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Comment by mathw | Hacker News Reader

The only way to even start to counter that is to make it a firm company policy that if you use an LLM to hallucinate any documents you absolutely must thoroughly review them yourself before you send them to anybody else, and that you are still responsible for the quality of LLM-generated content.

Getting an LLM to vomit out a bunch of documents and sending them straight to another colleague is absolutely unacceptable behaviour.

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This is going to just run up against the insanity that is tokenmaxxing every moment of the day. When people are incentivized (upon pain of firing) to get the LLM to vomit out as much as possible, they're hardly going to stop and ponder if schlepping the slop over the wall is acceptable if the alternative is a pink slip.

Which is going to win?

We employees need to remember that most software projects fail. So the work we produce should have lower value than we give it.

We also need to be motivated to stay in our jobs.

Most developers like their projects and value their work. But the chances are that it's for nothing.

Many developers know they work on bad products (gambling industry, military, surveillance, whatever) and so it's here that they focus on their technologies, tools and frameworks rather than the work they produce.

"Agentic engineering" for example.

Id be curious to see what and how Googlers are doing with their 20% time.

The 20% policy at Google is effectively dead.

If tokenmaxxing wins in your company, your company is going to lose. There's an external reality out there, outside your company, and your company has to produce things that actually work out there. Hallucinated AI slop does not help you do that. It leads you to unworkable plans, and if the plans produce, they produce unsellable products.

If you're an employee in that situation, push back if you can. If you can't, put your resume on the street. (But that may not work, these days. If it doesn't, all I can say is ride it out as best you can, and try to maintain both your job and your sanity. How? I don't know.)

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