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Comment by sixtyj | Hacker News Reader

I would rather hear the answer “I don’t know. I had to look it up.” (And I don’t care what you have used as sources, as citing counts with norms/laws or in academics.)

If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.

Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)

That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.

The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)

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> Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

and what if i tell you i asked stack overflow?

Back in the day, you couldn’t ask stack overflow about your specific business or project. You were forced to build at least some level of understanding of what you were doing on the job or risk your lack of knowledge being obvious (and obviously holding you back).

What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.

Actually that's fine. StackOverflow, Reddit, HN are or at least were populated by people. Looking to them for answers is doing a survey of best practices for a topic and will at least tell you what is popularly true.

Asking AI sometimes gives you the same answer as AI is trained on these same forums, but not always.

Your prompt structure and/or inference bugs (which is a lot more common in smaller providers or local hosting) can change the answer AI gives.

And ofcourse, if there's low/no data, AI will still give an answer even though it's not in the safe zone.

Stack overflow or Claude or Wikipedia…it doesn’t matter.

We don’t usually tolerate copy-paste answers at school so why should it count at work?

Work is not school. Within certain legal and ethical constraints, at work we only care about results.

Hard disagree. If I only cared about immediate results, I'd just ask Claude myself, sure. But I care about developing people's judgement, longer term. And if they're just parroting back what Claude says, I'm not doing that.

Another approach is to refuse to hire employees with poor judgment in the first place, or rapidly terminate them if they display bad judgment after hiring.

If you assume that good judgement is an inherent attribute that can't be developed, that might be a sensible option.

I've found that it's a thing that develops over time with experience, though. And I want people I'm training to develop that skill rather than farm it out to an LLM that never gets it right.

I care about developing people's judgment, longer term. You care about developing people's judgment, longer term. Does capitalism, or the managerial-business class that only sees 6 months out?

I mean it was always easy enough to say "Hey not quite sure but I did find this post on SO, in case it helps"

> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.

What a waste of time. Do you treat your coworkers like students trying to do homework that you assigned?

> Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

I should be upfront about the use of AI when providing an answer. You in turn would learn that you can find the solution using AI yourself next time. You learn something and so do I. What is wrong with this interaction?

> That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.

And don’t get me started with doctors. I hate when someone just tells me to trust them just because they are a professional. If they are worth their salt then they can defend their position without using their costume or degree to intimidate me.

If the only thing people can do is regurgitate an AI agent than what good are they?

I don’t see an issue with quoting an AI and citing it. Are you defending the parent post’s position of rewriting the AI answer to hide the fact that you used AI to find the solution?

I’m not condoning simply taking the first answer that AI spits back at you and regurgitating that as a response. But if the answer is correct then there’s no need to rewrite it. I just feel that rewriting the answer is trying to hide the fact that you had to use AI to help you find the solution, which to me, is dishonest.

The fact that people vet the AI answer before responding is the value added not the process of rewriting the response to protect frail egos.

You should abso-fucking-lutely use sources and cite them when trying to answer questions.

What is this macho bullshit of pretending like you have memorized all information you might ever need and looking something up is a sign of inadequacy?

And yes Claude or whatever is just another source, to be verified just like any other.

No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).

Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.

But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.

Besides just not wanting to look insecure, there are good reasons to include sources, even in cases where you actually have the info memorized.

It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.

> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something. Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.

On the other hand, it's nice when someone tells you an answer is AI generated so that you can apply an appropriate level of skepticism to that answer. Maybe you can even reply to let the person know when inevitably the something they just "learned" was entirely bullshit.

Part of the problem with people sending text/screenshots right out of AI chatbots is that it suggests that not only were they so lazy that they went to a pathological liar chatbot instead of thinking about what you asked, but they likely didn't bother to review/fact check any of it

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