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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though

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At my current job I just asked a coworker in chat if the reply was his or LLM. He quickly owned up and the incidence of brokered LLM messages in chat dropped signficantly.

Unfortunately people are being encouraged to use LLM in docs, emails, and presentations so it's probably a losing battle.

That's a better approach than what I did, and I'll use that going forwards.

We have a LLM bot in chat that analyzes bugs when.you drop in a link and anything else if you ask it directly. It's actually quite effective: all the slop is now localized and can be ignored/blocked easily, and people no longer feel the need to copy and paste slop themselves.

We had an exec show how he was using AI to write interview feedback from his very sparse notes, in front of a few thousand people.

Don't you just love how, instead of making tradeoffs or prioritizing, we just do more, worse?

I did a similar thing and I got reported to HR.

What was the outcome of the report to HR?

I think if you work somewhere that this is the result, you're unlikely to have much progress challenging anything directly. In order to actually have change you need to be able to challenge and stamp out these sorts of behaviours.

> What was the outcome of the report to HR?

"Do not make negative assumptions" basically. But also a drop in how often and quickly I did reviews.

I've been thinking about these kind of interactions a lot lately. I don't know what it says about human communication patterns but I'm not super excited about it.

I've been guilty of acting as a middleman for review comments from difficult coworkers. I farm out my interaction to avoid the confrontation, mental exhaustion, and to avoid negative feelings I got from those reviews. I don't mean 'my work is being challenged', I mean people who: delay, nitpick, blow up architecture after not participating in design, assert false info as truth and require you prove them wrong, require 10x evidence of everyone else. Not people who are like 'Hey, I don't understand this code can you add some comments or lets hop in a room for review'

I've also been on the receiving end. I like to think I'm NOT one of these toxic reviewers.

Now, we have Business Owners and Managers who are now even further away from engineers. Important meetings have 0 engineers in them ( a couple people who think they're engineers because they were for 5 years in the 80s ). Output is an AI generated transcript that gets copy/pasted into copilot to generate jira tasks by the Product Owner.

It seems like we (humans) really don't like working with other people. Or, maybe we like working with people who can advance our careers and want to automate interaction with people who cant?

I think this effort by Business Owners to set up an AI wall may be the closest I've seen to 'digital classism' (maybe there is a better term for it?).

>Or, maybe we like working with people who can

https://croissanthology.com/earring

We like whispering earrings. We'll follow a low friction happy path even if it leads us off a cliff.

Would you be OK with someone looking up the answer on the internet?

You mean like when juniors would copy paste Stack Overflow without verifying or even understanding it?

No. We hated that too.

Actual research is, of course, fine.

I see a possible misunderstanding on my part here.

My experience has typically been that engineers respond, "Claude said..." and then say what they think about it. If people are really receiving just a straight dump of AI response from their colleagues, then yeah, I would be disappointed too.

But, I have no problem receiving from a colleague, "Claude says ..., but I don't know what to make of it." The embedded space can be really hard, so I don't fault someone for feeling clueless about something. I feel that way every time I get handed something new to work on which I have zero experience with.

We're all complaining about the low effort verbatim dumps, not disclosing Claude usage as part of an earnest attempt to help.

devils advocate; why didnt you ask claude then? stop wasting people's time when you could get your own answers.

Because I wanted to ask a human who’s job it is to know, instead of an AI that might make things up and waste all our time.

Why is it their job to know, but it's not your job to know?

Different roles and specialties? Different work history?

So, you have different roles and specialties, but you know for a fact that this person should know the answer to your question. I think we're speaking past each other, because this doesn't make sense to me.

I don't presume that someone will have an answer I'm looking for. I'm pleased when they do, but often I just get breadcrumbs, and I have to solve the puzzle for myself.

I'm not GP, but in research very diverse teams are not uncommon. I'm on a team now in which I'm the embedded software engineer / Android SME and my coworker is the 4G LTE/5G NR SME.

I ask him 4G LTE/5G NR questions all the time. I don't know ahead of time if he'll know the answer, but (1) it'd be a solid bet that he does and (2) it's his responsibility to know it given his role.

Organisations typically divide up responsibilities between different teams, and also between different members of each team.

So, people are using AI to answer questions about tribal knowledge? Is that really the assertion which is being made here? Because I find that hard to believe.

Yes, it can get that bad

If you decided at the outset they're of equal value to a $20/mo AI, lay them off.

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