in and out comes a combination of insights that are personalized to the inputs.
This does feel like responding to rudeness with more rudeness. My personal guess would be that people who do this (pasting AI responses) know what they are doing, not genuinely trying to help. It's the equivalent of sending LMGTFY.
I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions.
Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.
Otherwise each of these coaxing sessions is something I have to keep in my head until resolved, which is a load in and off itself.
And even better - I can point Claude to that message and gives me a summary. You might say this is silly because we are paying the LLM tax, but knowing what to share, and then verifying against my situation are two different things.
Sometimes they have checked the wrong thing, sometimes they need guidance, sometimes I need to investigate before I can answer. A full LLM message with context is like “summary of their working context that I can resume on my end” so I don’t waste cycles asking or rechecking etc.
And it is still possible to be a learning experience for both of us since the initial message is the start, we can then talk to each other like humans, both much more in sync than before…
It is kinda ironic but I think it does push things in a better direction. Would I have loved it if the message was human, direct and to the point - obviously, but we are all busy, we got shit to do, and this is a useful “resume” mechanic
> sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me
I think that's the key. Generally people would rather not receive slop because the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication.
In your example, the more context the better. I think there's an interesting nuance there.
> the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication.
That's an interesting thought. The message can have metadata that says the sender's spent 1/5/10/60/120 minutes or some other metric of how much thinking over the communication happened. Just need a way to monitor people's thoughts and digitize them to make that happen.
1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter
2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good proxy for my opinions on this is that I think https://nohello.net/ is a crutch for undersocialised (or overworked/near-burnout OR undiagnosed autistic) engineers & should not be normalised. The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room & saying "hello", then leaving & not being around when someone eventually replies: in that context nohello is pragmatic, but taking it beyond that to modern high-frequency realtime chat is an antisocial overstep. Leading with the entire context of your query may have some practical benefits but they're honestly overstated in exchange for killing natural social tendencies towards human dialogue. Similarly, a non-technical user giving you zero info about a problem is an opportunity for conversation & mutual education. It's relationship-building & helps build a foundation for further interactions with this person. It was never a problem in the first place; "solving" it is just another milestone on the road toward de-socialising humanity.
You are right - and this has been the case for me before, but unfortunately human resource constraints are not something most orgs optimise for, including my current one.
I would love to spend more time and talk to the people with their issues so we can come to a common understanding… but neither have the capacity for this, and now things are getting worse I think.
Maybe someday agents are good enough that we just discuss direction and implementation details, and every “developer” becomes more of an executive in a company, free to chat about more than just work, focusing on building human relationships and leaving “the tech stuff” to their agent teams…
And old geezers like us who actually know how to write ourself out of a for loop would be the premium - wizards holding forgotten knowledge, incomprehensible to mere uninitiated mortals. I wonder what distinctive dress and hair styles will we develop :-D
I've generally seen it used in Slack, which can be sync/async depending on context, but most commonly sync. I've never seen it used in online forums or e.g. email so not really sure what you're getting at with your comment.
Either way it was intended as an analogy - being annoyed that a nontechnical user isn't given you everything up front (because they don't know how) is essentially just being annoyed with having to talk to somebody. The solution to that isn't something the nontechnical user should be burdened with.
> The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room
For me, the origin of this sentiment is the culture for certain departments at $LARGE_CORP I used to work for. People would ping me on the internal instant messaging tool to ask for help with things. Sometimes they'd take the nohello approach and just fold everything together in a single message: "Hello, hope you are having a nice day. I'm trying to do X, and I see Y instead of Z. What am I doing wrong?"
And sometimes, they... don't.
"Hello." <wait>
"How are you today?" <wait>
A conversation that could have been done in 30 seconds drags on for many minutes, and the message trickle feeds just fast enough that I can't do anything of any complexity in between. It's like pulling teeth. It's a complete waste of their time and utterly disrepectful of mine.
They are there to ask a question. I know they are there to ask a question. They know they are there to ask a question. I'm happy to answer the question, when they finally get around to asking it. Just ask the bloody question, ffs.
If you're absolving the other person from any understanding of the issue and the alternative is "stuff broken" then yes what you say makes sense. But that's an incredibly low bar and one would have to say - that's not a colleague, that's an end user type relationship.
> a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y”
These people had below than average communication skills (or at least they were putting below than average effort communicating with you), so LLMs improved their output.
However, the society kinda expects people can and Should improve themselves over time. The issue is that LLMs improved their output, but not necessarily them.
And did the LLM really improve their output? They gave similar output to the LLM, so if it doesn't have a harness with tools connected to fill in the blank, it might be hallucinating details. Might not even count as a hallucination as it tries to fill in the blank with the closest looking relevant information (previous chat, maybe it has access to teams/emails and scans that for anything similar, and so on).
I've sees some chat logs where I completely empathized with the AI trying to make sense of the information it was being drip fed. Always incomplete, often incorrect.
If everyone thinks their question will get closed, it might as well be reality because no one is going to ask and they are going to go elsewhere. Which is exactly what happened.
The difference with AI is that the agent becomes the first level of triage. It (many times) asks the easy initial questions (did you turn it off and on again?) so I don't have to. Doesn't always work like this, but often enough.
> I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions.
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.
Yes, but the kind of engineer that used to say "X is broken" will send you some slop with missing context and Claude will try to apply general solutions from its training data rather than from the specific context.
As somebody on the Ops side that usually helps devs fixing things here and there, in those cases I'd rather them say "X is broken" and then I ask the question to Claude with all the context I have.
Probably the best solution currently is a shared skill with at least some curated context.
The irony is that this is the exact opposite of the "let me google that for you" meme of the previous decade. If you have a question that could've been answered by AI, maybe you should've used AI in the first place.
I have the totally opposite sentiment from the previous LMGTFY meme. It was easier before to ask humans rather than do some research using Google, that's not true anymore with LLMs.
Now if I ask a question to humans I'm looking for their personal opinions drawn from their personal experience, be it ticket size for a feature on a legacy codebase, a design decision or a product strategy decision.
I agree that if someone asks you something, you should at least write "I asked AI and it said..." rather than pretending the AI response was your own. If you ask me something and my first response is to ask AI, it's probably because I only know enough on the subject to ask AI, and don't know much more beyond that, which would be the real answer.
I agree. Poor communication is one of the most expensive and frustrating things about life and society and business and development. LLMs are helping people better structure their thoughts and that's fantastic. Sure, it can feel impersonal, but once you get past that, I think the benefits far outweigh the costs.
The exceptions are spam, advertising, and propaganda. Because the barrier to writing now is effectively zero, there is no cost to writing unlimited tripe. So LLMs work well if the parties know each other is real. However I think it poses a major threat to the existing internet as it stands.
My take is that the friction is the point, and I'd much rather have a colleague communicate poorly to me than have them give the LLM response. The reason being I view my relationships at work as investments, and working together (communicating) helps build that investment through learning and feedback.
If someone says "x broken" and that's a bad response it becomes a learning opportunitity, something I can invest in. When I communicate poorly, I hope my colleagues help me understand why and give me pointers to improve.
Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but I've had the best growth with co-workers when actually engaging at a meta level and trying to help (and be helped) communicate better.
Using AI shifts that burden and entirely demoralizes any investment motivation I have. It's a view that communication is transactional rather than collaborative (we're all on the same team).
I want my team to work better, and be better, and if people offload their comms to an external system to generate I've lost that opportunity for growth.
I added that because people started attacking me since it was a bit angrier at first (the angry version was the only one) and they didn't want to send to colleagues or anyone else, just close friends so they asked me to add a smoother version and to say it's a joke
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 16.0 ms ] threadAlmost certainly written by AI
It also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"
And in my experience, us Brits, and USA folk, we tend to be quite understanding of broken English
Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)
As such, isn't the question really about
1) whether it was communicated clearly/effectively 2) whether it should have been communicated to others at all (rather than something that you just dealt with yourself)
I'm not defending AI over usage, but the policy doesn't seem to be addressing what it ought to be
And because most ai's are not concise we blame ai's for faults we don't like in humans either: being longwinding
In fact, my tendency is to be far too long-winded, with lots of perhaps-unnecessary parantheticals etc. Ai is often shockingly useful at reining me in and focusing on the issue at hand, as well as removing my worst tendencies towards meanness etc...
Im a good writer, when I want to be. But having Ai review, edit, write drafts etc undoubtedly makes me a better writer/communicator. But only because I'm actively thinking about it all, rather than just saying "respond to this" and then providing copy pasta.
No. People earn a reputation over time. An AI does not. If you copy paste an AI response verbatim, i need to read everything in your message with a big grain of salt. Imagine doing this all the time as a reader? Exhausting and a waste of others time. If i want to read raw AI output i’ll ask the AI directly, thanks.
If you write something in your own words, or at least synthesize an AI response before sharing it with me, then i know i’m reading something that has at least passed the smell test.
It’s the difference between reviewing a pull request from an intern and a principal software engineer.
Though, I think such a writing partner can only really be useful if you know how to write yourself, which also requires knowing how to think (because writing is really just thinking).
So, again, in the end all that really matters is whether you are effectively communicating what needs to be communicated, Ai-assisted or not. It's quite apparent to other thinking people when someone is not doing that, and that hurts their reputation, undermines trust and ultimately leads to losing your job, connections etc...
So, again, the policy really should just be something to the effect of "you're being paid to help us be effective and correct. If you can't do that, we don't need you. Take that into consideration with regards to the tools that you use.". That's obviously not an adequate policy - Ai could surely be helpful in polishing it! But it most definitely couldn't get to the root of the matter on its own.
There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email.
You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to articulate what the LLM found in your own words. If you don't you have just offloaded all the work to someone else: someone else will have to check, verify, investigate what could very well be an hallucination (bad context, random bit flips, whatever the cause doesn't matter). Your effective contribution to the discussion will be negative.
Asking it to identify problems such as spelling, grammar, or general clarity is fine.
If you tell it to "polish" many commercial LLMs will absolutely slopify your text with characteristic AI catch phrases and non-sequiturs. Beware.
Not the same burden.
The value of the person is digesting and giving the materially important stuff in the answer (including their expertise and opinion). Not the AI diarrhea.
You can also direct the Ai to write about specific points and, again, it may write somehing good or bad. I provided a link to a chat I had with chatgpt about this very conversation and it shows everything I was saying.
The fundamental issue is whether people are taking responsibility to communicate what needs to be communicated, in an effective manner. Whether the final words were authored by Ai or not is largely irrelevant.
There's something profoundly disrespectful about it towards the receiver.
Far better, and frankly perfectly acceptable, to say or have it implied or concluded, that Ai helped with the writing in some way. Still, if you're paying attention, it often shouldnt really be all that detectable because you should be aware of AI's smells and you can edit them away. Though, sometimes I'll leave it as obvious that Ai produced something I shared - eg making a well formatted github issue or whatever. But I'll also make sure to convey that a thinking human was behind it, vetted it etc
I agree with everything here, and do the same, but in my experience people will still interpret doing this as “profoundly disrespectful towards the receivers”. The sibling to your comment seems to express that sentiment:
“There's something profoundly disrespectful about feeding snippets produced by human authors en masse into a machine learning algorithm to create a predictive text generator to be applied as labor replacement, regardless of accuracy or appropriateness to the context or use case.”
Still, the reality is that these people exist and we're going to have to interact with them, sometimes even try to win their favour. So, the onus is on us to not trigger their irrational anti-ai hate.
I had such an experience last week, and in hindsight I probably should have written the issue differently. I used Ai there primarily to help me be more thorough and have the whole thing be better-formatted than I would have otherwise done myself (ain't no one got time for markdown tables etc).
I should have made it less thorough and more plainly formatted, because it did, admittedly, scream AI. That undermined an otherwise thoughtful and important issue. Though, the people who actually mattered didn't take exception and replied thoughtfully - perhaps partly because I had already gained some degree of trust with them, via thoughtful, useful issues and PRs.
In the end, Ai is a magical tool that can be enormously helpful with almost anything. But we have to use it consciously, like anything.
I'm at the point where I don't even want to interact with that mentality. I get it, as I too don't like to see slop so there's got to be a quality bar and standards. But when the standard is set to zero tolerance, the whole vibe of the community plummets as the example I pasted shows.
Originally I was for the policy, as there was a lot of low quality content.
But now people are finding their way around the tools and they have gotten a lot better, none of that can be appreciated. Instead, people post a project, they get hissed at, and banned. It can cause a lot of hurt feelings, the rules are fuzzy and don't match how they're applied while the mods say they're crystal clear and even handed.
Meanwhile you go to a programming language community that is pro AI and people are just talking about programming languages and AI. There's not all these weird witch hunts and purity tests. I'd rather just stay away from all that, I prefer AI slop to that.
Not to mention the coolest people I've met in the past 2 years have all been hacking away at AI tech. Creative, enthusiastic, chill people I'm happy to associate with.
Of course the level of moral disengagement that's rife around here generally precludes any recognition of such things, as that might be construed as "harshing the vibe on the innovation, man". So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect until this type of thing hits enough of a critical mass that a societal ethics framework begins to manifest around it and not be ignored.
Nope. Because the individual end user still has a choice. A choice to write an email (or whatever) on their own. Be it supported by AI research or whathaveyou, or not.
Also people are weirdly hypocritical about it. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/s/svUzbNy2oj
No tolerance policy for 77 of 10k lines, but exceptions made for language with unashamed use of large swaths of LLM code because it’s popular with the author. People just aren’t being consistent at all. Even when they draw hard lines.
In the old days it would take me weeks to get a good document out of door. Now a it is days. While the absolute number of iterations polishing is higher.
I don’t expect the other person to copy my response to the same chat and paste the AI response back even without reading it.
Don’t be a meat proxy.
If someone is feigning competence, that's the fundamental problem, not AI
These people know (or knew) what they were talking about so well, and was very passionate about their area as well.
Not knowing something is alright, but surrendering their whole knowledge and passion to a statistical model is not.
Now they are almost meat proxies, which is sad.
I genuinely worry even more about young people, who are being formed in this anti-thinking, anti-responsibility environment. I'm sure there's some who are strongly resisting it and seeking out genuine knowledge and connections. But surely most are happy to just vibe their way through school and life.
I have a simple rule: Do whatever makes you sleep in peace with yourself. IOW, My only guiding principles are my own ethics and conscience. I don't care what others are doing. I also don't compete with others. I do what I do and own the consequences of my actions. I might not have a mansion or a fleet of luxury cars, but this is not what makes me happy, anyway.
That's it in a nutshell. I think I need this up on my wall.
Theoritically yes. In practice:
- AI responses I get are walls of written diarrhea (even when they're relevant and take our particular context into account). The one's that don't are from people who write well based on their expertise, and who know to edit AI responses and not just paste them.
- I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
Evidently the people you are communicating with are not good writers/thinkers. That's the prerequisite for effectively using AI for writing help. Just as its the prerequisite for using it to produce code. If you can't code, you can't get Ai to produce good code.
So the real issue here, perhaps, is "vibe writing" rather than "Ai assisted writing".
> I'd rather get the bad/misleading/not-useful response from the person, rather that the good one they made via AI. This way I know they don't know what they're doing, are bad communicators, depend purely on the AI, and thus their position can be eliminated or replaced by someone cheaper merely relaying to/from the AI.
Agreed. But if people who don't understand the issue are feigning competence via AI then that's a fundamental problem of not just competence across many domains, but also character. As I said in another comment, the policy should be something to the effect of "you're paid for competence, integrity etc. If you don't have that, we don't need you. Take that into account when you use Ai"
While I agree with your overall distinction, I believe the scenario you portray is so unrealistic that you will never encounter it.
Yes; if I could wrangle Claude into communicating exactly as I would have, the practical difference is of course not observable. But that's never happened, and I've had an enterprise license at work for years.
The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback, but an AI will at best have some memory/skill/prompt nudge for next time that might have a shallow/localized band-aid effect, but will never stop doing similar mistakes elsewhere.
I think your linked chat demonstrates quite well why you are wrong.
The sender's burden is a few lines of text "Write me $FOO, conclude with $BAR".
The recipients burden is an order of magnitude greater, trying to find your conclusion in hundreds of lines of text.
After all, your initial line:
> But isn't that "burden" on others always going to be there, whether you or AI wrote it? That's what communicating is...
Is concise and clearly understandable in 21 words . I understand your point even if I don't agree with it.
The linked chat has 1424 words. Your point is in there somewhere, but now you want the recipient to play "Where's Waldo" to find your point.
(BTW: I can't believe just how effectively you argued against your own point! I have never seen someone do it as effectively as this in all the time I have been reading HN)
You say that my initial line is good, but then that you disagreed with it without saying why/making a counter argument.
As for sending anyone on a where's Waldo adventure, you've fundamentally missed the point, which was completely self-contained in my comment - the postscript link to chatgpt was just, at best, reference material for anyone who cared to look.
As for the fact that chatgpt did a terrible job of it all, that doesn't undermine my point even slightly. Because my point, made very clearly in my post, was that you can't just offload everything to AI. You have to, at the very least, give it context, direction etc. At that point, it can be quite useful. I use it effectively all the time to polish my writing, remove my worst tendencies etc.
If I cared enough, I'd have had it polish this response to make it significantly less aggressive while making the same point. But you don't deserve that, because you didn't put in even the slightest effort to communicate in good faith
And yet, he was unable to do the same (see his link). He demonstrated that he was able to more clearly articulate his point than the LLM he conversed with.
Moreover, that a thoughtful human can know their own tendencies and limitations, and have the AI help mitigate them.
From my experience, AI tends to sugarcoat and be very verbose in its' responses. Theses two combined mean I need to peel away a lot of text before I can get to the "real" point as a reader.
So while I could use AI to craft a response, and then rework it to be more concise, I wonder if it wouldn't be faster (and more rewarding) to simply type it myself.
And, yes, it would be foolish and inefficient to try to get Ai to write absolutely everything. But it can certainly be helpful in many ways.
What is needed is discernment.
It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader, then it doesn't matter than not using them is faster to type.
I'm sure we've all gotten that big stream of consciousness email that's a 15 line blob of lower case text, with no punctuation or line breaks.
I don't mean every ephemeral message needs to be perfect, of course. Just, you know, readable.
You can also teach those people about text expansion software. macOS and iOS have it natively, though if I’m not mistaken it doesn’t work properly in non-native apps such as Slack. Alternatives like Alfred should work anywhere. That way they can keep using their abbreviations to type faster, but others won’t have to deal with them.
> It's very likely that proper punctuation and capital letters help the reader
Can confirm. Not using proper punctuation and capital letters makes reading less fluid. I’ve stopped caring about posts and comments that do that—if you don’t care enough about what you wrote to do the most basic of courtesies (and sometimes even fighting the auto-capitalisation that’s done for you) then why should anyone else expend the effort?
You asked a human for their advice- based on their judgment. If they don’t take the time to validate the answer provided by ai, they literally have no judgment. A transparent proxy has zero value.
It should be the other way around-- you give the AI instructions and it does stuff. Any time the AI is giving you instructions and you do stuff, that should be a big red flag.
https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
I can understand that there are situations where you just can't type out the answer and those exceptions are of course fine, but if you post a voice message or god forbid a video message in a group chat you are forcing everyone to take the time and sit through it.
Too bad that’s not more universal.
It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each other voice recordings on WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, and I just haven't been to them yet.
1) long voice memos over succinctly typed notes
2) not forming lines/queues and just mobbing the train/shop/etc
3) habitually late or not on time
Also even queueing can have different norms. Here people rush to a newly opened supermarket checkout like their life depended on it. I feel that should be a lot less sociably acceptable than it is, especially for those with overfilled carts that will add huge delays for anyone behind them.
Won't be doing that again!
Fortunately my colleagues were very understanding, and I reverted back to text once I could type reasonably well and with minimal pain again.
Also, circular sawblades are terrifying.
They were putting every question I asked into AI and pasting it in slack
Very sad
2. Own the Output. Everyone is encouraged to use these tools to accelerate the pace of their work and to take the toil out of their daily output. But that doesn’t mean you simply defer to the model and skip your own careful review step. Part of the paradox of these models is that they’re wordy and it can feel exhausting to read through everything they’re writing and confirm its validity. But that’s an enormous part of the job: you’re the human-in-the-loop to make sure what it’s saying is correct, and that you’ve reviewed it before you’ve shared it with the rest of the class. Read all of the words before they reach the rest of your team or a client, and make sure you stand behind having your name attached to them. In situations where a full review isn’t possible for expediency, disclose it directly! “Hey, I haven’t had a chance to review, this is pure Claude, but here’s what it says.” This isn’t a get out of jail free card, but it can be used occasionally when the situation dictates. Most of the time, you need to review and adjust the output before other people see it.
3. Be the expert. Have an opinion. This is a big one. Do not offload your role as expert to the model. The model is an assistant. You need to internalize the work being asked of you, and apply your education, instincts, and specific expertise to form your own opinion. You can use models to work to adversarially challenge things, but part of being an expert is knowing when to discard irrelevant feedback. Use this skill daily. Don’t let it atrophy.
4. Don’t Slop-Bomb. This is an amalgamation of all of the above, but again, don’t just spew large volumes of model slop into comms channels. Bring your own perspective, internalize the problem in front of you. And be judicious about what you share, and how wordy these things are. Put another way: edit for clarity and concision. It’s too easy to generate busy-work-seeming reports and outputs, and that burden shift to everyone else is multiplicative. Use fewer words, distill things into insights (backed with longer form deep dives), but make sure you’re not just making the rest of the team read a bunch of useless pablum. I don’t want to have to make my model read your model’s output to glean what I’m supposed to out of it. Do that for your coworkers and your clients. Think in terms of information hierarchy.
For purposes of training the AI (enablement firm)?
> Write as yourself.
Unless it's your first day on HN (it's not 2008 account), most people use paragraphs and sentences longer than 2-5 words. Something like "You, directly." in the middle of all that has a certain vibe to it.
> Copying and pasting Claude responses... directly shifts the burden of comprehension
Most definitely.
The problem is we live in a world where people try to pass off copy pastes as their own all the time, many even smart enough to remove the em-dashes now. So I don't think that's going away soon. Your first sentence seems human, the rest doesn't match the tone at all.
Isn't that the very thing you just claimed people don't do?
For simple, impactful sentences, I often use short ones. They work better.
Perhaps that speaks more to your education and that of "most poeple on hn"
https://www.anthropic.com/learn/claude-for-you
This framework provides a more abstract way of thinking when working with AI systems. Especially valuable to me is the pattern of the 4 D's: Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence, which I have now internalized whenever I use AI systems. It helps me understand my own and others' (mis)use of AI systems a bit better.
Like is your insight that copying and pasting something is not understanding it? Do people seriously not known this?
There is no need to Socrates when writing policy docs. Maybe this is why people ignore reading your actual voice messages that you feel a need to also justify this basic request. Sometimes the human voice thinks too highly of itself also.
And maybe GP doesn't want that.
What you wrote just seems common sense to me, and I'm hopeful it will emerge as such given enough time.
The effect of this over time is cumulative. Cervantes said (in translation), "Show me who you spend time with, and I'll show you who you are." I realized as a teenager that the books I was reading and people I was listening to were shaping my ideologies in ways that were outside my control. It's prohibitively difficult to pause when presented with every idea and analyze it to see whether it makes sense. If you're cautious you'll catch some ideas and analyze them, but a lot of the time, you won't even consciously recognize that you've been presented with a new idea, and you'll simply integrate it unconsciously. Time passes and it becomes difficult to remember where our ideas came from or why we thought they were true.
This was a problem before AI: if you surrounded yourself with people who thought poorly, you thought poorly. Now with AI, millions of people have let a "thinker" into their lives which has massive information and no wisdom.
Frankly, when I find out someone uses AI in any way, I lose respect for them. The best case scenario is they use it similarly to the post I'm responding to, filtering the ideas they get from AI through their own intelligence. But that doesn't really work==original thought it harder than that. And that's the best case scenario--most AI users don't have anywhere near the discipline for that, and just regurgitate what AI tells them.
Rewording it doesn't help--it's still not your idea, from your experience and logic. And once you use AI at all, it's very hard not to be just rewording.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect
I hate spell checkers, I disable them and I do manually double-check words that I'm unsure about. But I'm under no illusions that most people are going to see automatic spell-checking as useful and time-saving, and I'm not going to waste my breath trying to convince anyone otherwise.
Where they disagree is if you add value on the knowledge that makes the prompt possible or add value in rewriting AI to pretend you wrote it.
If an AI answers a question perfectly, I'll go with it. But if my boss fires me for no longer being needed because of the AI, good luck to him and his new idiot employee.
Asking questions is part of the job. Answering questions is part of the job. Collaborating with other people is the most important part of the job.
Some junior technical folks early in their career might bristle at this: "my job is to write this code I'm writing, and anything else is a distraction", or something along those lines. It's hard to internalize that your job is actually making the company successful, not yourself, and that means making other people successful.
If you can't answer a human question from a colleague, as a human, then the natural conclusion is that you are unable or unwilling to do the job. Like, great, you can write (or generate) code, what about the other 90% of the job?
That's for their manager to judge. You can share your opinion on the matter and let them decide. Until then, collaboration is more important than your personal IC work, and usually more effective than 1 person working heads-down and another struggling.
Also, if the response of AI is sufficient, what is the added value of you spending more time on it?
The only reason someone needs to write this is because leadership is not smart enough to solve the problems it showcases, in a way that is respectful to how the employees with years of experience learned their craft.
They have a tried and tested thought pipeline that makes them capable of what you hired them for, and you try to introduce a magic eightball to that and then force them to research that whatever the statement that shows up on the ball is true before they relay it to someone else. It’s unnatural nonsense.
Ingenuity comes from that spark in your brain that happens when you really dig into something because you’re interested in it. A machine will never be capable of that. AI didn’t invent a single thing, it’s simply finding stuff in all the data the labs stole that is already there and humans overlooked.
Now you force people to start working with whatever the magic word generator put out and go from there. They have zero incentive for that, because those thoughts come out of a black box and are not their own.
I find it ethically troublesome you somehow see the need to force behavioral change down the employees’ throats because company leadership is collectively failing to address the core of why people paste AI into everything.
They have nothing but disrespect for the technology, because it makes their job harder and them as a person dumber and less satisfied with their work.
Hire an external company to do interviews with each employee about their use of AI in your company and how the way your company is using those tools annoys them. You’d be surprised what you find out, when people have no repercussions to fear and anonymity.
There is huge resistance if you see it necessary to write a document for the whole company that forces behavioural changes.
Sure, you can hit the dog until it does what you want, but if you do that long enough, you get your head bitten off.
You need to find out why people are doing all these things, and then fix them. No extra paperwork is needed.
https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-says-slavery-being-taug...
Yeah, I am sorry I’m not living in a country where people are treated like animals and have to work three jobs until they collapse in fear of getting murdered by government employees every single day if they have the wrong colour of skin.
If the calculator gave you wrong numbers every third time you use it and you have to calculate yourself anyway, because its results are not to be trusted, it would have been a dead technology.
Aside from forcing AI down people’s throats and that it annoys me to no end, the main take is you don’t need the policies if you have a company culture where people value each other and have the respect to not treat another human being as an NPC. To create such an environment is the responsibility of leadership.
Instead they put the burden on the employees and tell them please don’t do this or else… that’s dumb. They could just solve the problem.
So if it’s not a leadership failure, which in my opinion there are strong indicators it is, they have a terrible culture at that company.
Seriously so many people need this tattooed on their forehead so they’re reminded when they look in the mirror. I am so sick of it.
The only thing worse is people who literally just copy and paste a link to their ChatGPT session. Wild behavior.
It was wild, as it had never even occurred to me to just copy/paste out of an LLM while having a convo with someone else.
What is worse is that they don't even bother to provide the correct context to the model, or even use the same model to answer your questions. So, for example, they submit a PR using an LLM, and when you ask them to justify an engineering decision, another LLM responds with a completely nonsensical reply because it doesn't have the same context as the first one.
What if the response was perfect and sounded exactly like your colleague. Would you care if it was AI generated then?
I think there could be a world where a colleague could just ask its (finely tuned) AI tool of choice to respond for it and colleagues would hardly notice as the output would be so good!
I can’t help but think that that world would be so much more productive as we would spend less time in slack answering messages and more time doing more important work.
However there are two very important things that need to be in place for this to happen: - colleagues have to have their AI tool know all of the their context on their projects….etc and and in-depth understanding of how they write - colleagues must review (and tweak if necessary) the output
My guess is that the problems you are seeing is that your colleagues are failing on one or both of these points
And if you really want to record all your work and project context somewhere, just let people ... look at that directly? Or summarize and query it with their own LLM if they want to?
"read it all, yes even the bullets. especially the bullets"
if you read one thing from a large wall of text, its gonna be the bullet points, right? thats a big part of what they're for?
"It is the conversational equivalent of forwarding the email."
this is a terrible metaphor. it seems to rely on the idea you would be mad if you sent an email to someone and they forwarded to someone else? but thats useful, theyre literally sending it to someone who is presumably better placed to help you, or raising it to someone more important because they think what youre saying is important
And the result isn't even very angry at all. It's like mildly peeved internal company communication (also in direct violation of "don't send this to your manager")
In the end everyone accusing everyone of being AI.
DS9 Garak "especially the lies" reference maybe?
Hypocritical to say the least, given the message.
ZeroGPT says 21.5% generated.
The advice in the title is a cop-out of someone who thinks writing with AI is fine actually, as long as you just don‘t paste the whole thing. In other words, it sounds like someone who thinks they can outsmart AI-writing by using AI differently.
I was open to the fact that this might be a clickbait (so I read the comments first) but from this post, it looks like my intuition was right.
To clarify, I am a firm believer you should not use AI for any part of your writing, no AI-drafts, no AI-skeletons, no AI-research, no AI-nothing. AI pollutes your writing, and just makes it bad however you use it.
A simpler rule of thumb (which I abide to) is just don‘t use AI at all. It is bad for your brain, and highly addictive, and also bad for society and the environment. When you use AI you are only putting bad stuff out in the world and supporting te AI-companies, who are profiting off of all this damage they are causing.
Would be interesting if someone said “I spent $2.50 using llm-council with the three top SOTA models and think this reply makes sense: {paste}”
(But better “not sure, though after spending a few bucks on model APIs, perhaps {human-written analysis} is in the right direction”)
Also like you, I did think on the angry version “they have the same AI you do” isn’t likely to be right in the consumer space since their AI is ChatGPT (free version?!) and yours is Claude or something.
Over time, it was impressive to see how much the output of the same prompt would differ between us, and it seems to be heavily influenced by the role of the user. I.e. answers coming from the agent of a Data Engineer, a Backend Engineer and a Domain Researcher would not be the same at all. Some of us use harnessing tools, some not, but regardless it we saw differences.
So, for example, when a backend engineer would send a question to a data engineer, there was *some* added value even when it was a lazy copy & paste.
There's responsible AI use (which I think you - and I, and many people here) do, and the "I don't care, I've outsourced my brain to OpenAI" type of people.
Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.
Otherwise each of these coaxing sessions is something I have to keep in my head until resolved, which is a load in and off itself.
And even better - I can point Claude to that message and gives me a summary. You might say this is silly because we are paying the LLM tax, but knowing what to share, and then verifying against my situation are two different things.
Sometimes they have checked the wrong thing, sometimes they need guidance, sometimes I need to investigate before I can answer. A full LLM message with context is like “summary of their working context that I can resume on my end” so I don’t waste cycles asking or rechecking etc.
And it is still possible to be a learning experience for both of us since the initial message is the start, we can then talk to each other like humans, both much more in sync than before…
It is kinda ironic but I think it does push things in a better direction. Would I have loved it if the message was human, direct and to the point - obviously, but we are all busy, we got shit to do, and this is a useful “resume” mechanic
I think that's the key. Generally people would rather not receive slop because the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication.
In your example, the more context the better. I think there's an interesting nuance there.
That's an interesting thought. The message can have metadata that says the sender's spent 1/5/10/60/120 minutes or some other metric of how much thinking over the communication happened. Just need a way to monitor people's thoughts and digitize them to make that happen.
1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter
2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good proxy for my opinions on this is that I think https://nohello.net/ is a crutch for undersocialised (or overworked/near-burnout OR undiagnosed autistic) engineers & should not be normalised. The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room & saying "hello", then leaving & not being around when someone eventually replies: in that context nohello is pragmatic, but taking it beyond that to modern high-frequency realtime chat is an antisocial overstep. Leading with the entire context of your query may have some practical benefits but they're honestly overstated in exchange for killing natural social tendencies towards human dialogue. Similarly, a non-technical user giving you zero info about a problem is an opportunity for conversation & mutual education. It's relationship-building & helps build a foundation for further interactions with this person. It was never a problem in the first place; "solving" it is just another milestone on the road toward de-socialising humanity.
I would love to spend more time and talk to the people with their issues so we can come to a common understanding… but neither have the capacity for this, and now things are getting worse I think.
Maybe someday agents are good enough that we just discuss direction and implementation details, and every “developer” becomes more of an executive in a company, free to chat about more than just work, focusing on building human relationships and leaving “the tech stuff” to their agent teams…
And old geezers like us who actually know how to write ourself out of a for loop would be the premium - wizards holding forgotten knowledge, incomprehensible to mere uninitiated mortals. I wonder what distinctive dress and hair styles will we develop :-D
Either way it was intended as an analogy - being annoyed that a nontechnical user isn't given you everything up front (because they don't know how) is essentially just being annoyed with having to talk to somebody. The solution to that isn't something the nontechnical user should be burdened with.
For me, the origin of this sentiment is the culture for certain departments at $LARGE_CORP I used to work for. People would ping me on the internal instant messaging tool to ask for help with things. Sometimes they'd take the nohello approach and just fold everything together in a single message: "Hello, hope you are having a nice day. I'm trying to do X, and I see Y instead of Z. What am I doing wrong?"
And sometimes, they... don't.
"Hello." <wait>
"How are you today?" <wait>
A conversation that could have been done in 30 seconds drags on for many minutes, and the message trickle feeds just fast enough that I can't do anything of any complexity in between. It's like pulling teeth. It's a complete waste of their time and utterly disrepectful of mine.
They are there to ask a question. I know they are there to ask a question. They know they are there to ask a question. I'm happy to answer the question, when they finally get around to asking it. Just ask the bloody question, ffs.
> a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y”
These people had below than average communication skills (or at least they were putting below than average effort communicating with you), so LLMs improved their output.
However, the society kinda expects people can and Should improve themselves over time. The issue is that LLMs improved their output, but not necessarily them.
I've sees some chat logs where I completely empathized with the AI trying to make sense of the information it was being drip fed. Always incomplete, often incorrect.
I'd argue that it's worse because now you have no idea what the actual original context was, just the AI's hallucination of it.
Maybe SO really is full of rude, condescending gatekeepers - I haven't asked questions there much.
I haven't personally seen much evidence of it, though, despite decades of winding up there when searching for programming information.
If everyone thinks their question will get closed, it might as well be reality because no one is going to ask and they are going to go elsewhere. Which is exactly what happened.
The difference with AI is that the agent becomes the first level of triage. It (many times) asks the easy initial questions (did you turn it off and on again?) so I don't have to. Doesn't always work like this, but often enough.
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.
Yes, but the kind of engineer that used to say "X is broken" will send you some slop with missing context and Claude will try to apply general solutions from its training data rather than from the specific context. As somebody on the Ops side that usually helps devs fixing things here and there, in those cases I'd rather them say "X is broken" and then I ask the question to Claude with all the context I have.
Probably the best solution currently is a shared skill with at least some curated context.
Now if I ask a question to humans I'm looking for their personal opinions drawn from their personal experience, be it ticket size for a feature on a legacy codebase, a design decision or a product strategy decision.
The exceptions are spam, advertising, and propaganda. Because the barrier to writing now is effectively zero, there is no cost to writing unlimited tripe. So LLMs work well if the parties know each other is real. However I think it poses a major threat to the existing internet as it stands.
If someone says "x broken" and that's a bad response it becomes a learning opportunitity, something I can invest in. When I communicate poorly, I hope my colleagues help me understand why and give me pointers to improve.
Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but I've had the best growth with co-workers when actually engaging at a meta level and trying to help (and be helped) communicate better.
Using AI shifts that burden and entirely demoralizes any investment motivation I have. It's a view that communication is transactional rather than collaborative (we're all on the same team).
I want my team to work better, and be better, and if people offload their comms to an external system to generate I've lost that opportunity for growth.
It's a false dichotomy to suggest the choice is either endless noise or no information at all.
e.g. a DevOps person's LLM may have very different context than a marketing person.
In other words, if I'm in marketing and the website is down, I would rather hear from the DevOps claude than my claude.
(sure, there can be MCPs etc etc that everyone can share but it might not get converted into a level of detail that I can understand).
Dont be a meat proxy! simple