Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

If someone asked you a question, it's most likely because they value you. Whether it's your skills, your domain knowledge, or something else, people ask you questions because they know you can provide some value. When you give them a Claude response, not only are you being rude, but you're devaluing yourself in the eyes of those around you. They learn that you can't be relied upon any more, and so they stop asking you questions.

View on HN

Asking the LLM a question _is_ a skill, just like googling. The problem is not asking a LLM, but pasting the 300-chars response without any context.

"I've been asked to confirm that our random number generator satisfies section 14 of the Foo-Bar Accord of 2021. I'm fairly certain it does, and that foorandom.c is a good choice. Assuming I'm broadly correct, write one short paragraph that would confidently assuage anyone of concern without raising any new concerns. Cite the specification and link to it. Afterwards, for my benefit, write a short bullet list with any non-trivial reasons I might be wrong."

In that case a better answer would be "I'm fairly certain it does satisfy it, but in any case I asked Claude to double check for any issues and it didn't find any unsatisfied requirement". That's the information that matters, and it's probably faster anyways.

Sure, but if I'm going to prompt an AI anyway, I might as well ask it to write a convincing paragraph too.

There is no skill whatsoever in asking the LLM a question.

If I asked a question to Claude, it's because I couldn't answer it myself, but also, because I used my skills and domain expertise to explain clearly the problem to Claude.

And if I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it means that I have read and evaluated what Claude wrote back, and I have extracted the part of it that most clearly contains the answer as well as the diagnosis- if I gor anything relevant.

Of course I could instead pretend I came up with the answer myself in 5 minutes thanks to my superior analytical skills, and write down two short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?

> hey, I don’t know the answer to your question but I went through Claude and got this response. Let me know if that answers your question otherwise we can dig deeper together

That’s all you have to add to make this into a much more pleasant interaction

I agree. However, since I work in a small team and everyone knows me, I don't need to provide this entire context every time. I usually just prepend "according to Claude ..." and try to provide a one line recap of the main point. Then paste the relevant section of Claude's answer (two to three paragraphs).

Your response misses the words most critical to this interaction: "I don't know"

But that’s not what happens - people are posting the question into Claude and pasting back saying “here’s what Claude said”. There’s 0 value add in that - I don’t know if you agree, disagree or have even read it. My experience is that most of the time it’s just verbatim,

> write down to short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?

Yes. That’s why I asked you and not an LLM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com