Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM | Hacker News Reader

Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

blog.yaelwrites.com

244 pointstheorchid139 comments

The subtitle is:

> I already did.

They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article.

This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this.

For the first case, the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point. People are more interested in helping those who have already tried helping themselves.

The second case is more of a social situation with an infinite number of explanations. Some times you have to read the room and realize that someone may not be interested in having those conversations with you. Some times it’s only in the moment (we all have bad days where we want to be left alone) but other times it’s a signal that they’re not interested in discussing this topic with you or maybe even anyone else.

I agree 100%. I've been the resident 'tech guy' among my friends and family for as long as I can remember, and I thought that LLMs would be the definite end to all 'blurry picture of computer screen captioned with "what should I do"' texts, yet that didn't seem to be the case. In fact, LLMs made it worse, as it actually made me seem more knowledgeable; I would be the one asking AI on their behalf and responding with beautifully formatted, easy to understand answers, encouraging them to ask me more.

I chuckled because, as a joke to express my frustration about this, I made a website called djfa.ai (Dude, Just Fucking Ask AI), which is essentially LMGTFY for ChatGPT. As one can imagine, the gimmick wore off rather quickly with my loved ones (turns out moms of nerds sometimes ask their children tech questions because they miss their voice). I ended up haphazardly turning it into my personal blog, which I sometimes choose to abbreviate and sometimes not on my resume.

I would never have made it in the first place had most of the people asking me questions been like Yael: seeking my informed opinion on thought-provoking questions they'd already researched. Going back to your larger point about the social aspect of it all, even among my wife and my social group, "just ask Claude" is almost the new "I don't really know" or "that's a tough one" when it comes to any sort of question. Almost colloquial in the sense that it isn't to be taken literally, but more as an indication of uncertainty.

>turns out moms of nerds sometimes ask their children tech questions because they miss their voice

This made me feel things. To anyone reading this, go hug your mom (or other sufficiently close parent) if you can

>turns out moms of nerds sometimes ask their children tech questions because they miss their voice

Thanks, I'll to remember this.

> encouraging them to ask me more.

This part is kind of on you. Editing before sending, or choosing which parts of the response to copy, is an important step.

> the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point

It's also helpful to the problem-solving and learning processes. For the expert, knowing what you've tried and how it didn't work refines the set of potential problems. For you, it's a free opportunity to get feedback on your methods from someone with domain expertise.

When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.

Something tells me people's milage varies based upon how they prompt the LLM. I spent about half an hour using traditional web searches to tackle a software configuration problem today, then about another half an hour poking around the system to see if I could find a solution, then about half an hour with an LLM. Not once was I told by the LLM to use the consensus solution of reinstalling the operating system even though it was clearly bumbling around much as I was earlier. (Eventually I decided to go with the consensus decision.)

I ran into a pretty funny instance just yesterday - I was upgrading my windows partition to windows 11 and I asked claude if there was any chance it could corrupt my linux partition in the process. claude confidently said that yes there was a known failure mode where if the recovery partition was not large enough for windows 11 it would silently resize it, damaging the neighbouring partition. it even told me what system command it used to do so.

I googled the command and when the gemini prompt came up I said that claude had told me it might be run during the upgrade and damage my linux partition. gemini said "there is no such argument to that program, the other AI is hallucinating, and here is the knowledge base article that probably caused it to go wrong", which was actually pretty impressive, and amusing in the way it used both the term "hallucinating" and the phrase "the other AI".

I actually hate reading posts that go “I can’t understand/fix this problem. Tried LLM…”

To me, such screams “I’m too lazy to do anything more than ask a LLM. I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas”

Show me you put a modicum effort and aren’t just looking to be spoon-fed the content from the first Google result that would have been found.

I get exasperated with the inexperience that I have run across for decades. Yes, I frobnicated the frobnitz, I transmogrified the bit twiddler, I wizzled the wobnosticator, (and this decade, I talked the three LLMs), and the problem still exists. What I really need to know is how the transmogrification affects frobnication, but no one has ever touched that configuration.

“Why would you even want to do that?”

I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given. Do you know or not? No. No one does.

I take a week to figure it out, I come back to the forum to post my response, and it’s automatically closed as off-topic.

*sigh*

> Why would you even want to do that?”

> I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given. Do you know or not?

That's pretty sad to hear, and that's the hardest thing about working with junior engineers (or nowadays, with LLMs). Someone made a wrong assumption that a thing is possible, gave the wrong instructions, or simply phrased things badly, and now that person (or LLM) is trying to solve the impossible task instead of exploring the alternative approaches.

If it's LLM, the solution is simple. For a human, I usually bypass them and go to their senior directly: "Hey, did you task jagged-chiesel to transmogricate the frobnicator? This is a pretty complex task and our transmogricators are not trally desinged to work on frobs. What was the task you were trying to solve? Perhaps it's time to look into fizz-buzzing instead?"

(Or alternatively, if I am feeling tired that day, I will simply say that I don't know rather than engage. Because working on complex tasks with someone with "I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given" attitude is an exercise in frustration and will likely increase amount of tech debt too)

So I went back to The Business and asked "why would you even want to do that?" and the answer is that it centers on business processes that I can't reveal due to NDA. Other technical people dismissing the problem with "why would you even ..." is not productive. Many, many times, I have indeed communicated the why to those I am seeking help from and they go silent. Telling them didn't help me solve the problem. Many times, the explanation is pretty involved and people-heavy and ... not important to solving the problem. And more often than you'd think, I'm just not allowed to tell you.

Now, if you think at the next level, perhaps you might suggest looking at the problem from an angle you've seen before; or that just occurred to you and hasn't yet become apparent to me. Or you happen to know an alternate product that provides something close to what I'm asking. Great, that's helpful!

Attempting to diagnose my client's or employer's asinine process - I have indeed already done that and it is indeed asinine, and not up for changing - is shortsighted, just like many of the neophytes I've worked with throughout my career.

There is a third case where the other party doesn't realize that the asker lacks the relevant experience to discern good LLM answers from bad answers for that topic.

Same solution as case one though - don't be afraid to say "Claude said X but that doesn't sound right".

Depending on the question that possibility can be quite rare these days. If you ask “How does x work in this codebase?”, it will read a bunch of files and give you a very likely to be accurate answer. If your using a platform without that context and ask it something more abstract, well, your mileage will vary.

Here's the problem, countering a lie or hallucination takes much more energy than asking Claude something and saying its true. Its the same as trying to fight misinformation on the internet, the amount of energy you have to spend to prove someone is lying or fabricating data is very high.

And having to do this on the corporate environment saps the energy and time of people that could be doing something productive by wasting their time answering a clueless person that asked an LLM about something they don't understand, got the answer they wanted (but that isn't real), and now are asking multiple people to prove it can't be done.

Here's an example, a PM decided they wanted to build a metrics framework, to track team success, with high level metrics. They asked claude to build such high level metrics (out of nowhere, these metrics don't exist), it happily produced hallucinated code that said it was collecting the metrics and the PR opened a pull request. Now we have to go there, review, find out is all bullshit and explain to the person that what they're trying to build doesn't exist.

So now we have to fight misinformation even on the clock.

Honestly, I think she feels that it’s a new way to say “GOFY.”

She’s a journalist, and, from what I can see, a pretty good one. Someone that is fairly used to being able to talk to very senior people.

I suspect most journalists get told to intercourse themselves, from time to time, but it seems “ask Claude” is a new way of saying it, and, whether it’s meant, or not, a subtle insult. The kind that people like her especially resent. The intimation that she didn’t do her homework. It puts her on her back foot, and I think it’s meant to.

Us nerds can relate. How often are we told that we didn’t do something basic, with the onus on us, to prove we did? For a newb, that’s understandable, but it’s a real slap, for experienced pros.

I fear that it's more insidious than that - that the questions the OP is asking are already things that the other person has decided (consciously or otherwise) that they no longer bother thinking about themselves and just outsource the effort to the nearest LLM

> So this isn’t an anti-LLM article.

It kind of feels like it though. We can be anti-LLM even though it's smart or helpful or whatever. It's reduced so many interesting conversations to this type of boring redirect to just "Ask AI"

>I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him

Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM.

>LMGTFY

I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that google results had a high chance of getting with "I'm feeling lucky".

If you've already done a bunch of research, and already asked the LLMs, when someone says "Honestly, ask Claude", you should be able to come back with what results you got to your question and what you need clarification on.

I've been doing programming and sys admin for 40 years. When I run a coworkers question through the AI tooling and talk through the answer with them, it's because my 40 years of experience tells me that's the next step.

I think the other alternative is that the senior guy thinks that the junior guy is working on a problem where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. "Just ask an LLM" can be interpreted as "if the AI can't give you a quick solution, it won't be worth either one of our times to puzzle out the technical details."

> Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM.

Just say "I don't know". It is simple and short.

Going to agree with you here. There's two types of "ask an llm." There's the "I don't know but whatever the llm said is probably right" and the "lmgtfy, did you even try?" Based on the post his exact quote sounds more like 1 but obviously some people deserve the 2 sometimes.

I once wrote a similar essay on this topic. When I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer: https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/

This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice.

Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!

Beyond mirroring the engineering practices that you yourself want to see other people perform, have you found any techniques to get people to … in short, do their job again? Understand context, understand what they did, why they did it, what they’re doing, etc.

The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it.

And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking points back and forth at each other feels equally harmful.

Are we really tolerating turning ourselves into LLM rubber stamps?

For me the trick was just leaning all the way into it. I had a residual idea that if someone sends me a 2000 line PR, 10 page design, etc., that this represents some concrete investment of time and effort that deserves my careful consideration. And it just doesn't anymore.

I have one project where there must be hundreds of pages of design proposals I have not read and will never read, because the author really likes having Claude generate complete design proposals based on incomplete understanding. So every week or two he sends me a new one, I spend 30 seconds skimming it, and then I tab back to Slack to ask him to explain.

I don't like working this way, but you know, I don't like doing rollouts either. It's certainly better than being a human rubberstamp.

That sounds like a fantastic way for a malicious actor or an unintentional prompt injection exploit to sneak into a codebase.

Perhaps you could explain how this is different from rubber stamping, if it’s just 30 seconds of reading.

Does the conversation you have reveal what they actually want?

And what about the 2000 line change? Does that get stamped after someone talks about the change but without deeply reading it?

Typically what happens is that we have a good conversation, we make progress towards figuring out what they should want to do and how they should try to do it, and the 2000 line PR or 10 page doc gets abandoned. I do read things in detail when I expect I might one day be convinced to approve them, but that fraction has plummeted from 95% to like 20% since January.

Have you noticed an increase in their willingness to “do the right thing first time” during these last 6 months since your approval rate has dropped that much? (Even if the right thing is to have more conversations)?

Do you know if there’s a way to incentivize them to lean toward doing the right thing first? Are the company and stakeholder goals and objectives in line with them making progress toward higher quality engineering? That is, are these juniors protected from randoms asking them to circumvent good process, etc?

Unfortunately, I've had a number of people explicitly defend that nothing's going wrong here. Their view is that, if sloppy code is cheap, everyone might as well produce some to illustrate their ideas before having a conversation. I'm skeptical of that position but haven't had much luck in fighting it.

> Are the company and stakeholder goals and objectives in line with them making progress toward higher quality engineering? That is, are these juniors protected from randoms asking them to circumvent good process, etc?

In my personal experience yes, but I've seen a few teams and heard stories of many more where the juniors are not protected and they just ship regressions and outages all the time now. I think the trend towards AI cost controls will mitigate this, although the impact will of course be uneven as companies behind the curve discover powerful agentic coding for the first time.

You're fighting the good fight.

I tried to get our team to enforce a max PR size.

It worked for a while. There is a GitHub action that you can configure to fail if the PR is too large.

But then we started a new project and I didn’t add it right away since it’s a small team and I figured we could use the honor system.

Since then there have been lots of massive PRs but there’s not much willingness to go back to enforcing the rule because it might slow us down…

It’s frustrating.

Out of curiosity, with their current paradigm, what's the regression rate *and* how long do PRs stay in pending?

What's even worse is when you go though such PRs and your comments are handled in minutes, with replies explaining the change with perfect spelling and em dashes. At which point you ask yourself: "What am I doing here? His agent wrote the entire thing, and now I'm going through it and telling his agent what to fix. Why is he even needed?"

Or even, even worse is when you get a PR from a co-worker, you spend a lot of time explaining why that's bad idea, only for the person to say "Sorry, my openclaw/etc posted that. I'll close it." Or even the opposite, you tell a co-worker: "Hey, it was a great idea to change X." and he says "X? What is X?... Oh that must have been my agent."

Why is he even needed?

that's the point where i would want to start firing people. not because i want to replace them with AI, but because if they use AI to answer without contributing their own thoughts they make themselves replaceable.

Yeah, I don't love this part of the work. Especially since it's completely exploded out the text of basically everything. I'm also suspicious that the person that generated that text didn't read any of it.

How do ya feel about altercations at work? If like most, then hope your colleagues find your post & decide to stop (without realizing you’re their lead!).

Your prose curves from line to line very elegantly, not sure if its intentional

Good post. I'm trying to decide if this is better or worse than people sending their AI Q&A without anybody asking (as Cory Doctorow wrote about here https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-03-02...).

Author's criticism is valid. Using LLMs, like using search engines before them, is a skill. You have to know what to ask and what to accept as a valid answer, what to push back on and when to throw in the towel and try another approach.

I was talking to a very tired friend of mine and she described renting a small tiller from Home Depot. They didn't know how to set the choke and so flooded the engine. They spent hours troubleshooting, no one at Home Depot knew anything about the equipment they were taking money to rent. They eventually figured it out and were tilling their backyard garden well into the late night.

I told her next time just ask ChatGPT. I would have done it myself if I'd been there. She hadn't even thought of it. But a few pictures and descriptions would have gotten them rolling in half an hour tops.

One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question.

Compare:

— What's the best way of doing X?

— Ask Claude.

vs:

— I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think?

I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.

— I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think?

— Ask Claude.

Its a way to say I don't care, don't waste my time

That's the malevolent version of it. The alternative might be, I also don't know this from the top of my head and could spend some time to google/ask Claude/read the documentation/familiarize myself with the concrete code and/or problem at hand, but then again so can you and our collective time is better spent if I take care of my problems and you take care of yours, but if you really can't find a solution on your own and still need help please come back to me any time with a very concrete question you need my input on.

Or, in shorter words: "I don't care, stop wasting my time"

I get those kinds of question all the time ("I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think?"), but when I don't care or don't know, I prefer to say this directly:

"I am not very familiar with this area of the code, so I can't really answer"

"I'd need to do some research for that, but sadly I am pretty busy. But I like simple solutions, it would be nice to do this without yet another microservice of possible"

Just saying "Ask Claude" seems pretty rude.

Well, it’s fucking annoying. When I’m asking a question and I put time into understanding the context and problem space, and already did some analysis with AI, I’m looking for a human opinion. I want my colleagues who know stuff to use their experience and their brain for a second to help the team.

I don’t need Claude to give a second opinion on something that Claude already ran through. It’s fucking useless and it’s a huge blind spot.

This shit happens when everyone in an organization is expected to use Claude to answer questions and do the initial investigation / analysis. Yeah, I did that. Now let’s get to work as humans and provide our expertise, and not turn it into an AI circle jerk.

Which is funny because a huge number of people post this in responses to online asynchronous messages, on public forums, when they could also do literally anything else - like close the browser tab.

Intelligence is outsourced so now people who don't like to think they don't have to do it anymore.

Wellll lots of those people you’re referring to are human, and when have we ever let it be?!

This exchange sounds like "eff you". I would much rather hear "I don't have opinion" or "I don't know". A person asked you, because they are interested in your opinion. You dont have duty to provide it, but you can just say that without being jerk.

I’m assuming this person did ask in the second way, it’s hard to imagine someone working through a problem that has already tried a bunch of stuff just going in cold and not providing any context and saying “How do I do X?”

Good advice obviously if it’s not being followed already but also likely over-simplifying the problem. Also a normal person on the receiving end would probe a bit about what has already been tried. Which to be fair makes the whole thing a bit weird and does sound more like she’s being brushed off.

It's highly unlikely that the conversation actually happened as reported. At the very least, something was said after "Ask Claude".

Yes, the importance of asking a question to demonstrate you've invested effort cannot be overstated.

Without knowing what/how they asked, it's difficult but I would be tempted to suspect this was actually a way to say "please stop asking me questions"

I lost track how many times I heard or read "I asked Claude to do X. It seems to work".

Anyone who recommends to ask an LLM in the first situation will do so in the second because they're a shit engineer.

"Ask the LLM" is not at all a valid answer in a professional context where part of your job is to educate the less experienced, no matter how little effort is put in the question.

Sometimes part of the education is teaching people how to ask better questions, and that they need to do their research before asking you

"How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" by Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen is from before AI but still seems relevant.

(HTTP) http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/smart-questions.html

https://archive.ph/duRkf

Latest version: <http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>

Yes, fully agree. "Ask an LLM" does not achieve that.

Agreed, you can also preface the question. I've checked A, B, and C with AI, curious to get your opinion/thoughts?

I don't think anyone in any industry regardless of seniority would redirect you back to AI assuming you're having a genuine conversation.

And yet, here we are. :)

It's highly unlikely that the conversation actually happened as reported. At the very least, something was said after "Ask Claude".

LMGTFY for you was infuriating because it was 100% of the top Google responses to specific searches.

Generally I didn't unleash one of those without already being extremely certain that what they needed would be a top result.

However, search has become enshittified, and I don't think LLM chatbots have achieved a similar level of certainty, so it may just be the end of an era for me.

If you've already done some research then include that up front. I get asked a lot of questions by people who not only haven't asked an AI first they haven't even googled it. So if you've asked Claude and are not satisfied with the response then include that and say what your question is now in the light of that information.

This is exactly it. If you want someone to do some analysis for you, you're obliged to give them some context regarding what analysis you've already done.

The author considers the possibility that this is an outwardly-polite form of “you should be able to solve this yourself”. Another, grimmer possibility is that it’s an inwardly-polite form of “I should have been able to solve this myself”.

That is, the author asked for

    the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't

And his real answer is

    I have forgotten that thing

this is just effort equilibrium something that wasnt as effective with “google it”. but ask a low effort question and get “ask claude” as a response is entirely appropriate.

junior developers on my team are often asking questions about our code base without even attempting to explore or self direct. “ask claude to look at <subsystem> and explain how its designed the key files and dependencies so that i can better understand it” is unsurprisingly effective and far cheaper than a couple of hours of opex

I find a llm in a harnes combined with manual ripgrep exploration is really effective of getting codebases. But you font always want to find what you find.

Get used to it. People are lazy, and if they can deflect work off to an LLM, they will, as long as (crucially) it doesn't reflect poorly on them with anyone they care about.

So, if you want to have any decent company culture, make it reflect poorly on them.

Depends on the company and environment. If you work at a place that has an overabundance of easily-googleable questions, this behavior is a good social impediment.

I asked a question on slack. My coworker forwarded my question to Claude and pasted the response.

15 minutes later a different coworker responded pointing out that everything Claude said was wrong.

I asked on slack for a reason! It's not like i don't know how to ask Claude.

To be honest, I'm more worried about another side of the problem.

LLM's are good at learning from whatever humans have posted online. But with the agentic workflows getting more popular, more and more problems those AI agents figure out are not posted online, and the next time another agent running into the same problems they would have to figure it out from the scratch again. It'd be nice if there's a mechanism these agents would share the lessons they learn with each other, which could save a lot of trials and errors and wasted tokens. Humans share knowledge online. AI agents should be able to do so too. The moltbook thing from half year ago could have this potential, but too bad it's flooded by spams.

Of course, to make this AI knowledge sharing truly work, there may need to be a peer-review mechanism to ensure the knowledge being shared is truthful, reliable, non-trivial etc. That can probably be all worked out if somebody (or AI agent) really put effort into it.

There's also projects on hugging face like https://trace-commons-web.hf.space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u795pb/donate_...

These should be opt out. Maybe have a skill that is similar and is opt out

Have a skill enabled by default opt out that publishes them on a personal web page

My answer is usually to make a process.

Do you need to know if X is faster than Y? Do both. Measure. Sometimes the answer requires actual research.

Maybe you need a real Subject Matter Expert because it turns out that nobody ever published something on the internet about something so that an LLM could soak up the real world information.

Before the internet, we would consult with books. After the internet, it seemed faster to search and find answers in things like blog posts, (paid) articles, and CDs. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are great resources. Maybe you need an answer from Hacker News - ask HN.

By relying on LLMs more than these other sources and allowing LLMs to write articles and posts to these other sources, we lose subject matter experts.

Add to that companies like Microsoft and Meta and others laying off and offering retirement packages to get rid of institutional knowledge as fast as possible, and we are headed towards a gigantic crash of knowledge.

It's just the new "I don't know, Google it?"

Okay. In my experience asking an LLM requires you to know the right set of questions and the right process for working through the problem that you’re having. You have to know the correct terminology to use to describe your problem.

These are not trivial things even though they are things that senior developers tend to trivialize.

If you’re describing the wrong problem, you’ll get a right answer that doesn’t fix it.

If you’re describing the right problem wrongly, you’ll get another wrong answer that talks past being right.

If you’re describing a difficult problem that maybe isn’t even solved in existing stuff, you can get help figuring out the necessary steps if you have an idea where to start.

If you don’t know where to start you can start by asking where to start.

Anyway, point is, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know (or think you know) and what you don’t know. I don’t have a magic wand, I have years of experience grinding down problems until they submit.

I tell people this, a lot.

Its now a polite way of saying "I dont want to work on this project" without having to go through the effort of thinking hard enough about the problem to put the "go away" price on it (or even worse having to DO the work I dont want to do).

> I already did.

Well the people who keep bugging me verifiably do not, so that's tough.

On the off chance they do, they either spectacularly self-sabotage, or treat the response like they do a typical message box popup. So I'll be asked to essentially read the same thing out aloud, only for them to go "ok-ok". It's beyond insulting.

I'll 100% keep telling people to ask an LLM when I suspect this shit. They do NOT respect my time and attention, and have robustly demonstrated so. But then these are the same people who cannot internalize the idea behind nohello.net either (gotta remind them every few weeks/months), and have demonstrated this kind of helplessness even before LLMs, so it's clearly a deeper issue, likely cultural.

It seems your peers might have a similarly low opinion of you, or at least I'd definitely feature that as one of the options.

Even if they did ask the LLM, they might be bad at it, just like some people were bad at Google.

I used to stick people in front of a computer during interviews to see if they could do some basic stuff for an entry level sys admin position. If they wanted to use Google to look something up, that was fine. There were people who could not form a search query at all. It was painful to watch. Some of them would end up finding a blog post that had 4 of the 5 answers on it, but didn’t recognize what they were looking at, so they’d go back and keep looking. This was also painful. One guy wouldn’t even make an attempt and just left. I assume these types of people would also fail at asking an LLM.

Sometimes knowing the key words to use in the question matter a lot. Before LLMs, I would sometimes do some searches to try and figure out the correct term to search for, so that I could then make a proper search for what I needed. If someone is trying to fill in too many gaps in knowledge, this can be a real problem. LLMs can jump these gaps better, but still aren’t perfect.

I’ll have people come to me, not because they have a low opinion of me, but because they assume I know more of those words that they don’t know.

There have been several cases where people don’t want to bother me and they have spent hours calling actual support lines, searching online, trying random stuff, and then I answer it in 30 seconds… like the plumber that knows which pipe to hit.

Lots of people I work with seem to use Claude for things they should be learning or doing themselves. Stuff that really isn’t hard and if they took the time to learn themselves then they would be better at their job and more valuable.

Instead they are telling me that literally any other human could do their job and their only value is prompting a chat bot.

The thing is they aren’t even accelerating outcomes. Since they can’t be bothered to learn they pump out stuff that looks good but the detail that matters is trash and requires someone else to actually finish to an acceptable standard.

“ I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus”

Doesn’t that mean his answer was that he, with all of his years of experience, would ask Claude?

> I already did.

It's not about what you did or didn't do. It's about not being competent enough to help you and directing you to the more competent available entity. If it couldn't help you I won't be able either. Next time you lead with the information that you already asked the best available paid LLM, if you don't want to be directed there. Or explain your problem to a rubber duck instead because I won't be any more helpful.

Yeah I mean LLM's don't generally offer useful answers to questions. They just kinda make the same guesses that any reasonably educated and articulate but not very smart person would make. They will answer, "maybe its this, maybe its that", but they can't go and do actual investigation and digging and find the real answer to a question. They just wing it. I can already pop possibilities off the top of my head.

I don't know, maybe if you were generally not very informed the AI might seem knowledgeable by comparison?

This is insanely entitled. If you want someone with experience then pay them for it. Likewise if you don't want people to have some experience then don't pay them.

How do people get jobs at jar opening factories by deferring jar opening to someone capable? These are your collages who have full time jobs, not monks at some monastery, go do that if that's what you want.

...Are you proposing that coworkers pay each other to have technical conversations?

https://stopcitingai.com

If I am asked a question, and I refer it to an LLM, that’s because I have no respect for you.

why no respect?

"Ask the model" is usually the point where I realize that either what you need is not a specific answer to their specific question, but a tutor to guide you on a personal journey through the underlying fundamentals of more than one prerequisite areas of understanding, or, the question is too niche or domain specific that I would have to 'ask the model' as wel as I do not know. Now I did observe, not just with LLM but also with Google search, that many people struggle with this and never seem to get good results. They need meta-learning on how to ask the right questions, which I can offer, but often I notice at that point their eyes starting to glaze over as they want a 'direct' solution, me searching or llm guiding for them.

What was the question?

ask supercomputer earth. it will figure it out in ten million years provided the computer doesn't get destroyed before that by that hyperspace bypass the vogons are planning.

Ask an LLM.

Your question was: "What was the question?" -- GPT 5.5

"What did you find when you googled it?"

"What did an LLM say about it?"

"What did the docs say?"

These are all better follow-ups than telling someone to do a specific thing.

On the flip side, I work with colleagues that would ask before using an LLM / do some quick research on the web.

OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster.

People are really really tired.

Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the <panic about XYZ>", our employers are making us work much harder, with a subtle but palpable panic in their emails, with WAY less promises of any kind of job security, companies that never had layoffs for decades are now doing them regularly, our githubs are flooded with people pointing robots at our issues to generate tepid pull requests, and at our pull requests to generate tepid reviews, and look shit is just crazy now.

So I think the whole "how would you approach this interesting problem..." thing is, for now, at least for me it feels a little bit on hold. Like oh that problem. How to scale? how to horizontally shard PostgreSQL? sure, real problems. But geez whatever we're building, it will be replaced in three months anyway. That's a hard problem you have there! I remember when I used to have problems like that, and my solutions sucked anyway and it was replaced with a node.js app two years later. Whatever advice I have, Claude is going to have 98% of it plus another 10% that I didn't even have.

This is all bad. So I think your post is possibly extremely useful. Maybe we should, for people we know and trust as humans in the real world, actually take the time and approach an issue as though we didn't have the Matrix to approximate it for us. I'm going to think about this and consider it.

That makes sense as well, I think it's a nice human perspective. People really are uniquely tired lately.

We are not in a recession, and we (if you mean the US) recovered our economy from COVID (under Biden).

before COVID everyone on my team travelled once or twice a year to conferences as well as to the home office for get-togethers, on the company dime. Those conferences have been turned into online only and my company hasn't flown me or hardly anyone on my team or any of our related teams anywhere in years. All of that would be considered vastly extravagant and expensive today. So some kind of belt tightening went on that was never un-tightened.

Ok but he clearly used a model to write this so...

Oh, it did not feel AI but Pangram does say AI, high confidence. Good catch.

(I'd trust an ML algorithm that only has to classify in two boxes, thus easy to evaluate, over my own gut feeling).

I wrote this by hand but I did run it through an AI for editing. The changes were pretty minor; just a couple of lines.

The first paragraph screamed AI to me. I'll try to dissect each bit, see below. It's hard to put it into words...

---

Send an e-mail + pick up the phone. Mismatched analog. First one is outgoing, second is incoming. Yes, I know you can pick up "to make a call". In which case, then we have the classic LLM pattern of eliding details that matter to make it sound "smooth" (like blended cardboard smooth, glug glug).

someone senior enough - Way too vague. Most people would add details here that are unique to the actual human being that they spoke with. But Claude can't do that, so we get this.

a hard question - Same thing as the previous one. Which question? Why is there literally no detail or actual flavor here?

- Real - Claude looooves punchy, empty emphasis words like this.

... , the kind you ... - Tacked on extra phrase that should be a separate sentence. Claude does this all the time. We aren't writing a shitting noir novel, Claude.

-a decision go sideways in a boardroom - vague shadow of an anecdote, of just the right length. The "a" in front of "boardroom" is a blinking red light for me, can't fully explain why.

Not what the textbook says. - Too short, too vague, with the rhythmic punchy feel. (Damn... I've been infected with the triplet pattern myself).

textbook, 5 studies, 30 years of experience - Pattern of 3...

- that a search engine couldn't - Oh man... this type of phrasing is so triggering for me, heh. I've been busting my ass trying to sanitize Claude's output so it haven't doesn't these overly cute, inverted constructions.

Wrong, those were all me. (I just checked the draft.) The only part I tweaked was the conclusion, plus I broke up a few paragraphs that were too long.

I often leave out details and specifics or make things purposely vague because I am writing about real people.

Heh, fair enough! It seems you may have been infected with the LLM aesthetic :)

Increasingly common these days... I've caught myself more than a few times.

Heh, no problem. I will say the rule of three is something I've been taught over and over again... in speaking training, in a class I took on fundraising, and most recently in a book I read. (See, I just did it again!) Book was by Mehdi Hasan.

I also recently reread a blog post I wrote a decade ago, and it had the "It's not X, it's Y" pattern over and over again.

I feel sorry for your future writing prospects, because it looked like AI to me too: I insta-slop-back-buttoned on "so I scheduled one with someone senior enough to have real scar tissue, the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom."

Thanks for the the correction-- often when people say they weren't using AI they are very clearly lying, so it's hard to get useful corrections on this point so I appreciate your candor.

Oh, no problem! But now I am thinking I may need to rethink using AI for light editing. I've gotten in the habit of that because I don't have a human editor for my blog, and I like getting that extra polish sometimes, but it's probably not worth it if it's going to make people not want to read.

You can do a thing where you have it point out spelling and grammar errors or point out awkward parts without suggesting changes. But take care that you don't let it apply them as it may make other changes silently (especially if you're not running in an agentic harness with patch tools).

I'm a pretty late adopter and nost of my LLM use has been

1) vibe red teaming (having Codex RE the data flow of various extensions, comparing the attestation with the ToS, seeing if I think it's a potential FTC violation) which is just for fun and I do nothing with,

2) feeding tons of documentation into NotebookLM and asking if everything in a short document is attributable (often when it says it's not, it is, but you have to kind of read between the lines). I think this is a good use of AI if rigorously fact-checked.

3) feeding 20-30 job descriptions + cover letters, asking for outlines for new cover letters. For this one I think it may be faster to go back to creating templates because I have to entirely rewrite things anyway. (It does add lies! And conflates things! V bad for a cover letter!) But I think use of machines to write letters being read by machines is pretty justifiable.

4) I've been experimenting with Claude editing. I think what bugs me about people assuming everything is LLM-written is that it's rather dismissive and difficult to tell the difference between "a human spent X hours on this and made some stylistic tweets" vs "a machine wrote this in response to a prompt."

I do find myself immediately scrolling away too, though. A friend had a LI post for a course he's teaching and I could tell it was AI because it's not how he writes. That said, the post performed phenomenally well, which is probably more important for selling a course than my opinion is.

I'm also not confident in my ability to distinguish between 1) something an AI write from scratch, 2) something he may have iterated with an AI, feeding it many different versions of a post, going back and forth, etc. I think both would show up as AI in the extensions I've seen, but I also think they're very different.

My thought process on it is complicated. I think I'm more disappointed than anything. It made me sad because his human writing is so unique, and I'd hate to see it all outsourced. But I also don't have the same "you didn't even bother to write this so why should I read it" reaction so many do, given that I don't know how much time he spent on it or the reasoning.

Mostly I worry that if the whole of human knowledge becomes AI slop, and AI is then being fed that slop, that the writing would get even worse.

Re: fact-checking, I am far too paranoid/obsessive/whatever about accuracy to not review changes! Even NotebookLM is weirdly drawn to the first document you feed it, so if you have a second contradictory document, it seems to want to tell you why it's wrong. To be fair, I know people like this, too. The first version of a story they hear is what they will forever believe, even if every other version contradicts it.

People are lazy... just get used to it.

Not all that different from LMGTFY

While "I'm busy" might be true, "Ask Claude" is more helpful.

Maybe the people in your life are just trying to be helpful instead of effectively saying "Go away."

But hey, sure, it's AI so you should definitely hate on them. FUCK AI!!1!! AMIRIGHT?!?!

I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI.

It makes sense to hate and despise that answer.

And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.

> Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter

Huh, what if I don't want to spend time answering a low-effort question? I will have a look if the default answers/approaches don't work.

What is low effort about "I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus. Not what the textbook says. If five studies conflicted, which would he trust? I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't."?

He checked the consensus, the textbook, and 5 studies. He's asking for an answer from experience and he gets "Ask Claude".

But even if you don't know, "I don't know" is a better answer than "Ask Claude", which blindly assumes that the asker hadn't thought of that, which is a weird thing to assume.

Then don’t answer it? Or just give a seconds worth of context into why you think it’s not important?

Context switches are not free.

Dozens of "quick questions" over the course of a day will drag down your productivity to about one third or worse.

I know that for me, it takes about 45 minutes of focus to enter a flow state, when I'm at my most productive. If I can never enter the zone, then I'm not really doing the thing that made me such a valuable player in the first place, am I?

He scheduled a call specifically to ask this question. What does context switching have to do with anything? Don't accept the call if you can't afford to switch context.

I wish I was there with you to witness the look on your face as you slowly begin to realize that something as simple as a call can and often will absolutely pull you out of the flow state.

Someone sneezing nearby can pull you out of the flow state.

The idea that the onus is on the person who you're trying to distract to distract themselves to tell you not to distract them is just so broken if you think about it even just a little bit.

You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario.

The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done.

There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively.

Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this:

"What should I do?"

"What do you think you should do?"

"X"

"Do X"

There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro.

Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.

if this is the experience in a team, then the team already has a problem. i expect these things to be made clear up front.

when someone joins a team they should be assigned a mentor whom they can ask any question, no matter how dumb, and the mentor then guides the new team member in how to approach such a question, which at that point can include asking the LLM. it is the mentors responsibility to point out when it is ok to ask another senior developer. daily standups can also help with this sort of thing.

in a close knit team i would also expect that either everyone can ask anything from everyone else, and that everyone learns when it is ok to ask questions. the situation you describe should simply never arise. if it does, then something is going wrong

Alternative take: the assumption that senior engineers get pressured into agreeing to mentor without it formally being an acknowledged part of their job - that is, that a significant percentage of their time is supposed to be allocated to making themselves available to juniors - is fundamentally a problem.

There is so much stigma associated with being an senior engineer that simply wants to spend 95% of their day working on the problems that they were hired to solve. The worst part is that the vast majority of people in this situation are not compensated for this time, and they are expected to keep up with their actual assigned responsibilities.

This state of affairs is a relatively new thing. The idea that you would join a company with the expectation that the most important people to the success of a project should drop what they are doing to context shift to someone else's problem several dozen times a day is not something that would have been remotely normal twenty years ago.

I am not saying that mentoring is bad or that asking for help is bad, just that there's been a change and the unspoken vibe is that if you're not happy to work at ~30% capacity because you need to mentor people, you're some kind of antisocial jerk.

If a company wants seniors to mentor, pay them to mentor. It's very simple.

mentoring juniors should always be part of the job. sharing your experience and knowledge is part of the common job description. the idea that you just write code and never need to share your experience with others is a fundamental misunderstanding of what your work is about. you would have expressly negotiate an exception into your contract if you want that, not the other way around.

what doesn't work is the assumption that mentoring doesn't take any of your time and that you are expected to manage the same workload with and without mentoring. that's not ok. and spending 70% of your time mentoring may also be a bit to much, but if that is what the company needs then it is still your job.

It seems as though you want things both ways.

The notion that an experienced person should automatically consider mentorship to be part of their job is not backed by any code or contract that I'm aware of. It's just increasingly been pushed on people who haven't pushed back enough to keep a new generation from feeling as though they are entitled to it.

You can sample as large a pool of senior devs as you want; I suspect that if you can find 1-in-10 who have specific wording and structure in their employment contracts about the percentage of their time that they should expect to allocate to mentorship, you'll be beating my own estimations. No, what you're doing is attempting to codify a very polite form of exploitation. Yes, those people are usually among the most well-compensated, but it doesn't change the fact that they have their own job to do and a finite time in which to do it.

Please note that I am not suggesting anyone on a team could somehow work in a vacuum. Also, even the most experienced person frequently needs to ask for help, guidance and clarification. Being experienced is pretty much the opposite of knowing everything and is much closer to a measure of how much you have forgotten.

Nor am I implying that senior people have any business being rude or dismissive towards team members who legitimately have good reasons to interrupt someone's flow state. Timely clarification is important to a project regardless of who is doing what.

What I am saying is that if you run a company you might legitimately be horrified to learn that your most critical team members are spending 70% of their productive time mentoring, especially if that remaining 30% of their time is so fragmented that it never resembles a true flow state. You need those people to Build The Thing.

If you don't get that, then you're not living in the same reality I am.

The notion that an experienced person should automatically consider mentorship to be part of their job is not backed by any code or contract that I'm aware of.

every job i had, every developer i hired. it is also backed by german law for example, refusing to mentor/train others in the work you do is a fireable offense in germany. in any job. not just software development. i doesn't need to be explicit in the contract. it is a natural and expected part of your job. and in the US with at-will employment, what's in your contract doesn't matter as much either. if it seems like a reasonable request they can just let you go if you refuse. the idea that you should not ever have to pass on your knowledge to others in your company seems very entitled to me.

that's my opinion on the matter. you can find more diverse opinions here:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8627...

some even fully agree with you.

i already acknowledged the 70% problem you mention. that should not happen unless it is known and intentional. i'd be horrified too if i were surprised by that.

That's really interesting about German law. I didn't know that, so I appreciate learning.

I suspect that if we were having this debate over dinner, we would agree on far more than we disagree on. I think we're speaking past each other because we're operating with slightly different notions of what mentoring implies.

From my perspective, I think that there's an obvious and reasonable expectation that you make best efforts to be a good team player. That means doing your part to participate in planning, knowledge transfer, group morale and of course making yourself available to work through tough problems with people regardless of their skill level.

What I think is far more dubious is the relatively recent slippery slope towards the notion that someone should reasonably be expected that career progress dovetails with some sort of natural law that says you are not being a good human if you aren't willing-to-excited to spend 70% of your productive time in a semi-permanent state of continuous partial attention because the people around you demand priority access to your time and attention, above any of your personal priorities or job responsibilities, often without compensation beyond a rote "thanks".

If you can't ship inside of a deadline because your ephemeral "mentoring" took implicit priority over your actual job, then something is very wrong with people's expectations of how key talent's time should be allocated.

having this talk over dinner sounds nice :-)

german law or courts operate more on common sense than the letter of the law. to be able to reject a task from your boss the task has to be unreasonable. training/mentoring is not unreasonable unless the work is dangerous and/or a trainer needs specific qualifications. running a class that teaches some generic topic like a programming language would probably be unreasonable because you could just hire an external trainer for that. the training has to be rather specific to the individual experience of the senior or some company internal knowledge to be reasonable. so this doesn't apply to the scenarios you seem to have in mind. in any case from what i read it is recommended to talk to a lawyer before refusing.

but also, if the request interferes with your ability to do your normal work then you can and should speak up and you can reasonably refuse if your boss doesn't make accommodations for that. if he doesn't then refusal is reasonable, not because training wouldn't be your job, but because your workload has increased, which is not ok.

Why would you accept a scheduled call if you want to be left alone? That makes no sense.

You're the one projecting bias onto this scenario. You assume people only want to talk to you to waste your time. If you work with professionals, you can assume that when they ask you a question, they have a reason to ask you that question. Assuming that they're just being lazy is bad faith.

Accepting a call and then giving someone this kind of non-answer is extremely disrespectful of their time and their professionalism.

> Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs.

That's not what I wrote. You're being needlessly dishonest and disrespectful right here.

Again: getting a call is enough to knock someone out of deep concentration.

Anyhow, in addition to not hating LLMs, I would add "try not to use dramatic, hyperbolic devices in casual writing, it makes you sound ridiculous" to my advice.

You clearly used AI pretty heavily to write this - so whats the point?

There are a lot of parallels between "just ask an LLM" in response to a thoughtful, well-researched question and spurious accusations of heavy LLM use that never happened in response to a post, so that's actually a pretty astute point, just not the one I think you were trying to make.

Either you used AI or you happen to write like an AI - in either case something to work on.

I do think my comment was lazily dismissive so you do have a point but in so far your post is basically just a gripe, I would think artful expression of said gripe is basically the only thing that makes it worthwhile. Phrases like the kind you only get from watching a decision go sideways in a boardroom stink of llm, are not artful and have extra irony riding along given the point you are making.

edit: No scratch that, artfulness is not necessary - just get better at screening out the flavour of AI, even if you find it useful to write with - because people will notice.

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