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Comment by gharper | Hacker News Reader

It’s the conversational equivalent of “Let me google that for you”.

I think the issue is that about half the conversations in my life really shouldn't happen. They should have Googled it or asked an AI about it, as that is how I would solve the same problem.

It wouldn't surprise me if "let me Google that for you" is an unstated part of many conversations.

The big issue here is that a lot of company IP is proprietary. You can't Google 90% of it. And internal documentation has never been particularlly good, in my experience. It's a great leverage point to prevent people from saying "just google it" if I'm dealing with abrasive people, at least.

It is, which I'd argue has a time and a place. Maybe it's more specific to how I cut my teeth in the industry but as programmer whenever I had to ask a question of e.g the ops team, I'd make sure it was clear I'd made an effort to figure out my problem. Here's how I understand the issue, here's what I tried yadda yadda.

Now I'm the 40-year-old ops guy fielding those questions. I'll write up an LLM question emphasizing what they should be focused on, I'll verify the response is in sync with my thoughts, and shoot it to them.

It seems less passive aggressive than LMGTFY and sometimes I learn something from the response.

Instead of spending this time, it is faster, simpler, and more effective to phrase these questions in the form "have you checked the docs and what did they say?"

It's the conversational equivalent of an amplification attack

I remember reading about someone using AI to turn a simple summary like "task XYZ completed with updates ABC" into a few paragraphs of email. The recipient then fed the reply into their AI to summarize it back into the original points. Truly, a compression/expansion machine.

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