Hacker News Reader

Comment by hennell | Hacker News Reader

Personally my favourite feature of the new ai world is not when I use it directly but it's when one of my managers uses it to try to fix a problem, then issue to me their findings and I have to defend my process to someone who understands neither my process, their suggested solution nor often the problem they're solving in the first place.

View on HN

It gets worse when they challenge your solutions by feeding it back into the LLM and sending the response on to you, arguing with an LLM is exhausting, arguing by proxy with a human parroting its responses is excruciating.

On the plus side when they do this they can't flood your calendar with those "quick chat" meetings because they know they won't be able to hold a conversation on the issue beyond the first minute.

This happened to me on a paper I submitted recently where it was clear the reviewers used AI. Revising a paper based on LLM review is also exhausting, haha.

I've seen coworkers do this to each other when their expertise is in different domains.

I find that AI can be incredibly useful, but just text dumping its output into a conversation feels insulting.

True, but this was a problem long before AI (read this article, met this guy at a conference who told me x, my boss said blah)

AI probably exacerbates it but crappy managers exist regardless

Before maybe you had to deal with someone hiring schetchy consultants once in a while, but now the managers have a limitless well of dubious answers to draw on at any time.

But now you have a new tool in the upmanagement toolbox: subtlely tell them to implement their idea in prod with Claude Code, and see it for themselves.

Yeah dealing with this now, where my CTO is shipping features that are producing plausible results but just wrong. So, now I gotta spend all day explaining the math behind certain features to her, and she copies and pastes it to Claude.

Fight fire with fire. It's over the top passive aggresive, but it works. Whenever I get a JIRA ticket that was clearly AI generated and is 10x too many words, I tell Claude to respond to that ticket with my actual real opinion or suggestion, but make it 10x more words.

Sometimes I get a lot of "Do you want me to work up how the UI will look."

They give me what they'd like the UI to look like, but none of the actual content fits outside the one situation they're thinking of.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thankfully where I work now everyone is good about taking no for an answer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com