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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…

And I think this is where one key argument on the page itself I think fails:

> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.

Yes, the person on the other side has Claude; but in many cases, their Claude doesn't have the same context as my Claude. Saying, "This thing happened in an area of the code I don't have any expertise in. Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess" is I think a valid time to copy and paste LLM output. [1]

The other thing to say is that it can be a "LMGTFY" style response; i.e., "Why did you ask me that, when you could have gotten a perfectly good answer from ChatGPT?"

[1] In the particular case I'm thinking about, it was a bug in an ocaml component; I don't know ocaml or need to know it; handing Claude's analysis 'caveat emptor' to the maintianers who do know ocaml I think is more helpful than not.

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The problem is when all we get is the output, we don't know if their context is even valid. If they don't demonstrate any human understanding of their message content, we can't really take that on faith. Especially once we've got them copy pasting blindly in the past.

Working in support most of my life has shown me the vast majority of customer context is invalid when written by humans.

People don't read error messages. They'll include exactly zero context in their tickets. They outright lie. You can't take anything they say with good faith until you have a relationship with that individual and discern their competence.

I think some of this is a large amount of HN posters are working on software teams that have communicate pretty commonly, hence have a shared context. Once you start getting outside of that shared context knowing what information to exchange gets vastly more difficult for humans.

> Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess

I’m reading a bunch of game modding discords, and this exactly what happens, and what’s hated. Because Claude is also not qualified to assess it. Not by default. The modder’s Claude might be because of the extra context and steering, but the user’s produces usless slop, instead the actual log, and context what the user did is what’s helpful.

I’d say this (when you don’t understand it yourself) is pretty much the worst time to send AI output.

Quick edit: Yeah, I get it in situations like GP where the user is unhelpful, doesn’t want to learn, doesn’t care, and you also can’t tell them to fuck off. But just because the user gives Claude the context they should have given you in the first place, doesn’t make it good.

I agree that "The person on the other side has the same tools you do" might be technically true, I have myself encountered it often enough that they don't even use it at all.

People don't always want MY take on it, they just don't want to bother finding the solution on their own at all.

So in that case replying with a verbatim copy-paste of a Claude response has the same energy as a lmgtfy link.

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