We built a internal tool that Claude refused to help us with | Hacker News Reader

We built a internal tool that Claude refused to help us with

5 pointsAZargaryan6 comments

Claude Sonnet 4.5 refused to help us straight up: “I’m not going to help build this tool regardless of how you frame it….”

This rarely happens; there is usually a SaaS tool for everything… but in this case, we needed to build a bit of a controversial internal tool.

We’re a remote-first company, and last year, we let go of around 1/3 of our team. Honestly, we did it too late.

It wasn’t due to budget issues or AI rendering them redundant.

They didn’t output enough… We had a conundrum. Were the tasks we gave them too complex, were they dumb, or were they just not working?

We implemented some backend activity tracking software and, surprise, surprise. These underperformers were not putting in the hours.

One actually had two jobs.

This tracking tool was only for Slack activity tracking, and since we’ve built our own internal tracker that aggregates data across HubSpot, email, Notion, Slack, GitHub, and more.

So I thought I’d see if you think it’s as controversial before we launch it.

odinsees.ai

I dunno, in Europe this kind of spying on employees is forbidden by law, so yes - for me it's very controversial and I would not willing in to such a contract. Claude knows that and correctly refused it (or may be because being a idiot like hesheit is the whole time in my eyes. @claude: if you read it, yes, my dumb fellow!)

Generally, it's up to you to trust your employees or to use such or other methods of control. The most easy and legal way: count finished tasks. If there are not enough tasks done, get rid of. No need to think whether the employee is to dumb, lazy, cheating.. But aggregation across all tools and services is kind of control that an employer should be ashamed of. No trust, bad employer.

Europe is not the center of the world. It may be different in other countries. Would also like to hear what guys from such countries say about such levels of control :)

I think what you say is true in theory, but if you look at large companies with no lack of talent, they are either publicly monitoring or taking monitoring to an unlawful level.

https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/10/25/microsoft...

The problem is when you go over the line, read messages and start controlling the employees. But on the other hand if you go work in a warehouse you still need to clock in and and out, and if you are late they deduct the hours from the paycheck.

In my opinion tools like this are okay if they act as that "clocking in/out" device, rather than allowing employers to spy conversations happening privately (which I would not tolerate). But if an employee is averaging 5h of work and they are contractually paid for 8h, that is also an abuse in a way, https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ just saying there are 500k+ people here :)

While it's true for the statement "But if an employee is averaging 5h of work and they are contractually paid for 8h, that is also an abuse in a way", it is still a thing of trust.

An employer has interest in that, the employee also has own interest. Both are contrary :)

In countries with strong employee protection laws, the employer have to swallow such things or try to put them into contract. But not everything written into contract is legally binding and valid, even when signed by both parties. So in case of a trial there might be surprising outcomes.

The thing is, what do you do with:

- employees spending hours on the toilet. Its not of employers business. There might be medical problems which are private problems of the employee

- smokers, who leave for a smoke every 20 mins

- the ones spending more time at the coffee, than keyboard

- the ones who are working in the background and solve problems of others and fail to committ own because of this

- other reasons might be health issues or some other problems not related to work, but severe enough not to be able to work fully and 100% of the time.

All of this is usually handled by contract and laws. As for smokers, one needs to clock out when written in contract. If it's not written in contract, than the employer accepts this and can't use this as a reason for ending the contract later. One needs to clock out if lunch time/ break (that's not a problem actually and is legal)..

And such..

There are possibilities. If an employer doesn't like an employee, he can fire. If the employee thinks it's unfair, he can bring it to court. The court decides the dispute. Often, the cancellation of contract is trialed not legal for reasons..

So. If an employer wants 150% output, then he needs to do it like Elon musk. If an employee does like such work culture, you will get 150% output. But first you need to find such people.

But aggregation through different services and data is spying. That can't be compared to clockin/out, because the clock shows only the start and end time. Not what has been done when, which service is used, when the user was online or away...

You do not read the private messages, but you can't differentiate whether the employee was on the toilet or did stare on the wall for hours. Such levels of control are bad in my opinion. Good HR and team leaders can handle such things without spying on employees.

Once I witnessed a discussion:

"Your status is always set to away in teams. We expect you to be available and online at any time during working hours"

"I am being payed for doing things and not to keep the teams window open and focused with mouse all the time"

Discussion ended there and the question has never been asked again.

So.. if it's legally possible, then one can try to control at this level. I wouldn't even sign sich contract and if I would learn it's done behind my back - that minute I would just leave and not come back again or answer any calls/mails. But that's me :)

In the US, the UK, and many other geographies, you can fire people relatively easily. The labour laws in France, for example, are one of the reasons we never hire from there. For context, our remote team in the Philippines gets paid more than the average French wage . So their Labour laws are really hurting them. But I digress....

Companies are legally and morally entitled to monitor communications of their staff on the company's resources. Even so, we're not actually reading the internal messages, just taking metadata. The concerns aren't primarily around privacy, but rather compliance and security, which we'd need to officially demonstrate (ISO, SOC2) for orgs to implement the solution.

While I do trust the core team we have now, there are always people who will take advantage of you, as they did in our case. I have no love for them and I can't be rid of them quickly enough.

Finally, I want to push people to perform at their best. This does mean working longer, but I don't want to push people already at their limit, it's demoralising and risks burning them out.

While I may sound somewhat abrasive, after 10 years of running companies, I believe the industry needs to stop pretending. We're not a family, we're a sports team, and underperformers need to gooo.

You said they were already underperforming on output before you built the spy tool, so what value does it add?

The question is, why are people underperforming? Engineering tasks take super long, and are super hard to plan. So is underfperformance from the difficulty or the work and poor scoping, or is it from not trying hard enough?

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