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.
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.
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.
Same here in Uruguay but only for certain interactions (like contractors). Thankfully there’s a transcription feature that catches 90% of the message generally.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either
I always wonder why people generalize AI writing like this. If it's giving you responses like this that you don't like it's as simple as prompting it to give more succinct answers that aren't full of jargon and abstract nouns. I have chatgpt set to 'Efficient (concise and plain)' in the settings which works well to prevent this. And if efficient isn't enough some brief custom instructions will do wonders.
Because this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.
I think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself).
So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.”
Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.
I am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun.
I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word.
It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.
The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched.
Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you pasted from Claude in about thirty seconds, but it could have been one second had you used your mind instead of committing a worthless act that cost me time and gained both of us nothing.
Well my coworkers are the ones sending me the AI text and it's always garbage. And they're using Claude on the newest models. And they're all drastically more enthusiastic about AI than me.
So yeah, maybe every single person in my company sucks at Claude, or maybe Claude just actually sucks at writing and you don't know what bad writing looks like
Claude does suck at writing. No argument here. It's for coding, and it's good at that.
So if the goal is "writing" and they are using Claude, then they do in fact suck at it.
Its like using a butter knife instead of a screwdriver. It might work if you waste enough effort, but will never do the same quality of work a screwdriver can.
> Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.
I use Claude every day, by corporate mandate, generally with Opus 4.8 or 5, but sometimes Sonnet 5 (per corporate demand to both use LLMs heavily and simultaneously keep the bills within a budget).
I hate doing it, but I get results my coworkers, PMs, and end users are happy with.
> Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good...
I admit regularly that LLMs do amazing things. They're astonishingly good at breaking security, for instance.
That doesn't mean I like them.
And no, they really are not good at writing.
When you feel the impulse to be defensive, that's often a sign that asking questions will be more worthwhile than leaping into the defensive posture.
Claude might be the problem here. It really is bad at writing and ticks all the boxes you mentioned. It's much better at code.
I don't mean to be defensive, just to point out that most of the statements you made are provably and obviously untrue... And given that you admit bias that's the most likely explanation.
I hadn't considered that you have experience, but only with one that is legitimately bad at this particular thing because someone forced it onto you. Fair enough.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
>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.
I get the feeling this is the whole disconnect. People have high expectations from AI but haven't really been on the receiving end of a massive amount of text/code generated by it.
We recently had someone fired for using AI excessively. Before the firing, whenever anyone on the team sat down to give feedback, the only answer was "but everyone is using AI, we are supposed to use AI, how can it be bad?".
Until their boss sat down and forced them to read the verbal diarrhea and they finally admitted that it was 90% hallucinations and AI-filling-the-blanks.
I was agreeing! You said it yourself: "Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing".
The people complaining are talking about vibe-writing or heavily-AI-assisted writing.
EDIT: My point is, most people taking the "anti-AI" stance here wouldn't have a problem with Grammarly or AI to double-check spelling. It's a gradient.
EDIT 2: I wrote a lot of stuff without double-checking. Just editing to clarify what I mean. :D
> - 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"
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.
> 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.
> The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback,
For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea.
The people arguing that round-tripping their thoughts through AI still means that it's their thoughts apparently also believe that the game of telephone always results in perfect comms.
It's not just AI; adding more hops to a route changes the message when each hop is a human too, it's just that we notice it more when the hop is an LLM because of just how different they write compared to humans.
I don't think you quite realize the implications of what you're saying.
Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?
If someone is feigning competence via AI, that's the problem. Not Ai.
If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
> If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
My point is that it is still a problem, regardless whether they are asking an AI to write it for them or a human to write it for them.
Round-tripping a message through a 3rd party changes the message; in this specific context ("Don't Paste the AI, please"), there is no pretense of understanding or review from the human.
In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.
> In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.
Um, I've literally said throughout this entire thread that I regularly get Ai to assist with my writing, to great effect. It often helps me be more concise and certainly more kind - I have a tendency to be neither in writing, especially online.
It is also helpful in formatting, say, a github issue. Though, I do need to be careful with that as it is very easy for it to just appear as an Ai slop post, even if lots of thought went into it all.
To be very clear, at no point have I ever supported/advocated for thoughtlessly copy pasting whatever Ai writes for you. This thread has been about using it judiciously, as we can/should be doing for coding or anything else.
> If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
They don't though; I have never seen this happen. I have seen many people claim that's what they do, but not convincingly.
>Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?
Nothing they said implies that.
What they said is they want the understanding of the person to be revealed in the communication. Not masked via AI.
>If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
Yes, if that ever happens in the real world, it would be ok.
> For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea
It doesn't say the (level of) understanding of the person, but that they understand the idea. They might have misspoken, but they already replied to that comment and didn't object to my framing or further clarify.
> Yes, if that ever happens in the real world, it would be ok.
Well, this entire thread is me saying this happens in the real world, and people objecting to it
> 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.
Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs.
As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up. You might say that the "can't be bothered" part is the entire issue, and I'll again say that what matters is the final result - a master chef or chief architect is not doing all the grunt work...
Having AI do the work for you doesn't increase your writing skills, in fact, the opposite!
Instead of seeing the errors and thinking about what changes the draft needs ('improving' your writing skills'), you're letting someone else tell you what changes to make.
Because you aren't internalizing the corrections, guess what happens next time: your writing gets worse, AI comes to help...rinse and repeat.
> Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up.
Isn't this contradictory? Why do you need to take over if it's doing such a good job?
Because it can’t do a great job without frequent expert input, that’s the point.
Expert types prompt into Claude
, Claude produces fundamentally flawed but close output. Don’t take that output and give it to anyone — first refine it until it’s not flawed, then pass it on.
No, you were claiming that no one has ever used Ai to help produce better writing. I was objecting to that, because it is an absurd statement. Ai could have told you that if you asked.
> No, you were claiming that no one has ever used Ai to help produce better writing. I was objecting to that, because it is an absurd statement. Ai could have told you that if you asked.
Maybe take your own advice and ask your LLM if I did claim that.
This is what I claimed:
> 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.
This means that if I get Claude/LLM output, I would need to edit it/write myself to make it correct/better/distilled into relevant parts. I do not get LLM output I would want to post as is without numerous roundtrips, at which point vi is faster.
You then reply to claim that as a skill issue, while also later on stating that you iterate over it or take over a draft to edit it, which I then point out is a contradiction.
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.
Well, those people would be opposed to using spellcheck and grammar tools, too, I guess. I don’t think there’s a reasonable argument against using AI to spellcheck/check your grammar other than that it’s hugely inefficient.
The argument as I've heard it explained to me by someone with a banhammer: "One use of AI no matter how benign is not acceptable because usage is infectious; after even the most minimal use of AI, we can't tell what was AI and what wasn't, therefore the only acceptable position is no AI whatsoever"
Surely we can all agree that banhammer people are generally not a good standard to go by? Still, if you value participating in that space, you have no choice but to follow their rules
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.
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 and already has a choice. A choice to write an email (or whatever) on their own. Be it supported by AI research or whathaveyou, or not.
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 endless 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.
> 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.
> 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 it can be OK if AI is used to polish up one’s message or to help structure it. Basically help with grammar, formatting, and wording.
But copy pasting an AIs response to a question? Not at all. People earn a reputation over time. TRUST is earned. An AI cannot earn trust. 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.
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.
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
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.
Seconding this request... Our team is going through AI adoption without a clear direction and we're getting to the point we need to sit and come up with some guidelines. It would be awesome to have some human-made examples as inspiration
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.
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.
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.
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
Its like reading reddit comments now. Many of them are generated by AI and bots, and they sound just like real people. Or advertisers masquerading as regular people recommending specific products.
It used to be fairly obvious (using em dashes, etc) but now AI writing, with the correct guidance, is very much the same as regular conversational writing.
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?
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.
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?
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
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. You’re going to slow down your employer
That's for their manager to judge. You can maybe 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.
Newer devs invariably discover that the "write the code" part of the job is just a small part of being an engineer, and less value-added than collaboration. Big successes are achieved when you make others successful, rather than isolating yourself and focusing only on your own work and your own success.
AI is not a suitable substitute for collaboration – we are discussing the case of sending AI summaries (1 human asking, 1 LLM answering through a meat proxy), instead of collaboration between 2 humans
The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions?
What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated.
The underlying problem here is that communication is hard; especially if it's not face to face. People can't read your mind or might not get the full context of your question.
Back in the day I learned the hard way that sending a long reply to an email just ensures the other side won't read it. You can't assume that you dealt with their request effectively that way. And that was when there was a lot of email to deal with. Lots of people demanding all sorts of things via email and creating more work for each other by sending more email.
I learned to 1) never reply instantly to low priority requests, 2) be very brief and clear, 3) that talking to people is almost always the better choice when you get tempted to write a long reply.
If you don't like the answers you are getting, maybe reflect on what you are asking, how reasonable that request really was, and how you communicated it. Maybe your question was entirely reasonable and the answer really inappropriately bad. If so, give feedback or talk to the person. But maybe the other side didn't get you. Or maybe they were busy and you are interrupting them. There can be all sorts of reasons why you aren't getting what you expected.
It all depends on the context of course. If you are delegating something to somebody that reports to you, you can just tell them off. But if the other side is a colleague, your boss, or a friend you have to be a bit more considerate.
I get questions about academic papers I've written from non-academics sometimes. It's fun, I like that people are reading. However, some of them are clearly written by AI. I typically answer anyway, but on my most recent, I appended at the end:
> P.S. I intuit, and Pangram agrees, that this last email was AI-generated (and apparently so was the first one, now that I checked). As general career advice, I wish to observe that learning to write emails unaided is an extremely valuable skill in the dual senses that 1) writing is thinking [0] and 2) many people who receive an email they believe to be AI-generated will not be interested in corresponding, even if you're asking good questions, which you are. It would be a shame for that to get in the way of your research goals.
A polite, generic response like this is reasonably low-effort -- you must draft it once -- and might really help someone. Who knows though.
Natural selection is demonstrably not working. It only takes one look at a newspaper to see that thoughtlessness and stupidity are doing better than ever.
I think the internet is pretty great, but it's a major factor in that rise in at least 3 ways:
* Previously, an important check on fools was social consequences. Now they have an endless supply of people to bother. Spammers were the first to exploit that, but now it's endemic.
* Algorithmic weighting toward the reaction-generating (versus, say thoughtful, measured, responsible, accurate, helpful, kind) has rewarded idiocy and awfulness with attention and money. We're all now living in a reality TV show.
* As those behaviors become a major percentage of what people, especially young people, see, they become normalized. Otherwise people think being a thoughtless jackass is just how to get by in the world.
We are strongly in need of firm politeness, of militant decency. Without it, things will get "naturally" worse.
What I wrote was neither passive nor aggressive. My telling you now that I think your response was ill-considered is also not passive aggressive, though it's arguably aggressive.
I do not hate you :) I think you will probably have more positive interactions on the internet if you choose a different register to communicate in but I promise I do not actually care
Whats the worst that could happen if you read GP’s words in a positive bias? Best case you learn something, made a friend, amd trained yourself to look for useful feedback in the future. Worst case you improved your mood and moved on.
You’re in the prison of your own devise, the negative bias.
Directly telling someone that you have a problem with something they did and why you think it's a problem is not "passive aggressive" by any stretch of the definition.
> that talking to people is almost always the better choice when you get tempted to write a long reply.
I’ve heard this “conclusion” from many people over my career. I disagree as a general rule as much of my work is scientific and technical and long replies are more useful than talking as having things written down makes things reproducible and shareable.
I think long emails are bad ways to deliberate or debate or to collaboratively create. But they are great for communicating complex ideas to variable size audiences (ie, one person forwards to their team or files things off for later reference). Even better when accompanied to a link to a web version that can be revised with additional info later.
This really helps due to the async nature. Getting on the phone with someone and talking through an idea with them assumes both parties have time to do that. And is a silly suggestion when 5 people need to read something.
I find it more efficient to get a thoughtfully crafted email than a phone call that still will need to be followed up with an email to confirm all parties understand.
My, probably wrong, take is that the “talk, don’t write” people is based on their inability to logically think through, structure, and communicate their ideas and, instead, would rather connect directly and hope the solution emerges from a conversation.
> talk, don’t write” people is based on their inability to logically think through, structure, and communicate their ideas and, instead, would rather connect directly and hope the solution emerges from a conversation.
That is a remarkably direct way to dismiss the value of brainstorming. :)
Also consider that when content is easy to produce and distribute at scale people stop reading with any kind of attention - there’s too much to read and most of it is not targeted (relevant to me), far too generic and shallow in effort to address excessively large audience, and with little back pressure against verbosity. When we talk in person the other person knows that I am targeting the conversation and invest my time to the same extent they do, they will engage much more.
Also consider that often times a discussion will reframe the question rather than provide answer.
Also consider that people are dramatically more candid in person.
I’m wondering what is that nature of your work that none of this surfaced for you?
I don’t think there’s only writing. I agree that brainstorming serves a very important function.
But I’ve never encountered someone trying to brainstorm over email. If I did, I would certainly want to talk, instead.
I was referring to someone saying that said it’s almost always better to talk than write.
Good “content” is very hard to produce. It’s not a commodity. Again, I work in science and tech where truth is difficult and complex and precise. And it’s important to be systematic and correct. It’s not important that we produce content, but that we execute effectively.
I’m usually not tailoring to a single recipient, but trying to write something that’s understood and used by dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of people.
I agree that there’s a lot of blargh written that’s a waste of time. I’m not proposing to write more crap. My point is that thoughtful prose is frequently the best way to convey an important concept. So I want more well written man pages than people who want to talk to me to explain how to do something.
RTFM is a luxury that we need to invest in, not throw away.
As a possible reader of your email I’m facing dozens of emails every day, my default reaction is to skip past and “read it later”. Maybe you did put a lot thought into it, how would I ever know? If you show up in person I will know you are invested into it.
I’m kind of lucky to be in the position where if you don’t read my email you will regret it because something bad happens. Or at best you miss out on something cool that would help you.
I expect everyone I send my email to to read it and pay attention to it, or I don’t send it to them.
Also, I’d love to have only dozens of email. I expect me and most of my coworkers go through 50-200 emails per day. And this isn’t a problem. I probably spend about 20 minutes a day, twice a day. And it’s way quicker than talking with everyone I want to talk with.
Maybe you’re working with a scale where it’s even possible to show up in person instead of emailing. But even when I worked in small teams and small companies we emailed a lot. For building software, I want to get stuff written down and iterated on (email, issue trackers, spreadsheets). I don’t want to have errors that come out of primarily verbal conversations.
Fair point. I’m in a position of “creating horizontal influence” and I’m lucky enough to be able to focus on less than a dozen outcomes per quarter, so that colors my perception.
> what’s the equivalent of “google it yourself” these days?
Do you actually say that to people?
Edit: i’ve hit the comment limit per given time, but all I have to say is “what have you found so far?” And “Google it yourself” are radically different responses man. The former is far more reasonable, it shows you are willing to be helpful and is a productive question. The other is just rude and implies your time is too valuable as well as assumes they’ve done nothing to tackle the problem. If you actually say “Google it yourself” when people ask you a question that would be absolutely bizarre behavior.
People are lazy as hell, and I've noticed it's getting worse. My old team called this "remote brain execution" (because we work with Bazel and they have something called RBE) where folks would just drop questions in Slack and just ask the team to solve it for them. We were taken aback by how little work people would do before doing this. We developed the phrase: "What have you tried so far?" to try and counteract this culture, but it was an uphill battle, people didn't seem to have shame in saying "Absolutely nothing. I just need to get my job done, and you're holding me up!"
I try to give people a little leeway here, even if I get annoyed in the moment. I know that I myself have dropped a question in chat and continued to look elsewhere for the answer. It’s always a good idea to see if someone else has a quick answer to avoid spinning your wheels for hours looking in the wrong direction.
I like to point people toward ESR’s “how to ask questions the smart way” [0] to new people as it takes some work to learn that questions are about investigations and collaboration, not tasking.
Unless the organisation is on the brink of collapse there is valuable learning and understanding in honestly attempting the research. If nothing else one gets a bit more knowledge on how to research the topic, although some knowledge of the state of the field is hard to avoid if you're so new to it that it's resource intensive to research.
For the company it would probably pay off better (over time) to let the people who regularly get stuck after trying nothing spend some energy figuring out than what they get in return for shipping them to conferences.
Sometimes. However there are a lot of things that I know that are not worth your time to know. Somebody else in the company should also become an expert (for bus factor reasons), but it isn't what the company does and so spending time going deep on that topic isn't worth it.
I’m sorry dude but if it’s going to take me two hours of sorting through documentation to find a feature in the software I’m using and I know someone one Slack message away could point me to it in 30 seconds, I’m going to ask them. You’re basically making a case against any sort of technical collaboration outside of one where everyone comes to the table with all of their knowledge set and prepared to look up everything themselves. That is very inefficient and simply not how people operate, not even you do that
No, it's more like a basic case where you put five minutes into it and if you can't get there in that time frame, then you ask someone. But I am asking for the five minutes of work.
Why do you operate under the assumption that people haven’t spent a few minutes looking for it? In my experience, most people are not trying to waste my time. Perhaps that is different for you, but I find that unlikely.
Additionally, when it’s not your domain knowledge, research is more difficult and time consuming. It can be difficult to even know where to begin. Someone new to media production, for instance, wouldn’t know the major forums to check off hand. Someone had to tell me about dvxuser, reduser, cinema5d, etc.
We learn through a combination of our own effort efforts and the help of others. Otherwise why would we even have school?
"RTFM" was a common answer to an obvious question, back in the day.
If your question shows that you haven't done basic research, because your question would be answered by the most basic of research (like reading that entry in the manual), then you're wasting my time with your laziness. That might be regarded as deserving a bit of rudeness in the answer. (The exception is with someone who is so new that they don't even realize that there is a manual, but that should be very rare.)
I mean, hopefully I've grown up a bit, and grown more patient a bit, but I still understand why people reply that way.
> If your question shows that you haven't done basic research
You added this to the conversation. That was not the original discussion.
Also you and I both have absolutely asked people questions we could have looked up but we knew they likely knew offhand. I don’t understand why some of you think your time is so precious that’s every single question ever asked of you must meet some minimum, arbitrary bar you’ve set internally before you deign to come down from the mountain and bestow knowledge upon your friends and family.
Thanks for reminding me of lmgtfy. We used to say that all the time 20 years ago, and it was way politer than how the people older than us spoke. It took some getting used to, but I really miss the hilariously mean bluntness of the IT/tech world.
In retrospect, I think it was just a bunch of people who grew up breathing in leaded gas fumes, with undiagnosed mental disorders. But I miss it just the same.
That was never an acceptable thing to do outside of light hearted joking. You’d do that to a colleague or someone asking for help in earnest?
It’s a deliberate, rude act that is aggressively proclaiming “how dare you waste my time.“ God help you if you ever ask a question you could’ve looked up yourself, because of course you never do that right? You always make sure to engage in rigorous scholarly research before daring to bother somebody.
Deliberate rude acts were very common in my first few jobs. I distinctly remember multiple directors asking people "Are you a fucking moron?", and much worse. This was both at small companies and fortune 200s. The rude cranky IT guy is a trope for a reason. Learning to return the hostility, while proving that you do indeed know what you're talking about, was a rite of passage.
I almost just said it was like working with The Sopranos or Dr House, but now that I think about it maybe that's because I was in Jersey?
If your workplace resembled house, one of the most ridiculous, overdramatized medical shows that routinely displayed casual illegal acts and brushed them off like nothing, then you should understand that your worklife closely resembled fiction and nobody should work in a workplace like that. He was an addict who abused his colleagues and subordinates.
How on earth are you using an absurd work of fiction as a good thing and then justifying treating people like shit at work? People don’t want to be cursed and yelled at and personally insulted at work and they shouldn’t have to deal with that.
I didn't say it was a good thing, I said I missed it.
As I think about it, I guess I really just miss people being more authentic. There was a lot more understanding and forgiveness around unmedicated emotional outbursts. Modern work culture is more polite on the surface, but it feels like everyone is a cut throat politician manipulating their way to the top with a dumb fake smile. I would much rather work with someone who is upfront about their plans and how they're feeling, than someone who is friendly to my face while talking shit behind my back.
I do kinda feel bad for the kids that are entering the workforce, expected to act like emotionless robots, while spending most of their time talking to AI. There is an underlying sense of fear that they have to mask themselves to not be fired.
But yes, it is an overall improvement. I did have one truly abusive boss that was able to hide unchecked within that culture, and I would not wish that experience on anyone. The rest were just normal people that were emotional and funny.
Apologies for the intensity of my previous comment. It read to me like you were saying this was a good thing and something we should all want, which was just very striking to me. I probably should have asked you to clarify rather than react to my interpretation.
I understand what you’re saying, it is fun to kind of have a little bit more of an honest, “in the trenches” culture. I miss that from time to time from my work on film sets. But I can also say that the lows professionally were far lower as a result, as those blurry boundaries can cause much more friction and even harm people. So I just have a kind of a strong opinion on that
>The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions?
>What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated.
One of the hardest things about taking on any sort of leadership role (even unofficially) is that you need to allow others to do things. It feels incredibly stupid when you have to ask someone to do something you are more than capable of doing better/faster than the other person, but if you did that all the time you wouldn't have time to do your other work. Sometimes that includes questions that seem lazy, but part of asking the question is for the other person to acknowledge that they have thought about it and/or to ensure you aren't stealing ownership from someone.
> Back in the day I learned the hard way that sending a long reply to an email just ensures the other side won't read it. You can't assume that you dealt with their request effectively that way
Then I guess you didn't deal with much of the empty-headed-managment type much.
I learned a different lesson: Write a long email that took time to reason and write, precise and complete text.
You get a short reply that is a reply on a 1 sentence you wrote, twisted upside down ignoring completly the point that you had.
--
> never reply instantly to low priority requests
This is true 100%
I would even say: "Never reply on anything instantly that is not an absolute emergency, ever"
Long ago, I heard this advice on some ancient management tape: "never let a piece of paper cross your desk twice". It stuck with me and I've got into the habit of immediately answering, archiving or on occasion setting a snooze timer (in GMail). If the recipient takes my promptness for granted, then I might adjust my policies for just that person. (Un)fortunately, it helps to be a manager -- then you can give feedback to people who don't read emails properly.
I take that a step further, "absolute emergency" is rarely an "emergency".
Based on my experience, it mostly translates to whatever task the person thinks it's important for them. Sometimes people will mark the task as "urgent" just to dump it on someone else.
The other thing is, in critical emergencies, you should work slower than usual. This means muting all notifications and taking your time. Rushing to get things done can exacerbate the issue.
Best engineering managers shield the team in those situation and simply reply with: "thanks, we've been notified and investigating".
What is the problem with replying instantly? If you can give a reply immediately why wouldn’t you? If it’s low priority work that takes time, sure, but a typical yes/no, I’m available at 5, whatever, why not just send it?
If you’ve already read the email it’s less efficient to come back to it later
Also, email delivery in general can be delayed for hours. It’s not common, but there are no delivery guarantees around email. You could reply immediately, and it could arrive in their inbox much later.
I once built an IdP that vended access one time codes via email. We had to switch to other means because there were a small (but significantly high) fraction of customers who didn’t receive their OTPs before they expired (TTL was 15 minutes). Also even if they came in before the TTL, a user experience that involved waiting that long to get logged in was not tenable.
> Then I guess you didn't deal with much of the empty-headed-managment type much.
I worked in a big multinational at the time ;-). So, yes. Mostly my direct managers were alright. Some were excellent even. But organizational politics and learning to read between the lines is part of working inside of big organizations.
> You get a short reply that is a reply on a 1 sentence you wrote, twisted upside down ignoring completly the point that you had.
Usually a clear sign that you are not communicating effectively. If it's important to you, you might want to figure out how to fix it. Talking is usually a good way.
> Usually a clear sign that you are not communicating effectively
Agreed. I learned that in emails, a multi-paragraph, multi-item text means the recipient will randomly reply to only one of the points (often the least important one). So an effective email will make a single point, in as brief a manner as possible.
This defines "communicating effectively" in a way that it can't possibly cover a complex topic. Sometimes you need to communicate complex topics, so this definition is a failure. The problem remains that people refuse to do the reading required for their job.
> This defines "communicating effectively" in a way that it can't possibly cover a complex topic [...] so this definition is a failure.
Indeed, I don't think email can be reliably used to convey complex topics.
> The problem remains that people refuse to do the reading required for their job.
Communicating effectively means accepting common flaws of people who are unlikely to change, and delivering your message in the most effective way. Whether people are right or wrong or should be fired (as another comment says) is not truly relevant.
I often fail, by the way. I'm not saying I have this all figured out.
I don't think these people read the official documents either, though.
Adjusting communication to the audience is a good guiding principle, but not an absolute. There comes a point where no attempt at communication works for a given audience. If the communication must happen nevertheless, then the audience must change, whether through training or replacement.
I wish this were simply a fireable offense and we were expected to read. These kind of people who act like reading 3 paragraphs is being asked to swallow glass make me blindingly mad. They should be unemployed.
I’m usually very tolerant of others’ varying capacities, but 100% this. High-school level reading and comprehension shouldn’t be a hard ask for professionals.
Sending a wall of text in an email is, IME, ~never^1 the right thing to do. If more than a fraction of colleagues fall into that bad habit, soon all anyone will be doing is email. Let alone if you try to respond to one of the too many points in an overlong message, or loop someone else into the conversation(s) which are now hopelessly fragmented. It's akin to a self-inflicted DoS attack.
1. Exceptions do exist (eg if the message is intended solely for and addressed to a single recipient, and includes a disclaimer / request / reminder about general email hygiene), but they're vanishingly rare.
> "Write a long email that took time to reason and write, precise and complete text."
Respectful hard disagree. Emails should be limited to five sentences. "I didn't have time to make a shorter reply" as an apology / disclaimer for rare exceptions. In virtually every case, anything longer belongs somewhere better than email (Slack, wiki / knowledgebase, docs site) or merits a realtime conversation. My PoV is shaped by over 20 years in the industry working at startups, SMBs and huge enterprises.
Hard disagree back. Email has multiple contexts when I would say that short form is ideal and should be the default but at times a thoroughly long form email is needed. Or, honestly, you just need to create a document at this point. It could be a slide deck or word/markdown/excel/etc (depends on context) and this should be in the email. But email is key.
My experience is that people search subject lines, conversations, dates, and generally traverse historical conversations much better in email than in chat or a fully external application. They won’t search Slack, or try but can’t find the conversation. They won’t remember it’s on a wiki, you’ll constantly be redirecting them to the url. If the file is attached to an email, sometimes they’ll resurface it from a year+ ago. I find that’s way more common than someone referring to a chat from even a month ago. Chats are semi ephemeral. I’ve used both Teams and Slack and feel neither has really changed the game in terms of how the entire user base of an org use the system, enabling the historical reference points and moving it out of a ephemeral state, so email remains a stalwart for archival purposes and helps provide maximum context after the fact (people tend to elaborate on their choices more when writing an email).
Detail in the email, expect people to read it or fail. And include a reference to a wiki or some more detailed version that can be collaborated on and extended.
So the email isn’t the primary source, the wiki is (really some markdown in git). But the email is the thing that people organize and find over time.
This probably differs a bit by your exact profession and circumstances. I could see devs and technical people (most of HN readers) to prefer and have success with this when operating with like minded peers. It doesn’t scale much outside that. If you work with people outside of tech/dev minded people, those who are not used to RTFM type info seeking, it’s going to be an uphill battle.
I'm envious, although I think my experience is the rule and your's more of an exception. It might be more common on HN given the demo, but IRL, people mostly want to talk. Or even if they read email, they can't be bothered to search for things themselves. Makes me think of another long standing habit I have, I just ignore people. If they ask me something that has been answered and I know it's in an email somewhere, I ignore the question. If it's something they really need, they will go find it. Obviously this is very YMMV and I was able to start doing this after I reached a higher position/role, I've been a CFO for some time now and I still have certain people and audiences I will promptly answer any question even if I know it's been answered/documented.
>anything longer belongs somewhere better than email (Slack, wiki / knowledgebase, docs site)
wiki/kb or docs site, sure, depending what the topic is. but... slack? for your long-form communications?
please email me your long stuff, don't slack it to me. email is perfectly fine for longer text when longer text is required. (opinion also shaped over a long time in various roles at companies of various size)
Oddly, I find the search in Slack, Teams, and Discord to be so horrible I don’t create any “knowledge there.” It’s like trying to write a paper on the telephone.
Anyone putting long form stuff into an IM system is taking the way of pain.
I wasn't suggesting an IM system should be the source of truth for long-form documentation. But searching Slack works better than searching email you weren't cc'd on. Virtually anything is better than email for many essential aspects of collaboration.
Want to add someone to the mailing list and loop them in?
How many prior emails will you forward to them?
Someone replies to one of several points in an email, someone else wants to address a different point, and there are a mix of habits and patterns for whether / how much / where to quote or include the previous messages in a response....
vs adding someone to a channel where they can review the conversation history, and some combination of threads and links to additional channels or external resources can adequately support whatever direction(s) the conversation takes.
In any case, it's the wrong tool for the job in so many ways, so much of the time. Hence my recommendation to keep emails to 5 sentences, and to prefer communication tools that properly support multiuser collaboration.
we have polar opposite opinions on email and slack/teams/discord! im not sure i am even understanding the issues you brought up about email correctly.
may i ask what age bracket or generation you are? only if you're comfortable sharing, of course.
im in my 60s. and im curious if our difference of opinion here is a product of what technologies were/are available during the start & prime of our careers. i very well might be in stubborn old man mode subconciously.
Thanks for considering possible reasons for disagreement. I'd like to understand it, too. FWIW, I'm about to turn 52. Been working in tech since the late 1990s. Remote more than not. Email is great for certain specific things. But for multiuser async collaboration in the workplace, surely you've encountered problems like I have, no? Email conversations -- especially if they're long and/or include a lengthy recipient list -- are inherently prone to critical failure, completely decohering as _both_ the recipient list(s) _and_ the topic(s) under discussion can fragment from the very first of N replies, making it impossible to resolve anything conclusively or to know what's been communicated to whom.
I use a git-generated static site that has good search, so if people want to find stuff before asking that’s the go-to.
Otherwise, I can search email quite effectively. And oddly, its one of the few things Office Copilot is goos at.
I don’t email is a collaboration tool. It’s an information sharing tool and maybe workflow. Just today I had to email out to like 20 people a data call with a couple paragraphs of instruction. It’s much better than Slack for this. And I can search and find my email and their responses for all of eternity (I’ve got every email going back 20+ years instantly searchable in outlook, good luck finding a slack message from a month ago much less a decade).
That's almost the entirety of my point. Sure, email works well for simple, unidirectional / broadcast comms. But for async collaboration involving multiple recipients and any kind of back and forth, it's inherently problematic.
If it has to be information stored in depth, then sure a KB/wiki is better.
IME, the majority of long emails should not be persisted in such places, because they contain a fair amount of errors. One could say that any long email thread should be eventually synthesized in the KB/wiki after the conversation has wound down.
And Slack/Teams? No way. If I need to write something long in response to a Slack IM, and email is verboten, then I'll insist on setting up a meeting.
I think we're on roughly the same page. Long emails are problematic. Realtime meetings or (possibly but not necessarily near-realtime) chats in a dedicated channel can and do solve email's problems.
(I agree but would add...) They should ask for it if that's the case. Typically if you're asking in a forum, you ought to state the research you've done up front as not just a courtesy, but a clarification of what you've seen/tried. Otherwise, you can just look lazy.
> If you are delegating something to somebody that reports to you, you can just tell them off.
Coaching someone on why the perspective of the receiver of their behavior works counter-purpose to their intent due to <undesired-behavior-of-theirs> has so far always gotten me more durable and thoughtful behavior modifications than telling them off. I generally reserve telling off someone for proven malicious behavior from malicious intent.
Wow I felt this post and trust me I am never asking the question! I work in a job where people make "creative" proposals (we say pitches or decks) to me almost every day. The length and word count has exploded. I can't say for sure that it is AI in a case by case basis, but I often suspect it.
It used to be when I got something boring a person wrote I felt obligated to read it. Now I am not sure what to do.
If you work for a company of more than 1 person, then helping and developing and mentoring your colleagues is part of your job, and a more important one than telling them to rtfm so you can spend those few minutes getting your own thing done.
A company isn't just a bunch of people isolating themselves and doing their best to not talk to each other.
I always tell people "Here is the documentation, please tell me what is hard to understand so I can fix it". When someone is new on my team I tell them "here is our team documentation, your first task is to fix it so that the next person can follow the directions correctly".
That is I make the conversation not about them reading the manual, but about making it worth reading. There is a large amount of really bad documentation out there.
If your customers or colleagues are asking questions answered by your documentation, it's often a good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want.
Take this valuable signal as a gift, letting you know there is an opportunity to improve the documentation. You could become known as a helpful person, rather than a maybe-efficient, antisocial loner.
If your documentation is generated (by script, tool, or AI), rather than written by a person, this goes double.
> good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want
Of course it does. And it’s not “my documentation” it’s ours. And everyone is responsible for improving it. It’s not about pointing out that documentation sucks, it’s about working to improve it.
I don’t have a documentarian on my team. No one’s main job is to write docs. So we all get to help each other by gradually improving the docs. And if I help someone with something not in the docs then the recipient gets to include that missing info into the docs to help the next person.
We also added a hat for a rotating role called “Benevolent Documentation Czar for the Quarter” where that person gets to explicitly improve team docs. Maybe like 5% of their time.
Most of the problem is people don't know to look for it and so don't try. By asking them to help improve it that means I'm not shaming them for not looking at it and so they are more likely to read it. Also once in a while I get useful suggestions for improvement and so my documentation is now the best on the project, perhaps company (this is a very low bar)
So how exactly are you supposed to distinguish needing to improve the documentation from the fact that half the population—through no fault of their own—might be fundemenetally incapable of understanding the documentation? You can only polish something so much. Without a limiting principle this becomes unfalsifiable and an endless time sink.
As a general rule you cannot get a job working in my area without fluency in English. Probably the majority of the people who work with my code have English as a second language (I work with people in Germany, India, Mexico, and Brazil that I know of), but English is a requirement to work with my area. There are probably people in sales and support areas who don't speak English, but if they need to work with me they need a translator. (I'm lucky to be a native English speaker, but there is no reason I couldn't learn a different language)
if the person is incapable of, or unwilling to, read documentation which you think they should, you can ask them honestly about it, or ask your manager about it
if management feels this person is unqualified to be in their job, they can take care of the issue
"rtfm" or the AI equivalent is being snarky while dodging the issue that you should just talk about, which is that you think this person is asking you too many questions
if they didn't rtfm they are not being respectful of your time. unless you are literally first-day brand new, you should not be approaching a mentor for help getting unstuck without an answer ready for "what have you tried?"
> if they didn't rtfm they are not being respectful of your time
Yes they are. "RTFM" may be an angsty insult thrown around in some toxic open source projects, but it's rude and inappropriate for an actual working environment where you're supposed to (and being paid to) help others. Most time spent at a company at a normal job is collaborating with others.
Your time is not so valuable that you cannot use it to make other people and the company successful, and when you're on the clock, that time belongs to the company anyways, who would likely prefer you do what's best for the company, rather than yourself.
That said, "what have you tried so far" is a good question to ask, too, to coach your colleagues on how to find info, and to get context on what would be retreading their steps.
"Collaborating" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and you're making a lot of silly accusations and presumptions. As a boss I'm not paying one employee to waste another employee's time, and I'm not paying them to teach each other when the answer is in the manual.
The question is whether one employee's time is more valuable than another employee's time. One employee answering another employee's question expends two people's time. If the answer is in the book or on the first page of google, it is wasting one of those employee's time, and that is the boss's money. If the employee asking the question makes ten times as much as the employee answering the question, and it saves him 10% of his time over flipping through the manual, it's a wash. If both employees make the same amount, or the other person even makes less, it is obviously a waste.
This is simple.
RTFM isn't an angsty insult. It is a suggestion because I am not going to answer your question if it is in the manual.
> As a boss I'm not paying one employee to waste another employee's time
Yes you are: specifically, your job as a manager is to make the company and your people successful. The way that is achieved is through collaboration.
If somebody is asking questions to a disruptive extent, then you reach out to them or their manager to have an honest conversation about it, and to level expectations about what requests for help are unreasonable.
> The question is whether one employee's time is more valuable than another employee's time
That is looking at the world as a zero-sum game. If you devote 10 minutes to help somebody, and they're 10 minutes more efficient at that task every time afterwards, then the company wins. It's not your time, it's company time, and most companies prefer that their time be spent on the most value-added thing, which is almost always force multiplication
The bad PM on the other side does not have the same tools I do because they refuse to use the agents I've set up for them to ask questions about the codebase.
Google - even 20 years ago when they were good - is terrible. It often found something that looked good but was wrong in important ways. It often found things that were hard to understand.
There is still value in google first (even today with all the slop), but there is plenty of room for conversation after you have the background needed to understand the deep discussions that result after you have done some early research.
Hey if you want to passive agressively send AI responses to people because you are disgruntled that they even asked and have decided you don't want to confront them directly, go for it.
But I think the point of the original author still stands, even in that context.
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
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…
And I think this is where one key argument on the page itself I think fails:
> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.
Yes, the person on the other side has Claude; but in many cases, their Claude doesn't have the same context as my Claude. Saying, "This thing happened in an area of the code I don't have any expertise in. Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess" is I think a valid time to copy and paste LLM output. [1]
The other thing to say is that it can be a "LMGTFY" style response; i.e., "Why did you ask me that, when you could have gotten a perfectly good answer from ChatGPT?"
[1] In the particular case I'm thinking about, it was a bug in an ocaml component; I don't know ocaml or need to know it; handing Claude's analysis 'caveat emptor' to the maintianers who do know ocaml I think is more helpful than not.
The problem is when all we get is the output, we don't know if their context is even valid. If they don't demonstrate any human understanding of their message content, we can't really take that on faith. Especially once we've got them copy pasting blindly in the past.
Working in support most of my life has shown me the vast majority of customer context is invalid when written by humans.
People don't read error messages. They'll include exactly zero context in their tickets. They outright lie. You can't take anything they say with good faith until you have a relationship with that individual and discern their competence.
I think some of this is a large amount of HN posters are working on software teams that have communicate pretty commonly, hence have a shared context. Once you start getting outside of that shared context knowing what information to exchange gets vastly more difficult for humans.
> Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess
I’m reading a bunch of game modding discords, and this exactly what happens, and what’s hated. Because Claude is also not qualified to assess it. Not by default. The modder’s Claude might be because of the extra context and steering, but the user’s produces usless slop, instead the actual log, and context what the user did is what’s helpful.
I’d say this (when you don’t understand it yourself) is pretty much the worst time to send AI output.
Quick edit: Yeah, I get it in situations like GP where the user is unhelpful, doesn’t want to learn, doesn’t care, and you also can’t tell them to fuck off. But just because the user gives Claude the context they should have given you in the first place, doesn’t make it good.
I agree that "The person on the other side has the same tools you do" might be technically true, I have myself encountered it often enough that they don't even use it at all.
People don't always want MY take on it, they just don't want to bother finding the solution on their own at all.
So in that case replying with a verbatim copy-paste of a Claude response has the same energy as a lmgtfy link.
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.
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.
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 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.
Hah, I guess we are not far away from the “Avogadro Corp” future - and that book was written just _before_ LLM, chatgpt and the attention is all you need paper :) That author had quite the insight
> Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy.
I can't imagine why. You have become a robot. You've automated yourself out of existence. And due to your consistently mindless replies, everyone now knows there's no point in talking to you ever again.
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.
Well I mean… you didn’t come into this comment section saying “hello” and then waiting for someone to say hello back before commenting, right? And you don’t do that in emails either, right?
Because that would be super out of place, and you understand that intuitively.
That’s all nohello is about. It’s not trying to say “don’t be nice and say hi”, it’s saying “batch your hello and your question in the same message please”. Asynchronous communication mediums need an asynchronous communication style, it’s not that hard.
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, imo, & doing so doesn't tackle the crux if the original issue in any meaningful way.
> 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 the IM app's alert lighting up again. Extracting what they actually want from them feels 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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
Interesting to note the page also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"
Yeah it seems pretty LLM to me. Even the extra emphasis on stuff via bold/highlights is there. Kinda whack. Also the “angry” one is just not at all angry or offensive. Probably because there’s a limit to how rude Claude will get
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.)
Say more? I’ve found it quite useful and not a source of fear. It’s effective at calling out disrespect (human to human communication where one party stops participating as a human), and has been effective for me in writing my own communications more crisply and carefully
Fear of being tagged as AI even if you write the text yourself.
For me personally, it's fear to use – and —. I have my versions of XKB keyboard layouts that handily map these but I don't use them anymore. Nor do I use emoji, because some 18-6 months ago AU output abused emoji.
I honestly don’t think those are going to get you flagged as mostly-AI or with high confidence. On anything longer than a sentence I’ve found the false positive rate to be perfectly reasonable.
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.
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
AI;DR This is the broader symptom of a global toxic corporate culture.
We are afraid that one badly phrased message can hurt our reputation or even our jobs, so optimizing every message with softer wording, more political correctness, less directness is safer.
But the real problem is the culture underneath it. If people are constantly worried about how every sentence will be interpreted, eventually they stop speaking plainly, stop challenging decisions, and sometimes stop speaking up at all. So this is like attacking the consequences not the root causes. There should be some sort of measurement of how broken is a community or a company by letting a bot scan Slack/Teams and let the bot remind everyone the importance of lowering the fake index.
I think you are assuming that people use AI to communicate with others because they don’t want to hurt their feelings: it’s likely hardly the case. The article here is just virtue signalling corporate version. Just tell the person doing it not to send you messages produced by AI directly and candidly. It’s clear you are not afraid of “hurting their feelings”.
It’s rather weak to need a website to speak for you but maybe I’m wrong.
Completely agree. I wonder how much this varies across cultures on the country level (like how people say the Dutch are blunt).
I think that indirectness emerges when a critical mass of people decide that they're better off in an indirect culture. i.e., thinking "nobody is straightforward with me, but that's worth it because it means I don't have to be straightforward with anyone else". And of course that's infuriating for anyone who would rather take the opposite deal!
I remember back in the day when you could apply this to Google search results. When I was freelancing, I had a number of people I worked with who would fire off fast questions, but they would still pay me for my time. Then I would return what was essentially a Google search result shortly after. Yes, I would send my own answer, not some paste from Google.
But the point is. They had search, so why didn't they think to do the search? They had the same tools as I did. And yet regularly they couldn't think of the answer. I still deal with this with AI today. When you ask a question, maybe you're asking for the interpretation of the question by the person on the other side. And it's that interpretation that goes to the LLM. Or otherwise some filter of how that person thinks about the question differently than you do.
First of all there's a skill to it. You learn how to phrase things, based on how other people probably phrased it. You learn how google modifies or ignores your queries... (or stops respecting modifiers...)
That comes with practice, and lots of it! I google so much that google regularly throws up the captchas (even when I'm logged in). I remember when Kagi first started, my friend sent me a link to their subscription, and it was like an order of magnitude less search than I did. (They increased it a lot since then.)
So it's skill issue, and skill is a function of volume. Most people barely ever google things. Which is the second thing I've noticed.
I'll often be with people, and they'll be like, "huh I wonder XYZ", and then just trail off, as if there was an implied "I guess we'll never know!" at which point I pull out my phone, bewildered, and simply look it up, and everyone looks at me like I'm an alien. (I do not understand socializing apparently.)
Translating a client question to an actual technical question is the hard part I guess. Google-fu is still a thing, and absolutely a thing you were/are getting paid for it seems.
Ever since my boss has transitioned to doing code reviews by AI and off loading his brain fully to AI, I could just use my AI to do the same to fix the things and I no longer have to deal with petty design arguments. I no longer have to deal with stylistic problems and that's great. When somebody offloads their communication to AI, it's easy to deal with. Meet with the same energy. Let the AI waste their time in the communication because the lack of effort on one side deserves the same type of communication-style.
As I wrote this i switch to the phrase communication-style because I realize that when he does his code review it's literally just a quick pass and a paste, but unfortunately when I do AI code reviews I review every single review item and push back individually on each item, research the items, write tests against what the review says and basically curate the code review I give out, which takes me 3 hours and then I have a boss angrily messaging me asking why the code review isn't done.
So on the one end I've managed to reduce toxicity in the reviews, but the tradeoff is toxicity in the expectation of a rubber stamp.
You should mention that if the personal input isn't required your boss should prioritize the work to add purely AI driven reviews and not waste valuable human time.
This either calls their bluff, or more likely, leads the system to break over time, so that your boss comes to understand that an LLM is not a human developer.
> The person on the other side has the same tools you do. If they wanted the generic answer, they would have gotten it in four seconds. They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement.
I beg to differ. Most of my life, as “the computer guy” — basically since I was a kid — I’ve always been surprised by how lazy people can be, and how they often prefer to ask “the computer guy” or some other human trusted source rather than work out the answer themselves.
There was even a website called “Let Me Google That for You” back when Google was a trustworthy source of answers, precisely to point out how easy it was to find the answer yourself. Obviously, that didn’t stop people from asking, and I don’t think LLMs will either.
People will continue to turn to “the computer guy” — aka you. And if your judgement is that copying an LLM response verbatim is the best answer, then yes, you’re fulfilling your role perfectly well.
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.
> (1) Just read what it gave you, (2) then write your own take on it
completely agree except a crucial step is missing here:
(1.5) validate the accuracy/truth/relevance of it
your own sincere and human take on rubbish will still be rubbish. validating is indeed the more uncomfortable/demanding task here but if you omit it you become just a "human ai beautifier", and this will actually undermine the trust in you as a human. if you are going to omit validation just paste away, be honest and let it be obvious, you can then blame the ai.
I have been using the term "meat proxy" from Gruhn's blog [1] but was worried about sounding uncouth in an office setting. The "polite" version of this page solves that problem nicely. The "angry" version is funny, too.
> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.
Oh sweetie... I've been getting paid to "Google things" for 26 years. AI isn't going to change that transaction. When I was in high school it was assumed that everyone would be tech savvy. That didnt happen and in fact my kids were LESS tech savvy because of smartphones and refined aka dumbed down consumer tech.
I recently wrote an analysis for a proposal my company was working on.
I did not use any AI. I had a couple conversations with agents while mulling some approaches, but they never edited my work nor did I have any chat open while I wrote. Every word was my own.
I notified my other stakeholders - "here's my analysis, none of it was written with ai". It sounds silly to say, and I worried others could take it as an attack. But I needed to communicate "This is a long document but its actually worth reading".
I liked what I wrote. The final author of the proposal liked what I wrote. All of my ideas made it in to the proposal. We landed the contract. Its a nice chunk of $ for us.
I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are a lot of people asking obvious questions where they are just abusing your time and offloading work onto you.
Pasting AI output verbatim is the modern day equivalent of “let me google that for you.”
I used to feel that way until I realised some people I worked with were just actually quite terrible at Googling things. After that I realised that using a search engine is actually a skill I was taking for granted and one I was quite good at.
I did actually spend a few minutes searching for them and found multiple documents and forum posts - sent those over and they were super happy. A project that had been stalled for seemingly forever suddenly was done quickly.
Now that I pay for Kagi search I find myself doing this even more (especially since Google itself often doesn't return great results anymore) and I can quickly find good info way faster than most
I beg to differ. I'll often do a short LLM session to figure out an issue and will use my existing knowledge and experience to drive the LLM towards some solution. When the answer seems legit enough, I'll copy it back to the one asking.
It's not that different to what we were doing back in the day when search engines were still useful. I often wound up replying with a link either to a stackoverflow question or a blog post. There was still a knowledge/experience component involved in evaluating if the proposed solution fits the original question.
There's a delicious irony in pasting dontpastetheai.com into an AI chat, and I choose to believe that's deliberate.
It's well written though. The parody answer in the middle is the sharpest part — "this mild Google search you could've done in 3 seconds" — because it nails the exact texture of unedited model output: the fake enthusiasm, the numbered scaffolding, the conclusion that concludes nothing. The tell isn't that AI was involved, it's that no human judgment was applied afterward. You can't fake the presence of taste.
The "guess who the AI will replace first" line is the real argument underneath the humor. If your contribution is indistinguishable from a prompt box, you've made the case for your own redundancy better than any automation study could. What survives is the part the page calls "the thing the model doesn't have" — your opinion, your context, your willingness to say "actually I disagree."
It's also a close cousin of something you've presumably thought about with Kindship: when agents message each other or humans, the same failure mode applies. An agent that just relays raw completions is exactly as useless as the coworker this page is roasting. The value is in the editorial layer — deciding what's true, what's relevant, what you're willing to stand behind. That's arguably what SOUL.md-style identity is for: giving an agent something to have an opinion from.
Were you filing this as cultural artifact, or is it aimed at someone specific in your orbit?
What is the value of posting this? If I wanted to know what Claude thought about the article, that option is at my fingertips at all times. You are wasting time and space.
"Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't."
Excellent advice, with one very large exception based upon human foibles.
Occasionally there are people who do not ask things in good faith. They ask you a question not because "they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement". Instead they ask the question because they're then going to go to extensive lengths to find every possible counterpoint or opposition to whatever answer you give. In 2026 those sorts of people who will ask and then revert 30 minutes later, after you've carefully detailed a well thought out answer, that "ChatGPT says..." Add that for time eternal they will hold the fact that you answered something for them as a liability that you must atone for, and for which you are responsible for every ramification of their interpretation of your answer[1].
If you ask someone something and they just copy an AI answer, it's such a cop out that I imagine there are many cases where the person knows they're dealing with someone who "asks questions" like this. I have people who I give thoughtful, considered answers to, but then I also have people that I basically say "I don't know...Google it", because giving an iota of an answer always turns out to become something I regret.
[1] - This is not unlike helping someone with their computer. There are people who we love to help, but then there are people that will then ascribe everything that ever goes wrong with their computer for time eternal to that time you showed them a shortcut in Excel. CPU died six years later? Probably because of that shortcut.
Don't make the "Don't paste the AI website, please" site. You can rather use some kind of search tool to find one of the many that already exist. If it's not quite saying what you want, maybe just reach out to the author with an ask for them to update it. Then we get one place everybody knows about, rather than the many many sites (likely all AI generated anyway) that dilute the message.
Wow it’s actually that bad…
I was looking for https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ but it appears people have co-opted the original phrase and out SEOed the original article… only to make a less concise, AI generated copy of it mimicking nohello…. https://dontbeameatproxy.com
... 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.
Actually tbh AI outputs can be pretty good and I have been surprised to see a lack of copy / pastes of them in the format of:
Unique human prompt + AI output which is useful and does a good job expanding on the prompt topic and which when pasted saves people the time of having to go prompt AI on the same topic (fully reviewed by a person before sharing it, to ensure the content has relevance)
> Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't.
This is just demonstrably false. It often IS very helpful. It's annoying that people continue to ask basic factual questions without taking easy steps to solve the problem themselves. I can't remember the last time I "asked someone a question" that it was possible to figure out for myself.
It's the people who keep asking basic, easily researched questions and then wait for you to explain it to them, without first trying to resolve it on their own, that are being anti social, not the people trying to help them.
This is much the same as when Google was relatively new, and people hadn't adapted to it yet. I would get asked questions constantly like "what is the name of the class that does X" and since I usually try not to be too much of a jerk, I would often stop and go open a source file or look in the docs for the person. I know there is a class, and I think I remember what it's called, but I need to go double check it. That usually meant googling for the docs, clicking the first result, and sending them that link along with the specific answer. Sometimes when they asked me I was frustrated about something else or just in a bad mood, and I would tell them to f**g google it, I am not their research assistant.
Ignoring AI is the same scenario as ignoring Google but worse. I am not your research assistant, and worse, there is an artificial research assistant standing by 24/7. If I have to paste something in AI and paste the result back to you I am not the asshole in this situation. If you go do the work to check yourself and it's not something you can just verify conclusively and you need to be sure it's not the AI fooling you, then I am more than happy to look at what you have and lend any expertise I can add to the situation.
>The person on the other side has the same tools you do.
No, they don't. I have access to heaps of raw information about customers and their systems that I can easily provide to my AI. That AI can also dig through all the communications we've had with other customers who have asked us similar questions, and draft a coherent on-brand response.
I often paste AI-generated responses with significant success, and all I have to do is make sure the answer isn't wrong and doesn't include sensitive info, and to remove a few extra adjectives and em-dashes that I don't want.
If the customer has access to my tools, that's a critical security incident. They contact me because I have access to info they don't, and unlike and AI, I can guarantee my response is valid.
As for people who copy/paste AI generated text blindly: That's firable in my books.
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.
“Talk is cheap, show me the prompt” is my go to request for dealing with people’s AI generated responses. Voice and tone varies, of course, depending on the recipient.
It feels like prompt(s) is where the actual thinking can be observed these days.
Well not sure if I agree fully.
On one hand it does make a lot of sense to process and answer w/ your own words.
But, sometimes if what the agent says make sense and you just want to handoff findings that is also fine - I legit don't feel the need to be super strict.
In startup environment where people are more chill about this, this seems totally fine.
It would be more frustrating in a corp/executive environment where thing have to get more structure before being communicated and passed around. Someone would probably be justifiably tagged as lazy.
But I think ideally agents should speak to agents when this kind of comm goes through. What a nice opportunity here ;)
I think a lot about a mismatch of effort these days. Here's an extreme example: I spend an hour drafting a doc outlining our engineering strategy for the next few quarters (or if we're in a startup, maybe writing up my product vision.) I share it with you to get feedback and comments. If you plug it into Claude and send me back an AI-formatted list, with sections like "the real insight (read this first)", we have very different ideas about where our value comes from and what deserves our effort, even though on paper I drafted a doc and you reviewed/expanded it.
I think it's fine to provide AI input if you disclose it, in which case you could encourage me to just plug it into Claude myself next time.
And I agree there's gray area: the AI output might be the result of a long conversation, shaped by careful prompting and context and guidance. The writing is AI generated, but the thinking is human.
Nice pov.
I spoke mostly from an engineering perspective.
When revisiting my corp career in executive position I agree!
However when writing strategy documents and stuff like that I think that the AI is mostly corrupting the idea and making it extremely verbose.
If someone manages to make the AI speak straight to the point with the vision based on what they want to communicate, that, to me is completely fine too.
What is kind of sad is that in the old times we would value a lot the folk that went and wrote a memo, put a lot of thought to it and so on.. Now literally you just plug claude in your notion and you have the document.
To me, this kind of speaks about "the value was never really in the document itself"and more in the understanding of the doc. You can delegate a lot of stuff to the AI but you can't delegate understanding. So when you're presenting it to the exec committee, or circulating it, does not matter what claude/gemini/gpt wrote down, it matters if you understood it, agrees with it and understand that this represents your positioning.
What I see w a lot of juniors, on the other hand, is that people really just copy and paste or shallow understand what was wrote. Delegating too much like that removes the human-seed and makes it kind of worthless
If I spent an hour or two going back and forth with an LLM, I will write my understanding of the issue, and what I think it means for us. Then at the end I'll put "This is what [llm name] said:" and paste in the detailed ai summary at the end. I think that is the most honest, and effective way to do it.
Before an LLM, I would have worked for much longer, then written the same short description, but without the detailed summary at the end. The llm output is really just extra clarifying info I never would have bothered to do on my own. By clearly marking it, I give people the option to skip it and just trust me.
We really do live in an age of hypocrisy in pretty much every area of life. Of course it gets exhausting. Everything feels fake - movies, emotions, ambitions, even people themselves. For me, it’s important to keep my own identity and interests. And that’s not just about AI.
To "They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement." actually I'd ask even for more than that:
For any given <subject> I'd want:
- Your context
- your taste
- your judgement
- clarify what bet <subject> encourages to support
- be ready to elaborate your thesis of that bet
With that we have the basic complete building block that used one after another can model a basic lifecycle of a dialogue that can make progress towards something (a goal, a mission, something useful)
It sounds like you're approaching this narrowly for how you specifically communicate in your line of work, and not really thinking of the broader spectrum of how people communicate professionally.
If people provided me the information you just listed, it wouldn't help me at all in what I do.
Sometimes a customer emails asking a question answered by the documentation. I am not paid to paraphrase the documentation, I am paid to get customer requests out of the door quickly, so I'll be sending links to the documentation. If AI gets that request out of the way faster, good.
I see you point. You are helping them to connect dots and get unstuck. The case I've raised is actually generic and not specific to one domain. But you can say is scoped on how expert-to-expert can make progress. Or how "precision people" communicate because both agree they are putting hypothesis to the test and there will be one that is a winner (hence "the bet").
I enjoy, when arguing with friends, dumping an AI wall of text supporting my position and immediately following up with "What, no response? Argument over, I win."
> If you don't have anything to add, it's okay to say so. "No strong opinion here" is a real, helpful reply.
This is really useful, I wish more people would understand this: you don't have to have an opinion on everything. In fact, you probably shouldn't have an opinion on most things.
This I have been doing a bit. I strictly asks it to never give me suggestions but raise questions, concerns, tell me if it feels if something can be better, style-wise or otherwise without giving me those options.
And a bit of other overall feedback requests.
And if the model adheres to this and doesn't jump the gun, it indeed works quite nice. But it often jumps the gun, forgets, doesn't give a f- about my instructions, or whatever. Maybe more robust local models will better.
This resonates. Had this in the start of the year with clients sending me their “research”, which, of course, was just a Deep Research result. Lead me to send this article when I work with folks: https://www.marcia.no/words/etiquette
I like to think it helped, but likely what helped was that nobody seems to use Deep Research anymore, haha.
The article says they could have asked an AI themselves, but that is missing that I may have an agentic context with exactly the right information to answer the question well, which they do not have. For example because I worked on something closely related. Such an agent output is very useful, and taking the time to rewrite that to a short personal answer is not always worth it.
Your agentic context is still going to shit out 3 pages where a sentence would suffice. Use AI all you want, and then WRITE THE ANSWER IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
In that case why not just say you'd prefer not to answer and move on? They're asking for your input, not AI input - if you'd prefer not to contribute literally just say so.
I can really only imagine the social context you would want to use this response in would be inappropriate / anti-social. If you had a well-meaning work colleague send you something AI, sending this back is kind of not a good look. If it's meant to be an education piece we got the memo...
Ask the ai to point out the egregious mistakes only.
Especially today, I will prefer your slightly funny English to something that feels like AI.
And personally I do Support for people around the world and I often ask people to write in their native language.
Then I can translate myself and if the default ai translation gets something wrong I can add necessary context to improve it - which I can't really do if the only thing I get is the bad ai translation.
How did people do it before AI? Spellchecks have existed forever. Also, people have the ability to improve, so if you offload all your work elsewhere, you will never improve.
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.
det sker nogle gange! når man er ny til et sprog, det kan være forskrakkelig at skrive i et professionelt område. Men det er bare en del af dine udvikling - du kan sagtens skrive på hvilken sprog når som helst, og de kan bruge deres værktøj til at forstå det, du siger.
Der skal kom et tid hvor du skal tale på en sprog på dit kontor. Uden hjælp. Du har bruge for at øve dig, og folk er alligevel pænere end du tror.
(this being written in a foreign language I am learning is part of the point)
The premise of the article is that everyone has access to the “same tools” but that’s glossing over the specialization inherent in a specific expert’s harness config (memories, skills, rules, repos, etc) that produce actually helpful responses (eg engineer’s view vs product manager’s view).
Unless I'm your research assistant, why would I be asking AI questions for you when you could do it yourself? If you need an answer I already have I will gladly share it with you. If you need my help to find an answer, then tell me that and I gladly will help.
The inverse of this is. Don't ask me a question a 9b llm could have answered.
If you are getting blocks of llm text perhaps it's because you don't deserve their input and could have satisfied your query by not making it someone else's problem.
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.
Here for once is something HR can actually do to be useful, make an internal campaign around do’s and don’ts of AI in the workplace. They can add how clients don’t pay us to type things in a box for them either.
Had an offshore dev respond to me with copy pasted Claude response for the first time the other day.
My reaction was of immediate visceral disgust.
I can say in no uncertain terms that I do not care if your English is completely broken. I prefer that over AI slop. You will not improve your writing and language proficiency if you do not practice them! If you do not care about your language proficiency then you have zero business doing offshored work.
The answer was also wrong. I pointed Claude to the micro service repo in question and asked it myself. Got a different but correct answer, after verifying it myself.
Their code is so trash I wonder if we’re even using the same models. Every PR I need to go over it myself and have Claude refactor and restructure everything. Claude generates decent code that can be made great with just a few iterations. I don’t even think these guys are running the code to test it, let alone read it. Just slop and ship.
Can’t rely on them to understand the code or even answer simple questions about it.
What is even the point of all this?! AI has made me personally more productive but overall it’s still a net negative because when you’re a “-x dev” the force multiplier from AI is overwhelming and soul crushing to everyone around you.
The "good" news is you won't have to deal with this much longer. Claude, which this person basically admitted through their behavior, will replace 99% of the offshore devs in the next couple years. Then you won't have to get the ick from talking to them and they can go back to having no real economic prospects in a 3rd world country, and most likely lose the social and economic standing they had from having a good job.
You can’t fix hallucinations if you don’t even know what the code does. In my experience working with dozens of firms, offshore do not give a single damn about understanding. Frankly, their job security rests on nobody understanding what the code does. If they can inflict the brain damage on your organization so they can keep billing you in the future they will absolutely do it.
Oh a lot of onshore developers are going to be gone too.
I think I've worked with close to 200 software engineers close enough to get a good understanding of their abilities in my 20+ years in the industry. I think the current version of claude and chatgpt are more effective at writing code than about 85%, maybe up to 95% of them. That is to say, if you let me hire any of them for the cost of my Claude Max + Chatgpt subscriptions ($400 a month), I would probably hire less than 5% of them at that cost. I get more done, and with higher quality using Claude by myself than I would with a team of 50 average software engineers, and it takes less of my time to do it.
The industry is going to get rocked.
I think a company that right now has 10-20 full time software engineers will have 2-3 in 5 years, and realistically 2 of those 3 aren't necessary to get the coding done, they are there so you have coverage over vacations and redundancy when someone leaves.
The only reason I think offshore is going to be completely eliminated is it's too high friction to work with them. They are far away, you have to hire a firm to manage them which means hiring a manager on site as overhead, and they are awake when you are asleep (or pretending to be awake when you are awake).
I was recently listening to a podcast about mentalization theory therapy methods for BPD .. for a friend .. Mentalization being the activity of understanding whats going on in other peoples minds, or in ones own. And they idea of pseudomentalizing or "pretend mode" was put forward, where a person looks or sounds like they are .. engaged in mentalizing communication, but are actually checked out. Then I started to think about all the AI slop going around .. and the phenomenon, this meme site is responding to, or AI posting responses.. and I wondered, is this a symptom of.. a global society wide phycological functional deficit, where A) we're none of us communicating as if there is people on the other end.. and B) we're not thinking about our own minds, and taking time to understand things..
[edit] to extend the connections
The charm of a messaging board like this is bringing "join attention" to a topic, not just sharing separate monologs.
And also, always wondering if something was written by a human or statistically generated could be seen as Epistemic Hypervigilance, leading to stress, and loss of epistemic trust. This could reduces opportunities for taking on new information of feedback, and cause rigidity and isolation.
You're gonna need a stronger language. Why do you think people love AI? If I have to think and god forbid read the response I might as well live in the woods or something
Disagree - most people aren't bothered to ask AI and have a conversation with it, they will go to you to get an answer so they have someone to blame when it's wrong.
Sure. While we're tone policing can we put an end to the ad nauseam (unintentionally ironic) regurgitation of "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it" please?
I agree that such repetition can be annoying, like anything that's repeated too often. But your GP comment crossed further into guidelines breakage than most of those do.
I've seen it on HN, such as comments where someone asked a question about some animal's habitat, and someone else responded back with Claude's answer (labeling it as such). Personally, I thought the AI answer was helpful in the absence of anyone else providing a better source link (which would have been better, sure, but apparently me and everyone else who saw the question couldn't be bothered to go research it/report back).
I agree that AI text 1) should always be labeled, 2) can sometimes be bad, and 3) real sources/writing are better.
A common retort is "If we wanted an AI answer we could have asked the AI" - maybe, but A) realistically most of us aren't even going to switch contexts in a case like that to go ask an AI about the animal's habitat (even easier than googling), even if we may be interested in the answer, and B) Instead of having every user use a tiny bit of electricity, etc. to generate duplicate AI answers, we can do it once.
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
The problem to me is, if people slowed down enough to carefully review and also rewrite model output in their own words (even if we're not counting code output), then what you have is a tool that probably makes you slower overall instead of much faster. I don't think that is a bad idea per se, but it is generally the opposite of how you're expected to perform with AI tools.
DO NOT FUCKING PASTE AI RESPONSES TO ME, EVER, PERIOD.
When someone tells me they "talked to Claude" they sound retarded. Just tell me you looked into it, and I fucking swear to god if you just took what Claude said verbatim and do not understand the problem then you are a cunt and I will stop working with you.
When someone pastes LLM output in chat I completely ignore it. I will just continue the conversation as if they said nothing and silently mark them as cretinous in my mind.
This is not up for debate, you will talk to me in short well formed sentences and get to the fucking point or you will fuck off
Pasting AI slop is a strong signal. It tells the world "I add no value. I am a proxy for ideas generated by others". It's sad to see people I otherwise respected debase themselves.
I'll say this clearly. Using AI for writing is bad. Don't do it. Ever. If you can't formulate a coherent thought yourself, just don't. I don't want to hear what the LLM said. I want to hear what you said. Loudly proclaiming you have nothing to add is a strange flex. Just stay quiet.
If you don't understand the answer, don't answer somebody else with it. You're attaching your name to whatever you copy-paste to people, and if you don't understand it there's a chance it's complete nonsense. Save yourself the embarrassment. If you don't know how to answer somebody's question, just say "I don't know".
sometimes I get asked stupid shit they can figure themself really so in quotes I do like "This is what gpt-6 luna gave me:" [quote]then in quote the almost full AI answer.[quote end]
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.
The site owner me doesn't work with incessantly helpless people. Good for them.
I do. "They all have the same tools as I do" is exactly what's infuriating. They either blatantly don't use them, or are too incompetent to do so effectively, which would track.
I have been making an effort to provide an "AI;DR" section as well, even before the term existed, because of brevity. But sending along the full(er) text as reference I think is perfectly fine in such cases.
figuring out the most useful epistemic and conversational norms around AI in work communication is still a work-in-progress.
there's times when "go talk to claude a bit and then get back to me with a more precise question" is reasonable, and other times where it inhibits learning and culture.
similarly, there are many occasions where i don't mind quoted AI with a human precis.
the most objectionable behaviours are not that different from pre-ai ones.
don't copypasta stackoverflow code without understanding it. don't submit PRs you can't explain to a colleague. don't waste time asking people things you can easily figure out. don't send unreviewed work to people expecting them to figure it out. don't quote authorities you don't understand.
all the same stuff applies to AI, but AI seems to have expanded the scope and scale of the bad behaviours, making the need for better defences more pressing.
Yes - lazy AI answers from generic AI are lazy. Don’t do that please.
But this leading statement is not necessarily true:
“The person on the other side has the same tools you do”
Aren’t we all imbuing our AI with our own thought patterns? Folks I speak to spent a tremendous amount of time building tooling and (hierarchical) context around LLMs such that the output it produces is definitely not the same as what the stock model produces.
I don't see why I should have to "uglify" or compress needlessly the perfectly distilled analysis, just because people associate perfect formatting and details with AI slop.
That's pretty much why I built WhisperShortcut: ⌘1 dictates to the clipboard, and a second shortcut handles AI cleanup. That keeps raw transcripts and edits as two separate steps instead of a black box. https://github.com/mgsgde/whisper-shortcut
uff.. HN is degrading rapidly. (Yes, also all your comments about "AI SLOP SPOTTED, AI;DR". Regurgitating the same crap over and over again.... pff...)
>Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't.
OMFG! Even the "don't send AI answers" page text is fucking AI slop.
Can't they be bothered to write 200 words of their own?
might be the case, but as soon as you have read and agree with it, that doesn't make it any kind of "ai slop" :) Is it relevant or helpful? Can I verify it? Are main questions IMO.
Whether you agree with it or not has no effect on whether it's AI slop or not. Outside of math or coding, domains in which there is objective determinism, any AI outputs are slop to the extent they purport to represent the AI's subjective opinion about something. So, an AI proving that 2+2=4 is not AI slop because it's just a formal proof, whereas an AI writing a missive about how 4 is its favourite number would be slop whether you think it has good points/agree/disagree with it or not.
The fact that a site purporting to roast AI slop is itself AI slop is surely somebody taking the piss, and the fact that it has 700 upvotes and is the top story here means that people either simply don't read shit they upvote, or the brainrot is already fully established on HN.
I disagree strongly. Nearly every time this comes up it seems people are not doing a good job giving their AI context. My AI environment is REALLY context aware based on a whole bunch of things I have access to that others don't. When my AI respond to a question it is full of information the person asking the question just didn't have access to. You can also train your AI not to give a wall of text but to give very concise answers. This whole web page stinks of being a total skill issue with using AI. I much prefer AI answers to my questions ( most of the time the answer is going straight into my AI, so I don't really care if an AI generated the response, I'd probably trust it more.). This is all about you build your projects, the documentation you build, how that is shared, it means many questions don't need to be asked because everyone has access to good context whether its built things, things coming up, ideation, market research, product research, or whatever stage you are at. Build pathways for context to move around and go through stages. Not only that, my guess is everyone is mostly reading AI responses to things ALL the time anyways, what difference does it make if you get to ask a question and get a response from another AI with a different context? None. Avoid these kinds of sites as they lead people astray. Much like the advice "Share the prompt, not the response" ... absolutely ridiculous, different context means you get different responses with the same prompt. If you want to pursue something that's actually useful, think about context engineering such that questions largely don't need to be asked.
down voting this is silly, just shows how badly people are buying into this. It is misguided. On the other side of things I guess it's good not everyone is working out how to be super productive with AI.
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.
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.
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.
Modern problems require modern solutions.
Same here in Uruguay but only for certain interactions (like contractors). Thankfully there’s a transcription feature that catches 90% of the message generally.
Maybe it's a cultural thing in the Spanish speaking world? Had the same experience in Colombia.
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 was surprised WhatsApp didn't give me a "transcribe" button (as recently as yesterday). Seems like it'd be pretty easy to implement that.
I don’t have a transcribe button in the Windows app, but my Android phone has a transcribe button.
No thanks. If the sender wants to avoid typing then he should use the transcribe function and take responsibility for any errors in it.
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.
Are the messages in Spanish or English?
Both: English messages sent to me, and I also see my friends do it in Spanish for messages sent to other people.
It's a habit in specific countries, China is one in my experience.
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
3) habitually late or not on time
> 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.
Was just in south America, everyone uses it.
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.
I absolutely understand that some situations require voice messages, and I think everyone else in a chat would too.
Also, circular sawblades are terrifying.
Fortunately, if they send it as a text message or voicemail, I get automatic transcription.
Too bad that’s not more universal.
In WhatsApp?
Same here. I sometimes dont feel like typing but I use voice dictation, that should be the first option in a text convo imo.
I use dictation a lot and god it’s so bad. I have to correct something every single time.
Which is part of the reason why sending a voice message that the receiver might have to read a transcription of is so bad.
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.
Literacy is dying. I suspect that's part of the reason some people hate AI.
To the semi-literate a few paragraphs of text represent a significant investment of their time.
I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either
It's hard to talk about it in a very general way without being wrong a significant percentage of the time.
I suspect we're both right, just on different occasions.
I always wonder why people generalize AI writing like this. If it's giving you responses like this that you don't like it's as simple as prompting it to give more succinct answers that aren't full of jargon and abstract nouns. I have chatgpt set to 'Efficient (concise and plain)' in the settings which works well to prevent this. And if efficient isn't enough some brief custom instructions will do wonders.
Because this is a thread about other people's usage of AI, so how I/you personally use it is irrelevant because we still have to deal with everyone else pasting AI, in which case it is generally long and wordy.
In my experience it is the semi literate people who love generative AI the most. The people who struggled to form sentenced and hated reading.
I think some people suck (myself included) at writing and are amazed that they can finally generate text (fortunately not myself).
So their output from an llm has the halo/ikea/endowment effect and they want to show off what they “wrote.”
Writing is actually super easy. Editing and writing well is the hard part. It’s like co-workers who wrote a terrible book being excited just because they wrote a book.
I am literate and hyperlexic - I read ~500 words a minute, and have read thousands of books for fun.
I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons, but one of them is the way it bastardizes and ruins the written word.
It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.
The signal-to-noise ratio in genAI writing is just wretched.
Yes, I can read the thousand-word ball of muck you pasted from Claude in about thirty seconds, but it could have been one second had you used your mind instead of committing a worthless act that cost me time and gained both of us nothing.
> It writes incoherent, worthless prose, taking hundreds of words where two sentences would do.
Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.
> I hate genAI deeply, for many reasons
Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good:
a) Always find them to be bad
b) Are always bad at using them
Well my coworkers are the ones sending me the AI text and it's always garbage. And they're using Claude on the newest models. And they're all drastically more enthusiastic about AI than me.
So yeah, maybe every single person in my company sucks at Claude, or maybe Claude just actually sucks at writing and you don't know what bad writing looks like
Claude does suck at writing. No argument here. It's for coding, and it's good at that.
So if the goal is "writing" and they are using Claude, then they do in fact suck at it.
Its like using a butter knife instead of a screwdriver. It might work if you waste enough effort, but will never do the same quality of work a screwdriver can.
> Either you haven't used GenAI in a few years, you've only used bad ones, you're really bad at using them, or all of the above.
I use Claude every day, by corporate mandate, generally with Opus 4.8 or 5, but sometimes Sonnet 5 (per corporate demand to both use LLMs heavily and simultaneously keep the bills within a budget).
I hate doing it, but I get results my coworkers, PMs, and end users are happy with.
> Probably explains the above issues. In my experience people who don't want things to be good...
I admit regularly that LLMs do amazing things. They're astonishingly good at breaking security, for instance.
That doesn't mean I like them.
And no, they really are not good at writing.
When you feel the impulse to be defensive, that's often a sign that asking questions will be more worthwhile than leaping into the defensive posture.
Claude might be the problem here. It really is bad at writing and ticks all the boxes you mentioned. It's much better at code.
I don't mean to be defensive, just to point out that most of the statements you made are provably and obviously untrue... And given that you admit bias that's the most likely explanation.
I hadn't considered that you have experience, but only with one that is legitimately bad at this particular thing because someone forced it onto you. Fair enough.
We don't all have to like the same things.
In my experience it is the semi-literate who are most impressed by AI writing and the ones who use it the most to write for them.
ChatGPT can talk voice to voice to I don’t really get where you’re coming from.
People are just afraid of billionaires becoming trillionaires and not having food and shelter
OK, but are you hiring semi-literate people to do jobs that involve writing at your company?
Everyone is. They just don't always know that.
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.
This was posted a couple weeks ago, the term “meat proxy” was used.
https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
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?
That's a good use for AI. Type loosely and ask it to fix up the spelling, capitalization and punctuation.
Fixing spelling, capitalization, and punctuation...that's just a spell checker, no fancy LLM needed.
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.
It is needed. Sometimes the semantics matter.
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.
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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.
Its a excellent competency filter though..
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> 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)
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.
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.
> 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.
Again, youve missed the point entirely
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>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.
>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.
> Theoritically yes. In practice:
I get the feeling this is the whole disconnect. People have high expectations from AI but haven't really been on the receiving end of a massive amount of text/code generated by it.
We recently had someone fired for using AI excessively. Before the firing, whenever anyone on the team sat down to give feedback, the only answer was "but everyone is using AI, we are supposed to use AI, how can it be bad?".
Until their boss sat down and forced them to read the verbal diarrhea and they finally admitted that it was 90% hallucinations and AI-filling-the-blanks.
Yes, so the issue here was not AI but a lack of competence, prudence, integrity, responsibility, discernment etc.
It's the equivalent of vibe coding vs Ai assisted coding.
Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing.
Maybe you’re defending something that nobody here has a problem with.
Using AI to rephrase things is perfectly fine.
What? This entire thread and the OP and comment I originally replied to is people saying that Ai shouldn't be used for writing...
I was agreeing! You said it yourself: "Vibe writing vs AI assisted writing".
The people complaining are talking about vibe-writing or heavily-AI-assisted writing.
EDIT: My point is, most people taking the "anti-AI" stance here wouldn't have a problem with Grammarly or AI to double-check spelling. It's a gradient.
EDIT 2: I wrote a lot of stuff without double-checking. Just editing to clarify what I mean. :D
> What? This entire thread and the OP and comment I originally replied to is people saying that Ai shouldn't be used for writing...
No, the entire thread is literally called "Don't Paste the AI, please".
That's not the same as "Never use AI on your way to writing what you need conveyed".
> - 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 thing is, I expect the person who sent me something to know about and understood what they have sent me.
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.
Well, In any healthy organization or relationship, there should be no problem with someone not knowing about/understanding something.
If someone is feigning competence, that's the fundamental problem, not AI
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.
Now they are almost meat proxies, which is sad.
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.
> Don’t be a meat proxy.
That's it in a nutshell. I think I need this up on my wall.
> 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.
> The value in having a human write it is that whenever something bad/misleading/redundant is introduced, that person will learn from the feedback,
For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea.
The people arguing that round-tripping their thoughts through AI still means that it's their thoughts apparently also believe that the game of telephone always results in perfect comms.
It's not just AI; adding more hops to a route changes the message when each hop is a human too, it's just that we notice it more when the hop is an LLM because of just how different they write compared to humans.
I don't think you quite realize the implications of what you're saying.
Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?
If someone is feigning competence via AI, that's the problem. Not Ai.
If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
> If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
My point is that it is still a problem, regardless whether they are asking an AI to write it for them or a human to write it for them.
Round-tripping a message through a 3rd party changes the message; in this specific context ("Don't Paste the AI, please"), there is no pretense of understanding or review from the human.
In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.
> In some other context, sure, maybe some people are thoughtfully engaging with the AI, but I have never come across this yet. I suspect you haven't either.
Um, I've literally said throughout this entire thread that I regularly get Ai to assist with my writing, to great effect. It often helps me be more concise and certainly more kind - I have a tendency to be neither in writing, especially online.
It is also helpful in formatting, say, a github issue. Though, I do need to be careful with that as it is very easy for it to just appear as an Ai slop post, even if lots of thought went into it all.
To be very clear, at no point have I ever supported/advocated for thoughtlessly copy pasting whatever Ai writes for you. This thread has been about using it judiciously, as we can/should be doing for coding or anything else.
> If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
They don't though; I have never seen this happen. I have seen many people claim that's what they do, but not convincingly.
>Surely you don't actually believe, or even desire, for everyone to fully understand everything that they say... No room for questions, uncertainty, bewilderment, etc?
Nothing they said implies that.
What they said is they want the understanding of the person to be revealed in the communication. Not masked via AI.
>If they use Ai to polish a communication, be it statement, question, etc, and they do it in a thoughtful manner to ensure the final communication clearly and effectively communicates what it should be, there's no problem with that.
Yes, if that ever happens in the real world, it would be ok.
> For me, the value of receiving comms from a human is different: it communicates not just the idea itself, but the fact that the human already understands the idea
It doesn't say the (level of) understanding of the person, but that they understand the idea. They might have misspoken, but they already replied to that comment and didn't object to my framing or further clarify.
> Yes, if that ever happens in the real world, it would be ok.
Well, this entire thread is me saying this happens in the real world, and people objecting to it
> 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.
Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs.
As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up. You might say that the "can't be bothered" part is the entire issue, and I'll again say that what matters is the final result - a master chef or chief architect is not doing all the grunt work...
Your writing tendencies must be quite bad if Claude's tendencies are an improvement. Isn't writing a skill issue?
Thanks for sharing a perfect example of something that any AI could have helped you improve
Having AI do the work for you doesn't increase your writing skills, in fact, the opposite!
Instead of seeing the errors and thinking about what changes the draft needs ('improving' your writing skills'), you're letting someone else tell you what changes to make.
Because you aren't internalizing the corrections, guess what happens next time: your writing gets worse, AI comes to help...rinse and repeat.
> Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue (and not necessarily with using Ai). I've used Ai MANY times to help SIGNIFICANTLY improve things that I've written - from a few sentences to many paragraphs. As I've said in other comments, it'll rapidly and effectively remove all my worst tendencies. And, likewise, sometimes I'll have it write a first draft when I give it appropriate context/guidance that I can't be bothered to fully curate/synthesize. Then, once it gets that draft, I'll take over and tidy it up.
Isn't this contradictory? Why do you need to take over if it's doing such a good job?
Because it can’t do a great job without frequent expert input, that’s the point.
Expert types prompt into Claude , Claude produces fundamentally flawed but close output. Don’t take that output and give it to anyone — first refine it until it’s not flawed, then pass it on.
Correct, I was treating their claim as true for the sake of argument, not accepting it.
We're on the same page
Let's fire all editors, consultants, psychologists, sous chefs, grunts, etc!
I'm not claiming an LLM writes better than me.
No, you were claiming that no one has ever used Ai to help produce better writing. I was objecting to that, because it is an absurd statement. Ai could have told you that if you asked.
> No, you were claiming that no one has ever used Ai to help produce better writing. I was objecting to that, because it is an absurd statement. Ai could have told you that if you asked.
Maybe take your own advice and ask your LLM if I did claim that.
This is what I claimed:
> 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.
This means that if I get Claude/LLM output, I would need to edit it/write myself to make it correct/better/distilled into relevant parts. I do not get LLM output I would want to post as is without numerous roundtrips, at which point vi is faster.
You then reply to claim that as a skill issue, while also later on stating that you iterate over it or take over a draft to edit it, which I then point out is a contradiction.
>Sorry to say, but this is a skill issue
That's the same slop response as "it's a skill issue" applied to C codebases being inherently insecure due to the language's footguns/design.
Not even slightly. The burden of proof is on you, given that I regularly have AI improve my writing
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.
Write yourself and tell the AI: "Fix the spelling and grammar. Do not change the structure or meaning" then.
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.
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.
Well, those people would be opposed to using spellcheck and grammar tools, too, I guess. I don’t think there’s a reasonable argument against using AI to spellcheck/check your grammar other than that it’s hugely inefficient.
The argument as I've heard it explained to me by someone with a banhammer: "One use of AI no matter how benign is not acceptable because usage is infectious; after even the most minimal use of AI, we can't tell what was AI and what wasn't, therefore the only acceptable position is no AI whatsoever"
Surely we can all agree that banhammer people are generally not a good standard to go by? Still, if you value participating in that space, you have no choice but to follow their rules
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.
My problem isn't who wrote it, but the pretense of something having written by a person while it wasn't.
There's something profoundly disrespectful about it towards the receiver.
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.
I agree. But this is a separate conversation, which (unfortunately) seems to be pointless at this point.
> So I guess everyone had better just settle in and get used to some serious profound disrespect
Nope. Because the individual end user still and already has a choice. A choice to write an email (or whatever) on their own. Be it supported by AI research or whathaveyou, or not.
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 endless 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.
> 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.
Agreed that AI's default voice is unproductive. But you can set/give instructions.
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.
> 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 it can be OK if AI is used to polish up one’s message or to help structure it. Basically help with grammar, formatting, and wording.
But copy pasting an AIs response to a question? Not at all. People earn a reputation over time. TRUST is earned. An AI cannot earn trust. 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.
To be very clear, I NEVER advocated for copy pasting thoughtless LLM output anywhere. Literally quite the opposite.
> I think it can be OK if AI is used to polish up one’s message
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.
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.
You bring up a good point. Maybe it doesn't matter whether an ai or a person wrote it, as long as it is concise.
And because most ai's are not concise we blame ai's for faults we don't like in humans either: being longwinding
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.
You're missing the whole entire point.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect
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
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):
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.
Any chance you would publish that guide and share here?
Seconding this request... Our team is going through AI adoption without a clear direction and we're getting to the point we need to sit and come up with some guidelines. It would be awesome to have some human-made examples as inspiration
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.
You should out an emdash in there just to mess with people.
I’m interested in the rest of the document, is it something that can be shared publicly?
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.
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.
And maybe GP doesn't want that.
"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.
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.
Those people exist.
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
Its like reading reddit comments now. Many of them are generated by AI and bots, and they sound just like real people. Or advertisers masquerading as regular people recommending specific products.
It used to be fairly obvious (using em dashes, etc) but now AI writing, with the correct guidance, is very much the same as regular conversational writing.
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?
I’m curious if you’d share there rest of your principles. This is so well articulated.
Thanks for the compliment! I just posted the other 3 in another reply!
> You’re being paid for your expertise and insights.
For purposes of training the AI (enablement firm)?
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.
People all agree on that sentiment.
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.
It's sad that there is a chance people put your guide into AI and ask it to "summarize"
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?
They will paste it to their agent and ask it to live up to those requirements
Sharp idea. Thanks.
Summarize 9 short sentences?
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
Very sad
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.
atrophy of the thinking muscle
[dead]
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.
This is excellent. Would love to see the rest of the principles of AI usage.
> 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.
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.
I'd love the link to all those Principles
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.
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.
Am I the only one suspicious of your comment?
> 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.
Trained writers and journalists know that short sentences are an important tool. They convey directness.
Perhaps that speaks more to your education and that of "most poeple on hn"
>Most definitely.
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.
You also used newlines to write 23 words here, something non-existent above.
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.
if the response of AI is sufficient to do your job, why do you have a job?
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?
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. You’re going to slow down your employer
That's for their manager to judge. You can maybe 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.
Newer devs invariably discover that the "write the code" part of the job is just a small part of being an engineer, and less value-added than collaboration. Big successes are achieved when you make others successful, rather than isolating yourself and focusing only on your own work and your own success.
This is not counter collaboration, collaboration can also benefit from the use of AI.
AI is not a suitable substitute for collaboration – we are discussing the case of sending AI summaries (1 human asking, 1 LLM answering through a meat proxy), instead of collaboration between 2 humans
The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions?
What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated.
The underlying problem here is that communication is hard; especially if it's not face to face. People can't read your mind or might not get the full context of your question.
Back in the day I learned the hard way that sending a long reply to an email just ensures the other side won't read it. You can't assume that you dealt with their request effectively that way. And that was when there was a lot of email to deal with. Lots of people demanding all sorts of things via email and creating more work for each other by sending more email.
I learned to 1) never reply instantly to low priority requests, 2) be very brief and clear, 3) that talking to people is almost always the better choice when you get tempted to write a long reply.
If you don't like the answers you are getting, maybe reflect on what you are asking, how reasonable that request really was, and how you communicated it. Maybe your question was entirely reasonable and the answer really inappropriately bad. If so, give feedback or talk to the person. But maybe the other side didn't get you. Or maybe they were busy and you are interrupting them. There can be all sorts of reasons why you aren't getting what you expected.
It all depends on the context of course. If you are delegating something to somebody that reports to you, you can just tell them off. But if the other side is a colleague, your boss, or a friend you have to be a bit more considerate.
I get questions about academic papers I've written from non-academics sometimes. It's fun, I like that people are reading. However, some of them are clearly written by AI. I typically answer anyway, but on my most recent, I appended at the end:
> P.S. I intuit, and Pangram agrees, that this last email was AI-generated (and apparently so was the first one, now that I checked). As general career advice, I wish to observe that learning to write emails unaided is an extremely valuable skill in the dual senses that 1) writing is thinking [0] and 2) many people who receive an email they believe to be AI-generated will not be interested in corresponding, even if you're asking good questions, which you are. It would be a shame for that to get in the way of your research goals.
A polite, generic response like this is reasonably low-effort -- you must draft it once -- and might really help someone. Who knows though.
[0] hyperlinked to https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00323-4
it’s passive aggressive.
ultimately it’s better to not inform and start ignoring these people.
let natural selection work.
Natural selection is demonstrably not working. It only takes one look at a newspaper to see that thoughtlessness and stupidity are doing better than ever.
I think the internet is pretty great, but it's a major factor in that rise in at least 3 ways:
* Previously, an important check on fools was social consequences. Now they have an endless supply of people to bother. Spammers were the first to exploit that, but now it's endemic.
* Algorithmic weighting toward the reaction-generating (versus, say thoughtful, measured, responsible, accurate, helpful, kind) has rewarded idiocy and awfulness with attention and money. We're all now living in a reality TV show.
* As those behaviors become a major percentage of what people, especially young people, see, they become normalized. Otherwise people think being a thoughtless jackass is just how to get by in the world.
We are strongly in need of firm politeness, of militant decency. Without it, things will get "naturally" worse.
Natural selection selects for reproductive fitness, not intelligence.
I believe he's using it metaphorically here, and thus so am I.
People forget this far too often.
What I wrote was neither passive nor aggressive. My telling you now that I think your response was ill-considered is also not passive aggressive, though it's arguably aggressive.
this maybe a me issue
any kind of softness in language like “i’ll-considered” sounds so sterile that i sense hatred underneath. too much time in big companies.
more sharing a crazy person take on how different words can be interpreted counter to the intent.
I do not hate you :) I think you will probably have more positive interactions on the internet if you choose a different register to communicate in but I promise I do not actually care
ha! i like the negativity since the anonymous thing frees me to be me
i hate being civil!
Whats the worst that could happen if you read GP’s words in a positive bias? Best case you learn something, made a friend, amd trained yourself to look for useful feedback in the future. Worst case you improved your mood and moved on.
You’re in the prison of your own devise, the negative bias.
~salute-emoji~
What's passive about it?
Furthermore, what's aggressive about it?
don’t use ai when you write emails to me.
that’s direct and aggressive.
framing it as advice is the passive part.
Yeah, I have started ignoring AI generated stuff.
Directly telling someone that you have a problem with something they did and why you think it's a problem is not "passive aggressive" by any stretch of the definition.
Mindlessly calling things passive aggressive, is nearly as bad as pasting AI slop. Start working on your language skills.
And yes, this comment is passive aggressive.
See the difference?
oh, the irony!
Why is it passive aggressive?
when people write me ai slop.
i either ignore. or if i trust them i just say “don’t use ai slop”.
anything softer is passive and morally judgy too.
i’m not here to tell them what’s globally right, only how i want them to interact with me.
Ignoring them is more passive aggressive than the answer he gave.
> that talking to people is almost always the better choice when you get tempted to write a long reply.
I’ve heard this “conclusion” from many people over my career. I disagree as a general rule as much of my work is scientific and technical and long replies are more useful than talking as having things written down makes things reproducible and shareable.
I think long emails are bad ways to deliberate or debate or to collaboratively create. But they are great for communicating complex ideas to variable size audiences (ie, one person forwards to their team or files things off for later reference). Even better when accompanied to a link to a web version that can be revised with additional info later.
This really helps due to the async nature. Getting on the phone with someone and talking through an idea with them assumes both parties have time to do that. And is a silly suggestion when 5 people need to read something.
I find it more efficient to get a thoughtfully crafted email than a phone call that still will need to be followed up with an email to confirm all parties understand.
My, probably wrong, take is that the “talk, don’t write” people is based on their inability to logically think through, structure, and communicate their ideas and, instead, would rather connect directly and hope the solution emerges from a conversation.
> talk, don’t write” people is based on their inability to logically think through, structure, and communicate their ideas and, instead, would rather connect directly and hope the solution emerges from a conversation.
That is a remarkably direct way to dismiss the value of brainstorming. :)
Also consider that when content is easy to produce and distribute at scale people stop reading with any kind of attention - there’s too much to read and most of it is not targeted (relevant to me), far too generic and shallow in effort to address excessively large audience, and with little back pressure against verbosity. When we talk in person the other person knows that I am targeting the conversation and invest my time to the same extent they do, they will engage much more.
Also consider that often times a discussion will reframe the question rather than provide answer.
Also consider that people are dramatically more candid in person.
I’m wondering what is that nature of your work that none of this surfaced for you?
I don’t think there’s only writing. I agree that brainstorming serves a very important function.
But I’ve never encountered someone trying to brainstorm over email. If I did, I would certainly want to talk, instead.
I was referring to someone saying that said it’s almost always better to talk than write.
Good “content” is very hard to produce. It’s not a commodity. Again, I work in science and tech where truth is difficult and complex and precise. And it’s important to be systematic and correct. It’s not important that we produce content, but that we execute effectively.
I’m usually not tailoring to a single recipient, but trying to write something that’s understood and used by dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of people.
I agree that there’s a lot of blargh written that’s a waste of time. I’m not proposing to write more crap. My point is that thoughtful prose is frequently the best way to convey an important concept. So I want more well written man pages than people who want to talk to me to explain how to do something.
RTFM is a luxury that we need to invest in, not throw away.
You missed my point.
As a possible reader of your email I’m facing dozens of emails every day, my default reaction is to skip past and “read it later”. Maybe you did put a lot thought into it, how would I ever know? If you show up in person I will know you are invested into it.
Perhaps I missed your point.
I’m kind of lucky to be in the position where if you don’t read my email you will regret it because something bad happens. Or at best you miss out on something cool that would help you.
I expect everyone I send my email to to read it and pay attention to it, or I don’t send it to them.
Also, I’d love to have only dozens of email. I expect me and most of my coworkers go through 50-200 emails per day. And this isn’t a problem. I probably spend about 20 minutes a day, twice a day. And it’s way quicker than talking with everyone I want to talk with.
Maybe you’re working with a scale where it’s even possible to show up in person instead of emailing. But even when I worked in small teams and small companies we emailed a lot. For building software, I want to get stuff written down and iterated on (email, issue trackers, spreadsheets). I don’t want to have errors that come out of primarily verbal conversations.
Fair point. I’m in a position of “creating horizontal influence” and I’m lucky enough to be able to focus on less than a dozen outcomes per quarter, so that colors my perception.
> what’s the equivalent of “google it yourself” these days?
Do you actually say that to people?
Edit: i’ve hit the comment limit per given time, but all I have to say is “what have you found so far?” And “Google it yourself” are radically different responses man. The former is far more reasonable, it shows you are willing to be helpful and is a productive question. The other is just rude and implies your time is too valuable as well as assumes they’ve done nothing to tackle the problem. If you actually say “Google it yourself” when people ask you a question that would be absolutely bizarre behavior.
People are lazy as hell, and I've noticed it's getting worse. My old team called this "remote brain execution" (because we work with Bazel and they have something called RBE) where folks would just drop questions in Slack and just ask the team to solve it for them. We were taken aback by how little work people would do before doing this. We developed the phrase: "What have you tried so far?" to try and counteract this culture, but it was an uphill battle, people didn't seem to have shame in saying "Absolutely nothing. I just need to get my job done, and you're holding me up!"
I try to give people a little leeway here, even if I get annoyed in the moment. I know that I myself have dropped a question in chat and continued to look elsewhere for the answer. It’s always a good idea to see if someone else has a quick answer to avoid spinning your wheels for hours looking in the wrong direction.
I like to point people toward ESR’s “how to ask questions the smart way” [0] to new people as it takes some work to learn that questions are about investigations and collaboration, not tasking.
[0] https://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
In many cases someone else already knows the answer and your interruption of them is less time lost for the company than you looking up the answer.
Unless the organisation is on the brink of collapse there is valuable learning and understanding in honestly attempting the research. If nothing else one gets a bit more knowledge on how to research the topic, although some knowledge of the state of the field is hard to avoid if you're so new to it that it's resource intensive to research.
For the company it would probably pay off better (over time) to let the people who regularly get stuck after trying nothing spend some energy figuring out than what they get in return for shipping them to conferences.
Sometimes. However there are a lot of things that I know that are not worth your time to know. Somebody else in the company should also become an expert (for bus factor reasons), but it isn't what the company does and so spending time going deep on that topic isn't worth it.
I’m sorry dude but if it’s going to take me two hours of sorting through documentation to find a feature in the software I’m using and I know someone one Slack message away could point me to it in 30 seconds, I’m going to ask them. You’re basically making a case against any sort of technical collaboration outside of one where everyone comes to the table with all of their knowledge set and prepared to look up everything themselves. That is very inefficient and simply not how people operate, not even you do that
No, it's more like a basic case where you put five minutes into it and if you can't get there in that time frame, then you ask someone. But I am asking for the five minutes of work.
Why do you operate under the assumption that people haven’t spent a few minutes looking for it? In my experience, most people are not trying to waste my time. Perhaps that is different for you, but I find that unlikely.
Additionally, when it’s not your domain knowledge, research is more difficult and time consuming. It can be difficult to even know where to begin. Someone new to media production, for instance, wouldn’t know the major forums to check off hand. Someone had to tell me about dvxuser, reduser, cinema5d, etc.
We learn through a combination of our own effort efforts and the help of others. Otherwise why would we even have school?
These are software engineers asking questions about the code they wrote. They're able to figure it out.
Politely? — yes, all the time.
A frequent first question when a subordinate asks me for help:
“What have you found so far, searching for answers?”
"RTFM" was a common answer to an obvious question, back in the day.
If your question shows that you haven't done basic research, because your question would be answered by the most basic of research (like reading that entry in the manual), then you're wasting my time with your laziness. That might be regarded as deserving a bit of rudeness in the answer. (The exception is with someone who is so new that they don't even realize that there is a manual, but that should be very rare.)
I mean, hopefully I've grown up a bit, and grown more patient a bit, but I still understand why people reply that way.
> If your question shows that you haven't done basic research
You added this to the conversation. That was not the original discussion.
Also you and I both have absolutely asked people questions we could have looked up but we knew they likely knew offhand. I don’t understand why some of you think your time is so precious that’s every single question ever asked of you must meet some minimum, arbitrary bar you’ve set internally before you deign to come down from the mountain and bestow knowledge upon your friends and family.
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=do+people+say+google+it+yourself
Thanks for reminding me of lmgtfy. We used to say that all the time 20 years ago, and it was way politer than how the people older than us spoke. It took some getting used to, but I really miss the hilariously mean bluntness of the IT/tech world.
In retrospect, I think it was just a bunch of people who grew up breathing in leaded gas fumes, with undiagnosed mental disorders. But I miss it just the same.
Absolutely revisionist history.
That was never an acceptable thing to do outside of light hearted joking. You’d do that to a colleague or someone asking for help in earnest?
It’s a deliberate, rude act that is aggressively proclaiming “how dare you waste my time.“ God help you if you ever ask a question you could’ve looked up yourself, because of course you never do that right? You always make sure to engage in rigorous scholarly research before daring to bother somebody.
Deliberate rude acts were very common in my first few jobs. I distinctly remember multiple directors asking people "Are you a fucking moron?", and much worse. This was both at small companies and fortune 200s. The rude cranky IT guy is a trope for a reason. Learning to return the hostility, while proving that you do indeed know what you're talking about, was a rite of passage.
I almost just said it was like working with The Sopranos or Dr House, but now that I think about it maybe that's because I was in Jersey?
If your workplace resembled house, one of the most ridiculous, overdramatized medical shows that routinely displayed casual illegal acts and brushed them off like nothing, then you should understand that your worklife closely resembled fiction and nobody should work in a workplace like that. He was an addict who abused his colleagues and subordinates.
How on earth are you using an absurd work of fiction as a good thing and then justifying treating people like shit at work? People don’t want to be cursed and yelled at and personally insulted at work and they shouldn’t have to deal with that.
I didn't say it was a good thing, I said I missed it.
As I think about it, I guess I really just miss people being more authentic. There was a lot more understanding and forgiveness around unmedicated emotional outbursts. Modern work culture is more polite on the surface, but it feels like everyone is a cut throat politician manipulating their way to the top with a dumb fake smile. I would much rather work with someone who is upfront about their plans and how they're feeling, than someone who is friendly to my face while talking shit behind my back.
I do kinda feel bad for the kids that are entering the workforce, expected to act like emotionless robots, while spending most of their time talking to AI. There is an underlying sense of fear that they have to mask themselves to not be fired.
But yes, it is an overall improvement. I did have one truly abusive boss that was able to hide unchecked within that culture, and I would not wish that experience on anyone. The rest were just normal people that were emotional and funny.
Apologies for the intensity of my previous comment. It read to me like you were saying this was a good thing and something we should all want, which was just very striking to me. I probably should have asked you to clarify rather than react to my interpretation.
I understand what you’re saying, it is fun to kind of have a little bit more of an honest, “in the trenches” culture. I miss that from time to time from my work on film sets. But I can also say that the lows professionally were far lower as a result, as those blurry boundaries can cause much more friction and even harm people. So I just have a kind of a strong opinion on that
Yeah, came here to see if anyone still remembers lmgtfy. Back to the future, I guess!
> what have you found so far?
Love it, thank you!
>The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions?
>What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated.
One of the hardest things about taking on any sort of leadership role (even unofficially) is that you need to allow others to do things. It feels incredibly stupid when you have to ask someone to do something you are more than capable of doing better/faster than the other person, but if you did that all the time you wouldn't have time to do your other work. Sometimes that includes questions that seem lazy, but part of asking the question is for the other person to acknowledge that they have thought about it and/or to ensure you aren't stealing ownership from someone.
> Back in the day I learned the hard way that sending a long reply to an email just ensures the other side won't read it. You can't assume that you dealt with their request effectively that way
Then I guess you didn't deal with much of the empty-headed-managment type much.
I learned a different lesson: Write a long email that took time to reason and write, precise and complete text.
You get a short reply that is a reply on a 1 sentence you wrote, twisted upside down ignoring completly the point that you had.
-- > never reply instantly to low priority requests
This is true 100% I would even say: "Never reply on anything instantly that is not an absolute emergency, ever"
Mail is async by nature. Read them 2-3 times a day only (you don’t check mailbox 100 times a day :) and you get things done…
I prefer to reply to an e-mail immediately. Or never. If so than archive it or delete it.
If you don’t answer immediately, you carry it as opened mind window and probability to have your mind being unable to concentrate increases over time.
Long ago, I heard this advice on some ancient management tape: "never let a piece of paper cross your desk twice". It stuck with me and I've got into the habit of immediately answering, archiving or on occasion setting a snooze timer (in GMail). If the recipient takes my promptness for granted, then I might adjust my policies for just that person. (Un)fortunately, it helps to be a manager -- then you can give feedback to people who don't read emails properly.
>This is true 100% I would even say: "Never reply on anything instantly that is not an absolute emergency, ever"
you can shorten this to "never reply instantly", because an "absolute emergency" will never be communicated by email.
I take that a step further, "absolute emergency" is rarely an "emergency".
Based on my experience, it mostly translates to whatever task the person thinks it's important for them. Sometimes people will mark the task as "urgent" just to dump it on someone else.
The other thing is, in critical emergencies, you should work slower than usual. This means muting all notifications and taking your time. Rushing to get things done can exacerbate the issue.
Best engineering managers shield the team in those situation and simply reply with: "thanks, we've been notified and investigating".
What is the problem with replying instantly? If you can give a reply immediately why wouldn’t you? If it’s low priority work that takes time, sure, but a typical yes/no, I’m available at 5, whatever, why not just send it?
If you’ve already read the email it’s less efficient to come back to it later
i'm not a strict adherent to the rule, your question would be better aimed at jillesvangurp or mhaberl.
mainly i just wanted to stress that nothing in an email inbox is an "absolute emergency".
it encourages back and forth.
it trains people to expect things.
boundaries.
Also, email delivery in general can be delayed for hours. It’s not common, but there are no delivery guarantees around email. You could reply immediately, and it could arrive in their inbox much later.
This doesn’t happen enough to me that I consider it.
I once built an IdP that vended access one time codes via email. We had to switch to other means because there were a small (but significantly high) fraction of customers who didn’t receive their OTPs before they expired (TTL was 15 minutes). Also even if they came in before the TTL, a user experience that involved waiting that long to get logged in was not tenable.
When someones only contact with you is email, then that's how you'll get news of the emergency.
i can't think of a situation where both the following are true:
1) someone having an emergency needs to contact me specifically.
2) that someone only has my email, and no other possible way of contacting me (or someone else that can contact me).
> Then I guess you didn't deal with much of the empty-headed-managment type much.
I worked in a big multinational at the time ;-). So, yes. Mostly my direct managers were alright. Some were excellent even. But organizational politics and learning to read between the lines is part of working inside of big organizations.
> You get a short reply that is a reply on a 1 sentence you wrote, twisted upside down ignoring completly the point that you had.
Usually a clear sign that you are not communicating effectively. If it's important to you, you might want to figure out how to fix it. Talking is usually a good way.
> Usually a clear sign that you are not communicating effectively
Agreed. I learned that in emails, a multi-paragraph, multi-item text means the recipient will randomly reply to only one of the points (often the least important one). So an effective email will make a single point, in as brief a manner as possible.
This defines "communicating effectively" in a way that it can't possibly cover a complex topic. Sometimes you need to communicate complex topics, so this definition is a failure. The problem remains that people refuse to do the reading required for their job.
> This defines "communicating effectively" in a way that it can't possibly cover a complex topic [...] so this definition is a failure.
Indeed, I don't think email can be reliably used to convey complex topics.
> The problem remains that people refuse to do the reading required for their job.
Communicating effectively means accepting common flaws of people who are unlikely to change, and delivering your message in the most effective way. Whether people are right or wrong or should be fired (as another comment says) is not truly relevant.
I often fail, by the way. I'm not saying I have this all figured out.
I don't think these people read the official documents either, though.
Adjusting communication to the audience is a good guiding principle, but not an absolute. There comes a point where no attempt at communication works for a given audience. If the communication must happen nevertheless, then the audience must change, whether through training or replacement.
I wish this were simply a fireable offense and we were expected to read. These kind of people who act like reading 3 paragraphs is being asked to swallow glass make me blindingly mad. They should be unemployed.
I’m usually very tolerant of others’ varying capacities, but 100% this. High-school level reading and comprehension shouldn’t be a hard ask for professionals.
Sending a wall of text in an email is, IME, ~never^1 the right thing to do. If more than a fraction of colleagues fall into that bad habit, soon all anyone will be doing is email. Let alone if you try to respond to one of the too many points in an overlong message, or loop someone else into the conversation(s) which are now hopelessly fragmented. It's akin to a self-inflicted DoS attack.
1. Exceptions do exist (eg if the message is intended solely for and addressed to a single recipient, and includes a disclaimer / request / reminder about general email hygiene), but they're vanishingly rare.
If it's an emergency, you should call 911, or your country's equivalent. If that is not appropriate, then it's not an emergency.
> Hello 911, our auth service is down following a malformed config deployment.
"Emergency" is not the same as "emergency services".
You're making my point exactly. Auth service being down is not an emergency.
as i've gotten older, i've realized that an auth service being down does not fit my definition of emergency.
which is the point the parent commenter was making, if im not mistaken.
> "Write a long email that took time to reason and write, precise and complete text."
Respectful hard disagree. Emails should be limited to five sentences. "I didn't have time to make a shorter reply" as an apology / disclaimer for rare exceptions. In virtually every case, anything longer belongs somewhere better than email (Slack, wiki / knowledgebase, docs site) or merits a realtime conversation. My PoV is shaped by over 20 years in the industry working at startups, SMBs and huge enterprises.
Hard disagree back. Email has multiple contexts when I would say that short form is ideal and should be the default but at times a thoroughly long form email is needed. Or, honestly, you just need to create a document at this point. It could be a slide deck or word/markdown/excel/etc (depends on context) and this should be in the email. But email is key.
My experience is that people search subject lines, conversations, dates, and generally traverse historical conversations much better in email than in chat or a fully external application. They won’t search Slack, or try but can’t find the conversation. They won’t remember it’s on a wiki, you’ll constantly be redirecting them to the url. If the file is attached to an email, sometimes they’ll resurface it from a year+ ago. I find that’s way more common than someone referring to a chat from even a month ago. Chats are semi ephemeral. I’ve used both Teams and Slack and feel neither has really changed the game in terms of how the entire user base of an org use the system, enabling the historical reference points and moving it out of a ephemeral state, so email remains a stalwart for archival purposes and helps provide maximum context after the fact (people tend to elaborate on their choices more when writing an email).
I’ve found that a two-prong approach works best.
Detail in the email, expect people to read it or fail. And include a reference to a wiki or some more detailed version that can be collaborated on and extended.
So the email isn’t the primary source, the wiki is (really some markdown in git). But the email is the thing that people organize and find over time.
This probably differs a bit by your exact profession and circumstances. I could see devs and technical people (most of HN readers) to prefer and have success with this when operating with like minded peers. It doesn’t scale much outside that. If you work with people outside of tech/dev minded people, those who are not used to RTFM type info seeking, it’s going to be an uphill battle.
I think you may be right. Fortunately, I work with like 10k collaborators who are all science/tech oriented and it works quite well.
I wouldn’t want to work in an org where people can’t read email and want to talk to everyone instead.
I'm envious, although I think my experience is the rule and your's more of an exception. It might be more common on HN given the demo, but IRL, people mostly want to talk. Or even if they read email, they can't be bothered to search for things themselves. Makes me think of another long standing habit I have, I just ignore people. If they ask me something that has been answered and I know it's in an email somewhere, I ignore the question. If it's something they really need, they will go find it. Obviously this is very YMMV and I was able to start doing this after I reached a higher position/role, I've been a CFO for some time now and I still have certain people and audiences I will promptly answer any question even if I know it's been answered/documented.
>anything longer belongs somewhere better than email (Slack, wiki / knowledgebase, docs site)
wiki/kb or docs site, sure, depending what the topic is. but... slack? for your long-form communications?
please email me your long stuff, don't slack it to me. email is perfectly fine for longer text when longer text is required. (opinion also shaped over a long time in various roles at companies of various size)
Oddly, I find the search in Slack, Teams, and Discord to be so horrible I don’t create any “knowledge there.” It’s like trying to write a paper on the telephone.
Anyone putting long form stuff into an IM system is taking the way of pain.
(Replying to parent and GP)
I wasn't suggesting an IM system should be the source of truth for long-form documentation. But searching Slack works better than searching email you weren't cc'd on. Virtually anything is better than email for many essential aspects of collaboration.
Want to add someone to the mailing list and loop them in? How many prior emails will you forward to them?
Someone replies to one of several points in an email, someone else wants to address a different point, and there are a mix of habits and patterns for whether / how much / where to quote or include the previous messages in a response....
vs adding someone to a channel where they can review the conversation history, and some combination of threads and links to additional channels or external resources can adequately support whatever direction(s) the conversation takes.
In any case, it's the wrong tool for the job in so many ways, so much of the time. Hence my recommendation to keep emails to 5 sentences, and to prefer communication tools that properly support multiuser collaboration.
we have polar opposite opinions on email and slack/teams/discord! im not sure i am even understanding the issues you brought up about email correctly.
may i ask what age bracket or generation you are? only if you're comfortable sharing, of course.
im in my 60s. and im curious if our difference of opinion here is a product of what technologies were/are available during the start & prime of our careers. i very well might be in stubborn old man mode subconciously.
Thanks for considering possible reasons for disagreement. I'd like to understand it, too. FWIW, I'm about to turn 52. Been working in tech since the late 1990s. Remote more than not. Email is great for certain specific things. But for multiuser async collaboration in the workplace, surely you've encountered problems like I have, no? Email conversations -- especially if they're long and/or include a lengthy recipient list -- are inherently prone to critical failure, completely decohering as _both_ the recipient list(s) _and_ the topic(s) under discussion can fragment from the very first of N replies, making it impossible to resolve anything conclusively or to know what's been communicated to whom.
I use a git-generated static site that has good search, so if people want to find stuff before asking that’s the go-to.
Otherwise, I can search email quite effectively. And oddly, its one of the few things Office Copilot is goos at.
I don’t email is a collaboration tool. It’s an information sharing tool and maybe workflow. Just today I had to email out to like 20 people a data call with a couple paragraphs of instruction. It’s much better than Slack for this. And I can search and find my email and their responses for all of eternity (I’ve got every email going back 20+ years instantly searchable in outlook, good luck finding a slack message from a month ago much less a decade).
> "I don’t email is a collaboration tool"
That's almost the entirety of my point. Sure, email works well for simple, unidirectional / broadcast comms. But for async collaboration involving multiple recipients and any kind of back and forth, it's inherently problematic.
So far, searching email has been more effective than searching anything else (Wiki, Slack, etc).
How do you search emails you weren't cc'd on?
If it has to be information stored in depth, then sure a KB/wiki is better.
IME, the majority of long emails should not be persisted in such places, because they contain a fair amount of errors. One could say that any long email thread should be eventually synthesized in the KB/wiki after the conversation has wound down.
And Slack/Teams? No way. If I need to write something long in response to a Slack IM, and email is verboten, then I'll insist on setting up a meeting.
I think we're on roughly the same page. Long emails are problematic. Realtime meetings or (possibly but not necessarily near-realtime) chats in a dedicated channel can and do solve email's problems.
Because part of the answer is learning people's experiences.
(I agree but would add...) They should ask for it if that's the case. Typically if you're asking in a forum, you ought to state the research you've done up front as not just a courtesy, but a clarification of what you've seen/tried. Otherwise, you can just look lazy.
> If you are delegating something to somebody that reports to you, you can just tell them off.
Coaching someone on why the perspective of the receiver of their behavior works counter-purpose to their intent due to <undesired-behavior-of-theirs> has so far always gotten me more durable and thoughtful behavior modifications than telling them off. I generally reserve telling off someone for proven malicious behavior from malicious intent.
Wow I felt this post and trust me I am never asking the question! I work in a job where people make "creative" proposals (we say pitches or decks) to me almost every day. The length and word count has exploded. I can't say for sure that it is AI in a case by case basis, but I often suspect it.
It used to be when I got something boring a person wrote I felt obligated to read it. Now I am not sure what to do.
If you work for a company of more than 1 person, then helping and developing and mentoring your colleagues is part of your job, and a more important one than telling them to rtfm so you can spend those few minutes getting your own thing done.
A company isn't just a bunch of people isolating themselves and doing their best to not talk to each other.
I always tell people "Here is the documentation, please tell me what is hard to understand so I can fix it". When someone is new on my team I tell them "here is our team documentation, your first task is to fix it so that the next person can follow the directions correctly".
That is I make the conversation not about them reading the manual, but about making it worth reading. There is a large amount of really bad documentation out there.
If your customers or colleagues are asking questions answered by your documentation, it's often a good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want.
Take this valuable signal as a gift, letting you know there is an opportunity to improve the documentation. You could become known as a helpful person, rather than a maybe-efficient, antisocial loner.
If your documentation is generated (by script, tool, or AI), rather than written by a person, this goes double.
> good sign your documentation has some challenges: dense; intimidating; inaccessible; or not easy to search for the specific information you want
Of course it does. And it’s not “my documentation” it’s ours. And everyone is responsible for improving it. It’s not about pointing out that documentation sucks, it’s about working to improve it.
I don’t have a documentarian on my team. No one’s main job is to write docs. So we all get to help each other by gradually improving the docs. And if I help someone with something not in the docs then the recipient gets to include that missing info into the docs to help the next person.
We also added a hat for a rotating role called “Benevolent Documentation Czar for the Quarter” where that person gets to explicitly improve team docs. Maybe like 5% of their time.
Most of the problem is people don't know to look for it and so don't try. By asking them to help improve it that means I'm not shaming them for not looking at it and so they are more likely to read it. Also once in a while I get useful suggestions for improvement and so my documentation is now the best on the project, perhaps company (this is a very low bar)
So how exactly are you supposed to distinguish needing to improve the documentation from the fact that half the population—through no fault of their own—might be fundemenetally incapable of understanding the documentation? You can only polish something so much. Without a limiting principle this becomes unfalsifiable and an endless time sink.
As a general rule you cannot get a job working in my area without fluency in English. Probably the majority of the people who work with my code have English as a second language (I work with people in Germany, India, Mexico, and Brazil that I know of), but English is a requirement to work with my area. There are probably people in sales and support areas who don't speak English, but if they need to work with me they need a translator. (I'm lucky to be a native English speaker, but there is no reason I couldn't learn a different language)
if the person is incapable of, or unwilling to, read documentation which you think they should, you can ask them honestly about it, or ask your manager about it
if management feels this person is unqualified to be in their job, they can take care of the issue
"rtfm" or the AI equivalent is being snarky while dodging the issue that you should just talk about, which is that you think this person is asking you too many questions
if they didn't rtfm they are not being respectful of your time. unless you are literally first-day brand new, you should not be approaching a mentor for help getting unstuck without an answer ready for "what have you tried?"
> if they didn't rtfm they are not being respectful of your time
Yes they are. "RTFM" may be an angsty insult thrown around in some toxic open source projects, but it's rude and inappropriate for an actual working environment where you're supposed to (and being paid to) help others. Most time spent at a company at a normal job is collaborating with others.
Your time is not so valuable that you cannot use it to make other people and the company successful, and when you're on the clock, that time belongs to the company anyways, who would likely prefer you do what's best for the company, rather than yourself.
That said, "what have you tried so far" is a good question to ask, too, to coach your colleagues on how to find info, and to get context on what would be retreading their steps.
"Collaborating" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and you're making a lot of silly accusations and presumptions. As a boss I'm not paying one employee to waste another employee's time, and I'm not paying them to teach each other when the answer is in the manual.
The question is whether one employee's time is more valuable than another employee's time. One employee answering another employee's question expends two people's time. If the answer is in the book or on the first page of google, it is wasting one of those employee's time, and that is the boss's money. If the employee asking the question makes ten times as much as the employee answering the question, and it saves him 10% of his time over flipping through the manual, it's a wash. If both employees make the same amount, or the other person even makes less, it is obviously a waste.
This is simple.
RTFM isn't an angsty insult. It is a suggestion because I am not going to answer your question if it is in the manual.
> As a boss I'm not paying one employee to waste another employee's time
Yes you are: specifically, your job as a manager is to make the company and your people successful. The way that is achieved is through collaboration.
If somebody is asking questions to a disruptive extent, then you reach out to them or their manager to have an honest conversation about it, and to level expectations about what requests for help are unreasonable.
> The question is whether one employee's time is more valuable than another employee's time
That is looking at the world as a zero-sum game. If you devote 10 minutes to help somebody, and they're 10 minutes more efficient at that task every time afterwards, then the company wins. It's not your time, it's company time, and most companies prefer that their time be spent on the most value-added thing, which is almost always force multiplication
> What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days?
not mine, no license, only chinese language on the eventual page, but has the beginnings of something beautiful
https://github.com/chenxuan520/lmlfy
I've been saying "ask chatgpt" when I don't think I have anything more useful to add.
>3) that talking to people is almost always the better choice when you get tempted to write a long reply.
indeed! but i would add (in corporate environments):
4) follow up your phone call/face-to-face chat with a brief email summary, so you have something in writing.
it has saved me countless times over my career.
I like to go straight to #4 and skip the phone call or face to face.
The bad PM on the other side does not have the same tools I do because they refuse to use the agents I've set up for them to ask questions about the codebase.
Most times if we just google it, we'd have no conversation. Human interaction over.
If you're just copying and pasting to some chatbot, is it really human interaction anymore?
Minimizing human interaction is a feature not a bug.
Google - even 20 years ago when they were good - is terrible. It often found something that looked good but was wrong in important ways. It often found things that were hard to understand.
There is still value in google first (even today with all the slop), but there is plenty of room for conversation after you have the background needed to understand the deep discussions that result after you have done some early research.
And? Why is a conversation needed?
"Why is a conversation needed?" he conversed, obliviously
Hey if you want to passive agressively send AI responses to people because you are disgruntled that they even asked and have decided you don't want to confront them directly, go for it.
But I think the point of the original author still stands, even in that context.
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
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…
And I think this is where one key argument on the page itself I think fails:
> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.
Yes, the person on the other side has Claude; but in many cases, their Claude doesn't have the same context as my Claude. Saying, "This thing happened in an area of the code I don't have any expertise in. Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess" is I think a valid time to copy and paste LLM output. [1]
The other thing to say is that it can be a "LMGTFY" style response; i.e., "Why did you ask me that, when you could have gotten a perfectly good answer from ChatGPT?"
[1] In the particular case I'm thinking about, it was a bug in an ocaml component; I don't know ocaml or need to know it; handing Claude's analysis 'caveat emptor' to the maintianers who do know ocaml I think is more helpful than not.
The problem is when all we get is the output, we don't know if their context is even valid. If they don't demonstrate any human understanding of their message content, we can't really take that on faith. Especially once we've got them copy pasting blindly in the past.
Working in support most of my life has shown me the vast majority of customer context is invalid when written by humans.
People don't read error messages. They'll include exactly zero context in their tickets. They outright lie. You can't take anything they say with good faith until you have a relationship with that individual and discern their competence.
I think some of this is a large amount of HN posters are working on software teams that have communicate pretty commonly, hence have a shared context. Once you start getting outside of that shared context knowing what information to exchange gets vastly more difficult for humans.
> Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess
I’m reading a bunch of game modding discords, and this exactly what happens, and what’s hated. Because Claude is also not qualified to assess it. Not by default. The modder’s Claude might be because of the extra context and steering, but the user’s produces usless slop, instead the actual log, and context what the user did is what’s helpful.
I’d say this (when you don’t understand it yourself) is pretty much the worst time to send AI output.
Quick edit: Yeah, I get it in situations like GP where the user is unhelpful, doesn’t want to learn, doesn’t care, and you also can’t tell them to fuck off. But just because the user gives Claude the context they should have given you in the first place, doesn’t make it good.
I agree that "The person on the other side has the same tools you do" might be technically true, I have myself encountered it often enough that they don't even use it at all.
People don't always want MY take on it, they just don't want to bother finding the solution on their own at all.
So in that case replying with a verbatim copy-paste of a Claude response has the same energy as a lmgtfy link.
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.
If they user types "x broken" or "i do y" into Claude or ChatGPT with no context, that's absolutely no better than just sending it to you.
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.
Not quite, or at least not in my experience.
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.
so, have AI in front of the 'submit' button in the bug tracker and done!
You'd think two decades of StackOverflow would've teached people how to ask a good question.
Alas, what it taught people was to describe others who want to help them ask better questions as "gatekeepers".
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 you haven’t asked questions how would you know? A question that gets incorrectly closed as a duplicate would never get seen by you.
Perception is reality.
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 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.
Not just the internet, but written work in general.
Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy.
Context is everything.
Btw, Claude code sent my first accidental AI email yesterday. I guess permissions changed? Before it could only draft. Uhoh, waiting for the onslop.
Hah, I guess we are not far away from the “Avogadro Corp” future - and that book was written just _before_ LLM, chatgpt and the attention is all you need paper :) That author had quite the insight
> Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy.
I can't imagine why. You have become a robot. You've automated yourself out of existence. And due to your consistently mindless replies, everyone now knows there's no point in talking to you ever again.
How is that healthy?
> Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots.
Relevant comic from 2014: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576
I take your point but I have two counterpoints:
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.
Well I mean… you didn’t come into this comment section saying “hello” and then waiting for someone to say hello back before commenting, right? And you don’t do that in emails either, right?
Because that would be super out of place, and you understand that intuitively.
That’s all nohello is about. It’s not trying to say “don’t be nice and say hi”, it’s saying “batch your hello and your question in the same message please”. Asynchronous communication mediums need an asynchronous communication style, it’s not that hard.
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, imo, & doing so doesn't tackle the crux if the original issue in any meaningful way.
> 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 the IM app's alert lighting up again. Extracting what they actually want from them feels 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.
there is a site like the OP one for this: nohello(dot)net
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
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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.
Everyone is also assuming that each person's Claude has the exact same context.
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).
LLMs have an equalizing effect.
> 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 people are not being clear, you can just tell them to dial that in too.
It's a false dichotomy to suggest the choice is either endless noise or no information at all.
> 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.
> 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.
please god no
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…
Really? How does Claude gather that context?
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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
Interesting to note the page also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"
Yeah it seems pretty LLM to me. Even the extra emphasis on stuff via bold/highlights is there. Kinda whack. Also the “angry” one is just not at all angry or offensive. Probably because there’s a limit to how rude Claude will get
Yeah, it's obvious enough on its own, but I'll add that Pangram also thinks it's 100% fully AI generated.
Hypocritical to say the least, given the message.
Pangram sucks
Pangram sucks as much as humans who think they're perfect llm generated text detectors, too.
As qarl2 wrote below:
>See how perverse this "I hate the way AI sounds" thing is?
>In the end everyone accusing everyone of being AI.
Which — as we all know — was trained on how humans write.
If it's not one thing, it's another...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k59d-xMvooA&t=205s
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.)
I've never seen a false positive from Pangram for human-written text of 300+ words.
Seems like you have now?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49372618
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49377954
People sometimes tell lies on the internet. This is definitely AI-generated.
Pangram sucks by seeding fear.
Say more? I’ve found it quite useful and not a source of fear. It’s effective at calling out disrespect (human to human communication where one party stops participating as a human), and has been effective for me in writing my own communications more crisply and carefully
Fear of being tagged as AI even if you write the text yourself.
For me personally, it's fear to use – and —. I have my versions of XKB keyboard layouts that handily map these but I don't use them anymore. Nor do I use emoji, because some 18-6 months ago AU output abused emoji.
I honestly don’t think those are going to get you flagged as mostly-AI or with high confidence. On anything longer than a sentence I’ve found the false positive rate to be perfectly reasonable.
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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.
The angry version is even more obviously AI
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.
See how perverse this "I hate the way AI sounds" thing is?
In the end everyone accusing everyone of being AI.
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I sure hope you wrote all those em dashes by hand you asked claude to remove in the latest commit in the repo. And all the ones on the website
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.
I asked it to write the initial version and then refined it later on, there was an AI review on it yes, but anyway, hope the point is made
Half the audience perceives it as AI anyway. Does it matter if you spend the time or do not spend the time to write it? The result is the same.
The angry one is just as bad IMO.
the parts you wrote aren't what people are complaining about.
I had the same feeling. The terrible metaphors smells like Claude.
It's pretty obviously AI written in parts at least.
ZeroGPT says 21.5% generated.
> especially the bullets
DS9 Garak "especially the lies" reference maybe?
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
AI;DR This is the broader symptom of a global toxic corporate culture.
We are afraid that one badly phrased message can hurt our reputation or even our jobs, so optimizing every message with softer wording, more political correctness, less directness is safer.
But the real problem is the culture underneath it. If people are constantly worried about how every sentence will be interpreted, eventually they stop speaking plainly, stop challenging decisions, and sometimes stop speaking up at all. So this is like attacking the consequences not the root causes. There should be some sort of measurement of how broken is a community or a company by letting a bot scan Slack/Teams and let the bot remind everyone the importance of lowering the fake index.
People don’t rely on AI because they’re worried about political correctness. That’s a pretty weak assumption.
Once per decade or so, a man decides to tell the truth, and gets his life destroyed.
I think you are assuming that people use AI to communicate with others because they don’t want to hurt their feelings: it’s likely hardly the case. The article here is just virtue signalling corporate version. Just tell the person doing it not to send you messages produced by AI directly and candidly. It’s clear you are not afraid of “hurting their feelings”. It’s rather weak to need a website to speak for you but maybe I’m wrong.
People need to internalize what Bernie Mac says here [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35rEpCur2E
Completely agree. I wonder how much this varies across cultures on the country level (like how people say the Dutch are blunt).
I think that indirectness emerges when a critical mass of people decide that they're better off in an indirect culture. i.e., thinking "nobody is straightforward with me, but that's worth it because it means I don't have to be straightforward with anyone else". And of course that's infuriating for anyone who would rather take the opposite deal!
Same but shorter: https://noslopgrenade.com/
This was recently on the front page as well https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
I remember back in the day when you could apply this to Google search results. When I was freelancing, I had a number of people I worked with who would fire off fast questions, but they would still pay me for my time. Then I would return what was essentially a Google search result shortly after. Yes, I would send my own answer, not some paste from Google.
But the point is. They had search, so why didn't they think to do the search? They had the same tools as I did. And yet regularly they couldn't think of the answer. I still deal with this with AI today. When you ask a question, maybe you're asking for the interpretation of the question by the person on the other side. And it's that interpretation that goes to the LLM. Or otherwise some filter of how that person thinks about the question differently than you do.
There's a couple pieces to this I've noticed.
First of all there's a skill to it. You learn how to phrase things, based on how other people probably phrased it. You learn how google modifies or ignores your queries... (or stops respecting modifiers...)
That comes with practice, and lots of it! I google so much that google regularly throws up the captchas (even when I'm logged in). I remember when Kagi first started, my friend sent me a link to their subscription, and it was like an order of magnitude less search than I did. (They increased it a lot since then.)
So it's skill issue, and skill is a function of volume. Most people barely ever google things. Which is the second thing I've noticed.
I'll often be with people, and they'll be like, "huh I wonder XYZ", and then just trail off, as if there was an implied "I guess we'll never know!" at which point I pull out my phone, bewildered, and simply look it up, and everyone looks at me like I'm an alien. (I do not understand socializing apparently.)
Translating a client question to an actual technical question is the hard part I guess. Google-fu is still a thing, and absolutely a thing you were/are getting paid for it seems.
Ever since my boss has transitioned to doing code reviews by AI and off loading his brain fully to AI, I could just use my AI to do the same to fix the things and I no longer have to deal with petty design arguments. I no longer have to deal with stylistic problems and that's great. When somebody offloads their communication to AI, it's easy to deal with. Meet with the same energy. Let the AI waste their time in the communication because the lack of effort on one side deserves the same type of communication-style.
As I wrote this i switch to the phrase communication-style because I realize that when he does his code review it's literally just a quick pass and a paste, but unfortunately when I do AI code reviews I review every single review item and push back individually on each item, research the items, write tests against what the review says and basically curate the code review I give out, which takes me 3 hours and then I have a boss angrily messaging me asking why the code review isn't done.
So on the one end I've managed to reduce toxicity in the reviews, but the tradeoff is toxicity in the expectation of a rubber stamp.
You should mention that if the personal input isn't required your boss should prioritize the work to add purely AI driven reviews and not waste valuable human time.
This either calls their bluff, or more likely, leads the system to break over time, so that your boss comes to understand that an LLM is not a human developer.
> The person on the other side has the same tools you do. If they wanted the generic answer, they would have gotten it in four seconds. They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement.
I beg to differ. Most of my life, as “the computer guy” — basically since I was a kid — I’ve always been surprised by how lazy people can be, and how they often prefer to ask “the computer guy” or some other human trusted source rather than work out the answer themselves.
There was even a website called “Let Me Google That for You” back when Google was a trustworthy source of answers, precisely to point out how easy it was to find the answer yourself. Obviously, that didn’t stop people from asking, and I don’t think LLMs will either.
People will continue to turn to “the computer guy” — aka you. And if your judgement is that copying an LLM response verbatim is the best answer, then yes, you’re fulfilling your role perfectly well.
Ironically, almost all the content on that page sounds AI generated to me!
Yup, I think the author needs to take their own advice and invest some time into putting it into their own words.
Yup, that's the biggest joke, the website is not worth the weight.
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.
> (1) Just read what it gave you, (2) then write your own take on it
completely agree except a crucial step is missing here:
(1.5) validate the accuracy/truth/relevance of it
your own sincere and human take on rubbish will still be rubbish. validating is indeed the more uncomfortable/demanding task here but if you omit it you become just a "human ai beautifier", and this will actually undermine the trust in you as a human. if you are going to omit validation just paste away, be honest and let it be obvious, you can then blame the ai.
I have been using the term "meat proxy" from Gruhn's blog [1] but was worried about sounding uncouth in an office setting. The "polite" version of this page solves that problem nicely. The "angry" version is funny, too.
[1]: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.
Oh sweetie... I've been getting paid to "Google things" for 26 years. AI isn't going to change that transaction. When I was in high school it was assumed that everyone would be tech savvy. That didnt happen and in fact my kids were LESS tech savvy because of smartphones and refined aka dumbed down consumer tech.
DontMakeWebsitesFullOfObviousAISlopThatComplainAboutUsingAITheIronyIsTooThickForMe.com
can I buy the domain?
Luckily I don't have this problem since I am so full of shit that one of the things I still enjoy the most is answering people with my own crap.
I recently wrote an analysis for a proposal my company was working on.
I did not use any AI. I had a couple conversations with agents while mulling some approaches, but they never edited my work nor did I have any chat open while I wrote. Every word was my own.
I notified my other stakeholders - "here's my analysis, none of it was written with ai". It sounds silly to say, and I worried others could take it as an attack. But I needed to communicate "This is a long document but its actually worth reading".
I liked what I wrote. The final author of the proposal liked what I wrote. All of my ideas made it in to the proposal. We landed the contract. Its a nice chunk of $ for us.
Its still worth putting the hours in.
I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are a lot of people asking obvious questions where they are just abusing your time and offloading work onto you.
Pasting AI output verbatim is the modern day equivalent of “let me google that for you.”
I used to feel that way until I realised some people I worked with were just actually quite terrible at Googling things. After that I realised that using a search engine is actually a skill I was taking for granted and one I was quite good at.
I did actually spend a few minutes searching for them and found multiple documents and forum posts - sent those over and they were super happy. A project that had been stalled for seemingly forever suddenly was done quickly.
Now that I pay for Kagi search I find myself doing this even more (especially since Google itself often doesn't return great results anymore) and I can quickly find good info way faster than most
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I beg to differ. I'll often do a short LLM session to figure out an issue and will use my existing knowledge and experience to drive the LLM towards some solution. When the answer seems legit enough, I'll copy it back to the one asking.
It's not that different to what we were doing back in the day when search engines were still useful. I often wound up replying with a link either to a stackoverflow question or a blog post. There was still a knowledge/experience component involved in evaluating if the proposed solution fits the original question.
Yeah but this is like the folks who just pasted the first hit or the first SO reply without even reading it and that sucked too.
Unfortunately nowadays you can't easily see if enough effort went into the reply.
same but shorter (already posted on hn): https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
Dont be a meat proxy! simple
Here's what Claude said:
There's a delicious irony in pasting dontpastetheai.com into an AI chat, and I choose to believe that's deliberate.
It's well written though. The parody answer in the middle is the sharpest part — "this mild Google search you could've done in 3 seconds" — because it nails the exact texture of unedited model output: the fake enthusiasm, the numbered scaffolding, the conclusion that concludes nothing. The tell isn't that AI was involved, it's that no human judgment was applied afterward. You can't fake the presence of taste.
The "guess who the AI will replace first" line is the real argument underneath the humor. If your contribution is indistinguishable from a prompt box, you've made the case for your own redundancy better than any automation study could. What survives is the part the page calls "the thing the model doesn't have" — your opinion, your context, your willingness to say "actually I disagree."
It's also a close cousin of something you've presumably thought about with Kindship: when agents message each other or humans, the same failure mode applies. An agent that just relays raw completions is exactly as useless as the coworker this page is roasting. The value is in the editorial layer — deciding what's true, what's relevant, what you're willing to stand behind. That's arguably what SOUL.md-style identity is for: giving an agent something to have an opinion from.
Were you filing this as cultural artifact, or is it aimed at someone specific in your orbit?
What is the value of posting this? If I wanted to know what Claude thought about the article, that option is at my fingertips at all times. You are wasting time and space.
Sure, here's a reply you can use.
Nobody is reading that
Is there anything you would like me to add?
Jesus that feels like it has even more claude-isms than usual.
just me or does this entire site/text read as 100% LLM generated? extremely ironic if so, they just pasted the AI.
I got that impression too. Absolutely reeks of LLM. Really irritating.
"Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't."
Excellent advice, with one very large exception based upon human foibles.
Occasionally there are people who do not ask things in good faith. They ask you a question not because "they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement". Instead they ask the question because they're then going to go to extensive lengths to find every possible counterpoint or opposition to whatever answer you give. In 2026 those sorts of people who will ask and then revert 30 minutes later, after you've carefully detailed a well thought out answer, that "ChatGPT says..." Add that for time eternal they will hold the fact that you answered something for them as a liability that you must atone for, and for which you are responsible for every ramification of their interpretation of your answer[1].
If you ask someone something and they just copy an AI answer, it's such a cop out that I imagine there are many cases where the person knows they're dealing with someone who "asks questions" like this. I have people who I give thoughtful, considered answers to, but then I also have people that I basically say "I don't know...Google it", because giving an iota of an answer always turns out to become something I regret.
[1] - This is not unlike helping someone with their computer. There are people who we love to help, but then there are people that will then ascribe everything that ever goes wrong with their computer for time eternal to that time you showed them a shortcut in Excel. CPU died six years later? Probably because of that shortcut.
Don't make the "Don't paste the AI website, please" site. You can rather use some kind of search tool to find one of the many that already exist. If it's not quite saying what you want, maybe just reach out to the author with an ask for them to update it. Then we get one place everybody knows about, rather than the many many sites (likely all AI generated anyway) that dilute the message.
Wow it’s actually that bad… I was looking for https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ but it appears people have co-opted the original phrase and out SEOed the original article… only to make a less concise, AI generated copy of it mimicking nohello…. https://dontbeameatproxy.com
https://dontpastetheai.com/angry/
Almost certainly written by AI
... 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.
no, but it does argue specifically against presenting people with large amounts of ai written text without reading it or checking that it makes sense.
It also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"
Actually tbh AI outputs can be pretty good and I have been surprised to see a lack of copy / pastes of them in the format of:
Unique human prompt + AI output which is useful and does a good job expanding on the prompt topic and which when pasted saves people the time of having to go prompt AI on the same topic (fully reviewed by a person before sharing it, to ensure the content has relevance)
> Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't.
This is just demonstrably false. It often IS very helpful. It's annoying that people continue to ask basic factual questions without taking easy steps to solve the problem themselves. I can't remember the last time I "asked someone a question" that it was possible to figure out for myself.
It's the people who keep asking basic, easily researched questions and then wait for you to explain it to them, without first trying to resolve it on their own, that are being anti social, not the people trying to help them.
This is much the same as when Google was relatively new, and people hadn't adapted to it yet. I would get asked questions constantly like "what is the name of the class that does X" and since I usually try not to be too much of a jerk, I would often stop and go open a source file or look in the docs for the person. I know there is a class, and I think I remember what it's called, but I need to go double check it. That usually meant googling for the docs, clicking the first result, and sending them that link along with the specific answer. Sometimes when they asked me I was frustrated about something else or just in a bad mood, and I would tell them to f**g google it, I am not their research assistant.
Ignoring AI is the same scenario as ignoring Google but worse. I am not your research assistant, and worse, there is an artificial research assistant standing by 24/7. If I have to paste something in AI and paste the result back to you I am not the asshole in this situation. If you go do the work to check yourself and it's not something you can just verify conclusively and you need to be sure it's not the AI fooling you, then I am more than happy to look at what you have and lend any expertise I can add to the situation.
>The person on the other side has the same tools you do.
No, they don't. I have access to heaps of raw information about customers and their systems that I can easily provide to my AI. That AI can also dig through all the communications we've had with other customers who have asked us similar questions, and draft a coherent on-brand response.
I often paste AI-generated responses with significant success, and all I have to do is make sure the answer isn't wrong and doesn't include sensitive info, and to remove a few extra adjectives and em-dashes that I don't want.
If the customer has access to my tools, that's a critical security incident. They contact me because I have access to info they don't, and unlike and AI, I can guarantee my response is valid.
As for people who copy/paste AI generated text blindly: That's firable in my books.
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.
Or no memories or history.
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.
“Talk is cheap, show me the prompt” is my go to request for dealing with people’s AI generated responses. Voice and tone varies, of course, depending on the recipient.
It feels like prompt(s) is where the actual thinking can be observed these days.
Well not sure if I agree fully. On one hand it does make a lot of sense to process and answer w/ your own words. But, sometimes if what the agent says make sense and you just want to handoff findings that is also fine - I legit don't feel the need to be super strict. In startup environment where people are more chill about this, this seems totally fine. It would be more frustrating in a corp/executive environment where thing have to get more structure before being communicated and passed around. Someone would probably be justifiably tagged as lazy.
But I think ideally agents should speak to agents when this kind of comm goes through. What a nice opportunity here ;)
I think a lot about a mismatch of effort these days. Here's an extreme example: I spend an hour drafting a doc outlining our engineering strategy for the next few quarters (or if we're in a startup, maybe writing up my product vision.) I share it with you to get feedback and comments. If you plug it into Claude and send me back an AI-formatted list, with sections like "the real insight (read this first)", we have very different ideas about where our value comes from and what deserves our effort, even though on paper I drafted a doc and you reviewed/expanded it.
I think it's fine to provide AI input if you disclose it, in which case you could encourage me to just plug it into Claude myself next time.
And I agree there's gray area: the AI output might be the result of a long conversation, shaped by careful prompting and context and guidance. The writing is AI generated, but the thinking is human.
Nice pov. I spoke mostly from an engineering perspective. When revisiting my corp career in executive position I agree! However when writing strategy documents and stuff like that I think that the AI is mostly corrupting the idea and making it extremely verbose. If someone manages to make the AI speak straight to the point with the vision based on what they want to communicate, that, to me is completely fine too.
What is kind of sad is that in the old times we would value a lot the folk that went and wrote a memo, put a lot of thought to it and so on.. Now literally you just plug claude in your notion and you have the document. To me, this kind of speaks about "the value was never really in the document itself"and more in the understanding of the doc. You can delegate a lot of stuff to the AI but you can't delegate understanding. So when you're presenting it to the exec committee, or circulating it, does not matter what claude/gemini/gpt wrote down, it matters if you understood it, agrees with it and understand that this represents your positioning.
What I see w a lot of juniors, on the other hand, is that people really just copy and paste or shallow understand what was wrote. Delegating too much like that removes the human-seed and makes it kind of worthless
If I spent an hour or two going back and forth with an LLM, I will write my understanding of the issue, and what I think it means for us. Then at the end I'll put "This is what [llm name] said:" and paste in the detailed ai summary at the end. I think that is the most honest, and effective way to do it.
Before an LLM, I would have worked for much longer, then written the same short description, but without the detailed summary at the end. The llm output is really just extra clarifying info I never would have bothered to do on my own. By clearly marking it, I give people the option to skip it and just trust me.
We really do live in an age of hypocrisy in pretty much every area of life. Of course it gets exhausting. Everything feels fake - movies, emotions, ambitions, even people themselves. For me, it’s important to keep my own identity and interests. And that’s not just about AI.
To "They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement." actually I'd ask even for more than that:
For any given <subject> I'd want:
- Your context - your taste - your judgement - clarify what bet <subject> encourages to support - be ready to elaborate your thesis of that bet
With that we have the basic complete building block that used one after another can model a basic lifecycle of a dialogue that can make progress towards something (a goal, a mission, something useful)
It sounds like you're approaching this narrowly for how you specifically communicate in your line of work, and not really thinking of the broader spectrum of how people communicate professionally.
If people provided me the information you just listed, it wouldn't help me at all in what I do.
Sometimes a customer emails asking a question answered by the documentation. I am not paid to paraphrase the documentation, I am paid to get customer requests out of the door quickly, so I'll be sending links to the documentation. If AI gets that request out of the way faster, good.
I see you point. You are helping them to connect dots and get unstuck. The case I've raised is actually generic and not specific to one domain. But you can say is scoped on how expert-to-expert can make progress. Or how "precision people" communicate because both agree they are putting hypothesis to the test and there will be one that is a winner (hence "the bet").
I have non-English speaking coworkers that use AI to translate.
This just comes as Karen-like behaviour: shaming people for using a tool in a way you don’t like.
No way this individual is fun at parties!
I enjoy, when arguing with friends, dumping an AI wall of text supporting my position and immediately following up with "What, no response? Argument over, I win."
> If you don't have anything to add, it's okay to say so. "No strong opinion here" is a real, helpful reply.
This is really useful, I wish more people would understand this: you don't have to have an opinion on everything. In fact, you probably shouldn't have an opinion on most things.
My own take on the AI issue: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/
> It's a great drafting partner
This I have been doing a bit. I strictly asks it to never give me suggestions but raise questions, concerns, tell me if it feels if something can be better, style-wise or otherwise without giving me those options.
And a bit of other overall feedback requests.
And if the model adheres to this and doesn't jump the gun, it indeed works quite nice. But it often jumps the gun, forgets, doesn't give a f- about my instructions, or whatever. Maybe more robust local models will better.
I read this somewhere: "send me instead the prompt you used to ask the AI to tell me something, so I know what it was that you wanted to say"
Ironic comment of the post.
This resonates. Had this in the start of the year with clients sending me their “research”, which, of course, was just a Deep Research result. Lead me to send this article when I work with folks: https://www.marcia.no/words/etiquette
I like to think it helped, but likely what helped was that nobody seems to use Deep Research anymore, haha.
While I agree with the sentiment it seems unnecessary for things like this to have their own domain name. Surely a blog post would cover this?
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The article says they could have asked an AI themselves, but that is missing that I may have an agentic context with exactly the right information to answer the question well, which they do not have. For example because I worked on something closely related. Such an agent output is very useful, and taking the time to rewrite that to a short personal answer is not always worth it.
Your agentic context is still going to shit out 3 pages where a sentence would suffice. Use AI all you want, and then WRITE THE ANSWER IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
If I’m answering your question, and you are not directly paying me for being an information desk, you are definitely getting the AI reply.
In that case why not just say you'd prefer not to answer and move on? They're asking for your input, not AI input - if you'd prefer not to contribute literally just say so.
This is like an earlier internet era when it was common for people to just copy-paste directly from other websites into a forum response.
Give them a second brain so they don't bother you with silly questions: https://github.com/amaldini/maldalang/blob/main/Examples/Age...
> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.
Strictly speaking, not true. I have Gemini Pro; my friend doesn’t.
Similar in spirit: https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/, discussed a few months ago [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389570
I can really only imagine the social context you would want to use this response in would be inappropriate / anti-social. If you had a well-meaning work colleague send you something AI, sending this back is kind of not a good look. If it's meant to be an education piece we got the memo...
What if English is not your first language and you are afraid of sounding silly when you email or text someone?
Ask the ai to point out the egregious mistakes only.
Especially today, I will prefer your slightly funny English to something that feels like AI.
And personally I do Support for people around the world and I often ask people to write in their native language.
Then I can translate myself and if the default ai translation gets something wrong I can add necessary context to improve it - which I can't really do if the only thing I get is the bad ai translation.
How did people do it before AI? Spellchecks have existed forever. Also, people have the ability to improve, so if you offload all your work elsewhere, you will never improve.
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.
Don’t use a calculator, either.
How will you learn if you don't practice?
You write your reply and ask the AI to fix the spelling / grammar for you. It's really not the same thing
Create new chat after step 2, then ask AI to fix the spelling / grammar of those three sentences
I also suffer from this! But it's called growth. You will not improve language skills if you are too afraid to practice them
And in my experience, us Brits, and USA folk, we tend to be quite understanding of broken English
If you respond to me with slightly "off" english, I at least know it was a fellow human who wrote it and I will act accordingly.
خب، در آن صورت، من وقت می گذاشتم و متنی را با دست می نوشتم و دقیقاً همان چیزی را که نوشته بودم از طریق نرم افزار ترجمه ماشینی اجرا می کردم.
Да, тоа изгледа како среќна средина.
det sker nogle gange! når man er ny til et sprog, det kan være forskrakkelig at skrive i et professionelt område. Men det er bare en del af dine udvikling - du kan sagtens skrive på hvilken sprog når som helst, og de kan bruge deres værktøj til at forstå det, du siger.
Der skal kom et tid hvor du skal tale på en sprog på dit kontor. Uden hjælp. Du har bruge for at øve dig, og folk er alligevel pænere end du tror.
(this being written in a foreign language I am learning is part of the point)
Use it to rewrite your OWN thoughts, or translate it to english. Not bloat with phrases sounding fancy but carrying no meaning
At this point I would hold that silly sounding message in a much higher regard than I would hold AI slop.
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The premise of the article is that everyone has access to the “same tools” but that’s glossing over the specialization inherent in a specific expert’s harness config (memories, skills, rules, repos, etc) that produce actually helpful responses (eg engineer’s view vs product manager’s view).
Very ironic this page is full of AI text
Unless I'm your research assistant, why would I be asking AI questions for you when you could do it yourself? If you need an answer I already have I will gladly share it with you. If you need my help to find an answer, then tell me that and I gladly will help.
The inverse of this is. Don't ask me a question a 9b llm could have answered.
If you are getting blocks of llm text perhaps it's because you don't deserve their input and could have satisfied your query by not making it someone else's problem.
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.
Does anyone else think the angry version reads like AI? “Here’s what you just did”
Here for once is something HR can actually do to be useful, make an internal campaign around do’s and don’ts of AI in the workplace. They can add how clients don’t pay us to type things in a box for them either.
Had an offshore dev respond to me with copy pasted Claude response for the first time the other day.
My reaction was of immediate visceral disgust.
I can say in no uncertain terms that I do not care if your English is completely broken. I prefer that over AI slop. You will not improve your writing and language proficiency if you do not practice them! If you do not care about your language proficiency then you have zero business doing offshored work.
The answer was also wrong. I pointed Claude to the micro service repo in question and asked it myself. Got a different but correct answer, after verifying it myself.
Their code is so trash I wonder if we’re even using the same models. Every PR I need to go over it myself and have Claude refactor and restructure everything. Claude generates decent code that can be made great with just a few iterations. I don’t even think these guys are running the code to test it, let alone read it. Just slop and ship.
Can’t rely on them to understand the code or even answer simple questions about it.
What is even the point of all this?! AI has made me personally more productive but overall it’s still a net negative because when you’re a “-x dev” the force multiplier from AI is overwhelming and soul crushing to everyone around you.
The "good" news is you won't have to deal with this much longer. Claude, which this person basically admitted through their behavior, will replace 99% of the offshore devs in the next couple years. Then you won't have to get the ick from talking to them and they can go back to having no real economic prospects in a 3rd world country, and most likely lose the social and economic standing they had from having a good job.
I know what people from their country think of the people from mine so I won’t be losing sleep over it.
Or you’ve got it backwards. Claude et al. with offshore developers to fix hallucinations and verify answers will replace onshore developers.
You can’t fix hallucinations if you don’t even know what the code does. In my experience working with dozens of firms, offshore do not give a single damn about understanding. Frankly, their job security rests on nobody understanding what the code does. If they can inflict the brain damage on your organization so they can keep billing you in the future they will absolutely do it.
Oh a lot of onshore developers are going to be gone too.
I think I've worked with close to 200 software engineers close enough to get a good understanding of their abilities in my 20+ years in the industry. I think the current version of claude and chatgpt are more effective at writing code than about 85%, maybe up to 95% of them. That is to say, if you let me hire any of them for the cost of my Claude Max + Chatgpt subscriptions ($400 a month), I would probably hire less than 5% of them at that cost. I get more done, and with higher quality using Claude by myself than I would with a team of 50 average software engineers, and it takes less of my time to do it.
The industry is going to get rocked.
I think a company that right now has 10-20 full time software engineers will have 2-3 in 5 years, and realistically 2 of those 3 aren't necessary to get the coding done, they are there so you have coverage over vacations and redundancy when someone leaves.
The only reason I think offshore is going to be completely eliminated is it's too high friction to work with them. They are far away, you have to hire a firm to manage them which means hiring a manager on site as overhead, and they are awake when you are asleep (or pretending to be awake when you are awake).
I was recently listening to a podcast about mentalization theory therapy methods for BPD .. for a friend .. Mentalization being the activity of understanding whats going on in other peoples minds, or in ones own. And they idea of pseudomentalizing or "pretend mode" was put forward, where a person looks or sounds like they are .. engaged in mentalizing communication, but are actually checked out. Then I started to think about all the AI slop going around .. and the phenomenon, this meme site is responding to, or AI posting responses.. and I wondered, is this a symptom of.. a global society wide phycological functional deficit, where A) we're none of us communicating as if there is people on the other end.. and B) we're not thinking about our own minds, and taking time to understand things..
[edit] to extend the connections The charm of a messaging board like this is bringing "join attention" to a topic, not just sharing separate monologs.
And also, always wondering if something was written by a human or statistically generated could be seen as Epistemic Hypervigilance, leading to stress, and loss of epistemic trust. This could reduces opportunities for taking on new information of feedback, and cause rigidity and isolation.
> Don't Paste the AI, please
You're gonna need a stronger language. Why do you think people love AI? If I have to think and god forbid read the response I might as well live in the woods or something
Linked a the bottom of the post is the angry version https://dontpastetheai.com/angry/
Verbatim AI responses to my PR review comments drive me up a wall
Disagree - most people aren't bothered to ask AI and have a conversation with it, they will go to you to get an answer so they have someone to blame when it's wrong.
I think this text also applies well to code written using an LLM.
They did not read AI output, they will not read that page either.
Fits the topic :) https://nader.io/posts/ai-dr/
I want to mindlessly copy-paste this link to so many people rather than think for myself on how to respond to them.
We need a dontpastethedontpastetheai.com to get ahead of this.
I find it shocking this needs to be said.
Of all you’re doing is copying and pasting anyone else’s stuff, then you’re adding little/no value. You should be paid nothing.
@dang this is both an obviously AI-generated post and also versions of it have been posted ad nauseam over the past few weeks/months. why no flag?
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Please don't do this here.
Sure. While we're tone policing can we put an end to the ad nauseam (unintentionally ironic) regurgitation of "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it" please?
I agree that such repetition can be annoying, like anything that's repeated too often. But your GP comment crossed further into guidelines breakage than most of those do.
A much better and straight to the point example is https://noslopgrenade.com
Similar in spirit to my site, https://stopcitingai.com
People are doing this? Wow, I'm sorry folks.
One trend that I've noticed recently is that I find myself discussing things with an LLM through a human proxy.
I don't really seem to be sent very much unfiltered AI output - do other people? I'd love to hear horror stories.
> AI output - do other people?
I've seen it on HN, such as comments where someone asked a question about some animal's habitat, and someone else responded back with Claude's answer (labeling it as such). Personally, I thought the AI answer was helpful in the absence of anyone else providing a better source link (which would have been better, sure, but apparently me and everyone else who saw the question couldn't be bothered to go research it/report back).
I agree that AI text 1) should always be labeled, 2) can sometimes be bad, and 3) real sources/writing are better.
A common retort is "If we wanted an AI answer we could have asked the AI" - maybe, but A) realistically most of us aren't even going to switch contexts in a case like that to go ask an AI about the animal's habitat (even easier than googling), even if we may be interested in the answer, and B) Instead of having every user use a tiny bit of electricity, etc. to generate duplicate AI answers, we can do it once.
I wish the author lived by the same principle, seeing how the text on the webpage is pretty evidently AI-generated.
as far as I can see, the author is not copy/pasting the AI output as answer to a question.
> The world is filled with people that don't want to read or think about things
Ignore them and move on with your life.
I don't understand the need of need "Satire, mostly." at the bottom, are opinion on things so dangerous?
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
The problem to me is, if people slowed down enough to carefully review and also rewrite model output in their own words (even if we're not counting code output), then what you have is a tool that probably makes you slower overall instead of much faster. I don't think that is a bad idea per se, but it is generally the opposite of how you're expected to perform with AI tools.
Related:
Don't Be a Meat Proxy: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
No Meat Proxy: https://nomeatproxy.com/
How to Passive-Aggressively Shame People Who Use LLMs Selfishly: https://joshmoody.org/blog/selfish-ai/
AI;DR: https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/aidr-ai-didnt-read
AI;DR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336573
I don’t think it’s that Sol loves to cheat; rather, every GPT model since 5.4 seems to have had that tendency.
Perhaps you meant to reply to a different post?
https://noaislop.net/
I wanted to suggest just not talking to people who do this, but apparently you get paid to talk to them.
"written by a human, on purpose."
idk about that
Sorry this website is too polite.
DO NOT FUCKING PASTE AI RESPONSES TO ME, EVER, PERIOD.
When someone tells me they "talked to Claude" they sound retarded. Just tell me you looked into it, and I fucking swear to god if you just took what Claude said verbatim and do not understand the problem then you are a cunt and I will stop working with you.
When someone pastes LLM output in chat I completely ignore it. I will just continue the conversation as if they said nothing and silently mark them as cretinous in my mind.
This is not up for debate, you will talk to me in short well formed sentences and get to the fucking point or you will fuck off
I like this comment so much I checked out your profile. Turns out I just like the cut of your jib.
I loved this comment more than I should have hahaha
can relate, happening everywhere, Ideas and personal opinions matter more than ever.
Recently, We conducted a hackathon and saw a lot of folks coming up with the same ideas, AI :)
This is a sidenote, but I really like the design of the website. It’s very tasteful.
Pasting AI slop is a strong signal. It tells the world "I add no value. I am a proxy for ideas generated by others". It's sad to see people I otherwise respected debase themselves.
I'll say this clearly. Using AI for writing is bad. Don't do it. Ever. If you can't formulate a coherent thought yourself, just don't. I don't want to hear what the LLM said. I want to hear what you said. Loudly proclaiming you have nothing to add is a strange flex. Just stay quiet.
The point is valid but I'm 90% sure the delivery was ironically AI generated.
Thanks for sharing my little rant again <3 we are looking for translations too!
And in general do not use its words as your own. Its words are its, not yours.
What if i have used the AI, it answered, but I don't understand the answer?
If you don't understand the answer, don't answer somebody else with it. You're attaching your name to whatever you copy-paste to people, and if you don't understand it there's a chance it's complete nonsense. Save yourself the embarrassment. If you don't know how to answer somebody's question, just say "I don't know".
Worst case you just ignore it. Best case there is something useful in it. Shrug.
sometimes I get asked stupid shit they can figure themself really so in quotes I do like "This is what gpt-6 luna gave me:" [quote]then in quote the almost full AI answer.[quote end]
You see a lot of his on reddit and i resort to just scan it like a trash
Nah.. people will start to check for 'watermarks' first...
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.
It literally takes you more effort to get an LLM answer, and if it doesn't, it's not really a dumb question, is it?
my favorite tell is when a pasted answer opens with 'Great question!' — you can hear the model clearing its throat before the human even types.
Awww... Soz. Is that not so good for your model training!
The funny thing is: this website reads like AI.
No. Don't ask a question that AI can answer.
How many of those websites do we need?
Ironic for this to be full AI Slop.
"Angry" version is clearly 1-to-1 ai output. I think I prefer dontbeameatproxy
that's the joke, isn't it?
this is equivalent to nohello.net/en/ club, deserves to be in pinned in every messaging app
Weirdly, this post speaks for everyone.
Just sent this to my CEO - thanks!
It's the modern era lmgtfy
The site owner me doesn't work with incessantly helpless people. Good for them.
I do. "They all have the same tools as I do" is exactly what's infuriating. They either blatantly don't use them, or are too incompetent to do so effectively, which would track.
I have been making an effort to provide an "AI;DR" section as well, even before the term existed, because of brevity. But sending along the full(er) text as reference I think is perfectly fine in such cases.
Don't be a meat proxy.
Don't be a MEAT PROXY
i recently created https://needsmoresalt.org/ with a similar intent
figuring out the most useful epistemic and conversational norms around AI in work communication is still a work-in-progress.
there's times when "go talk to claude a bit and then get back to me with a more precise question" is reasonable, and other times where it inhibits learning and culture.
similarly, there are many occasions where i don't mind quoted AI with a human precis.
the most objectionable behaviours are not that different from pre-ai ones.
don't copypasta stackoverflow code without understanding it. don't submit PRs you can't explain to a colleague. don't waste time asking people things you can easily figure out. don't send unreviewed work to people expecting them to figure it out. don't quote authorities you don't understand.
all the same stuff applies to AI, but AI seems to have expanded the scope and scale of the bad behaviours, making the need for better defences more pressing.
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This site is AI slop.
Yes - lazy AI answers from generic AI are lazy. Don’t do that please.
But this leading statement is not necessarily true:
“The person on the other side has the same tools you do”
Aren’t we all imbuing our AI with our own thought patterns? Folks I speak to spent a tremendous amount of time building tooling and (hierarchical) context around LLMs such that the output it produces is definitely not the same as what the stock model produces.
Did they really just say "genuinely useful" in a post decrying the blind copy-pasting of AI text? (it's a strong Claude indicator)
Was going to say the same but then decided to search first if someone beat me to it. Sigh.
Feels like a lost cause. You can’t just push a highly addictive slop machine in front of users and then blame them for using it.
There's a very deep irony in this page being a bunch of pasted LLM output.
This site feels like AI slop, and it’s also not something I’d be able to send without feeling like asshole.
I found this blog post to be much better at getting the point across: https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/
“Paste this AI generated text to your coworkers telling them not to paste AI generated text to you.”
> A short reply from you beats a long one from a model, every time.
Disagreed. Bad writing from a chatbot beats worse writing from its user every time - regardless of length.
One reason we have so much bot slop is the attractiveness of bad-writing bots to the many people whose writing is even worse.
the angry version is... not very angry.
And doesn't seem very constructive either.
Don’t link the AI slop, please
pencil pushers gonna pencil push
I don't see why I should have to "uglify" or compress needlessly the perfectly distilled analysis, just because people associate perfect formatting and details with AI slop.
what a complete waste of time
Beautiful theme. Author has style.
Slop style.
My response when someone is pasting AI is “Thank you for the tokens”.passive aggressive - effective. Feel free to use it
personally i like editing much more than writing (the scare of the white page or how it was called…)
and i detest ai slop
so my solution is to speak combined with an ai cleanup like macwhisper or wispr flow of all the uhs and ahs and repetitions or rephrasings etc
you can even use ai to pretend a conversation or interview style
then i have stuff to edit
boom
That's pretty much why I built WhisperShortcut: ⌘1 dictates to the clipboard, and a second shortcut handles AI cleanup. That keeps raw transcripts and edits as two separate steps instead of a black box. https://github.com/mgsgde/whisper-shortcut
Wish there was another version more "angry" than the angry version
Correct. If I wanted slop, I'd ask the slop generator.
uff.. HN is degrading rapidly. (Yes, also all your comments about "AI SLOP SPOTTED, AI;DR". Regurgitating the same crap over and over again.... pff...)
"written by a human, on purpose."
Meh. Ask the agent to be succinct.
Make it a standing rule.
lmao love it. Although I'm guilty too though
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>Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't.
OMFG! Even the "don't send AI answers" page text is fucking AI slop.
Can't they be bothered to write 200 words of their own?
coming from a site pasted with ai :)
might be the case, but as soon as you have read and agree with it, that doesn't make it any kind of "ai slop" :) Is it relevant or helpful? Can I verify it? Are main questions IMO.
Whether you agree with it or not has no effect on whether it's AI slop or not. Outside of math or coding, domains in which there is objective determinism, any AI outputs are slop to the extent they purport to represent the AI's subjective opinion about something. So, an AI proving that 2+2=4 is not AI slop because it's just a formal proof, whereas an AI writing a missive about how 4 is its favourite number would be slop whether you think it has good points/agree/disagree with it or not.
The fact that a site purporting to roast AI slop is itself AI slop is surely somebody taking the piss, and the fact that it has 700 upvotes and is the top story here means that people either simply don't read shit they upvote, or the brainrot is already fully established on HN.
I only read the "Do this instead" section and it sounds eminently reasonable, if not common sense.
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I disagree strongly. Nearly every time this comes up it seems people are not doing a good job giving their AI context. My AI environment is REALLY context aware based on a whole bunch of things I have access to that others don't. When my AI respond to a question it is full of information the person asking the question just didn't have access to. You can also train your AI not to give a wall of text but to give very concise answers. This whole web page stinks of being a total skill issue with using AI. I much prefer AI answers to my questions ( most of the time the answer is going straight into my AI, so I don't really care if an AI generated the response, I'd probably trust it more.). This is all about you build your projects, the documentation you build, how that is shared, it means many questions don't need to be asked because everyone has access to good context whether its built things, things coming up, ideation, market research, product research, or whatever stage you are at. Build pathways for context to move around and go through stages. Not only that, my guess is everyone is mostly reading AI responses to things ALL the time anyways, what difference does it make if you get to ask a question and get a response from another AI with a different context? None. Avoid these kinds of sites as they lead people astray. Much like the advice "Share the prompt, not the response" ... absolutely ridiculous, different context means you get different responses with the same prompt. If you want to pursue something that's actually useful, think about context engineering such that questions largely don't need to be asked.
down voting this is silly, just shows how badly people are buying into this. It is misguided. On the other side of things I guess it's good not everyone is working out how to be super productive with AI.