Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeonflux | Hacker News Reader

> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people.

Same thing did happen to many work places. People at all levels proxy questions through LLMs and don't even bother to read/trim/edit the response.

Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.

View on HN

Wasn't there an article here, or was it under another HN post as a comment? Someone pointed out that the before the dawn of LLMs, "bad contributors" had a rate limiter of sorts. Now anyone can prompt their LLM and throw their output at you, shifting the burden entirely on the reviewer at highest possible speed.

It's so much worse than just that. Because they will also decide on how problem should be solved by prompting LLM and ask you to argument doing it any other way vs the LLM slop they pasted

It which point you reject the PR and suggest them to maintain a fork themselves.

I'd say don't bother suggesting anything.

Not as a rule for all prs you want to reject, but any time it seems to be no-effort pure ai. Both to waste as little of your own time and effort as possible, but also to to help make this activity not rewarding.

I wouldn't worry about false positives and being unfair. This is self defense and also community defense. Anyone legit will manage to get your attention. You'd be filtering not on any specific detail or rule but on simply "care".

If a legit person fails to convince you that they are a human that cares, then that's just an unfortunate industrial accident. It's unfortunate but trying to do anything about it is worse.

Besides, any actual adult understands that if they can't prove their age right now, then they can't buy a drink right now, even though they normally have that right, and is never the one trying to cry about the travesty of justice at being denied. If I submit a pr that fails your ai sniff test, I get it and don't think you're abusing me. I can try harder and we can be friends later no problem at all.

I put something like that right into AGENTS.md in one of my open source repositories -- disclose the usage of AI (it's super obvious anyway) and be prepared to act on review comments, otherwise the PR is closed and submitted could be banned depending on my mood. And I only got like 3 PRs before I put it.

Those weren't even that bad code-wise, some have uncovered realy problems, but I ended up asking /my/ LLM to ponytail them into shape, because the submitter didn't bother.

Quasi-sealioning.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sealioning

this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474143

Just this morning I had a senior manager say to me "I was trying to do someone else's job and give them all the info so they can review it as I have no knowledge" in response to me asking for them to please filter the Claude word salad using the meat proxy. I'm pretty tired of having to do the job of filtering the low-effort copy-paste walls of text

Similar to sending a "Let Me Google That For You" except somehow because it was an LLM not Google, they've forgotten it's more insulting than helpful, and aren't even in on the joke they themselves are making.

I mean I can't speak for everyone but in my mind, sending lmgtfy was not only always insulting, it was meant to be. It's saying "I know you have access to the tools you need to answer this question, why are you asking me, and here's some instructions on how you use this tool in the future so you don't need to be asking me foolish questions."

And while I generally believe we should be pro-social in our communications both with each other as software engineers and with others who don't know what we know, I think it's also fair game to point out that the thing being asked of you is commonly available knowledge. Google may suck as my sibling comment points out, and I agree, but filtering good info from info dumps, be that Claude or Google search, is a life skill that's more critical now than ever. And if you work in tech, really at any level, you know how to do that.

The issue with LLM copypaste by non-expert humans, and it took me a while to realize this, is ego.

What they feel like when they do it: "Man, I'm fucking brilliant. Look at me using new technology well. I was always the key provider of value here."

What they hear when you call out AI copypaste as less useful: "None of that is true."

Now we can debate on the factual merit of both sides, but that doesn't change the feelings.

Unfortunately, I don't see a way to change the feelings, because that dopamine burst of making non-experts feel like experts is something all the AI labs have a HUGE financial incentive to maximize in their products.

Well - the "let me google that for you" nowadays barely works, because google ruined the search engine. The search engine sucks now - and by default the first results are AI slop summaries that are IMO worthless.

I saw a product manager that used to do that, just ask developers to verify the Claude hallucination and placeholder numbers.

He got fired quite quickly after his boss realized it was all bullshit.

I knew a manager that tried the exact same but in the GPT4 era :D He also got fired/left but as satisfying it would be to say that this was the cause of his demise I can't prove that.

> Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.

Wasn't it always?

I agree, anecdotally I've always noticed a huge amount of my peers lacked professional communication skills even pre-LLMs.

A lot of people get this idea that "more verbosity = better" instead of optimizing for conciseness and information-density. I largely blame minimum word-count essays from school assignments.

Verbosity can be fine, but you'd want a simple enough text, with the verbosity separated. I still write emails with footnotes, and thanks to UTF-8 I now have all the numbers available.

Amusingly enough the advent of HTML-emails didn't produce any better formatted mails, despite the extra formatting options, than what you can do with a plain text email supported by a proper text editor.

Verbosity is, among other things, a cover-your-ass move. Stating something simply requires cutting details that might matter sometimes. If your counterparty or experience has made this painful, you'll likely write more.

Would you like me to edit this mess for you? You’re way too verbose..

"As brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief. [then bloviates on and on.]" ~Polonius

I’d have written a shorter comment, but I didn’t have the time.

That's the essence of it, I suppose. Cheap walls of text.

Edit: although another quote comes to mind- "Quantity has a quality of its own."

Was also a power signal, often demonstrated by execs who send three or four word replies to everything, often also in lower case with no punctuation.

sama tweets like this all the time, totally performative

Depends. A lot of the 1-2 sentence rapid responders from my past jobs weren’t really understanding the problem. They were virtue signaling that they were confident, fast to respond, and understood immediately (without elaborating)

It’s easy to send a pithy response that suggests experience and understanding without having either. Think of a middle manager spouting pithy buzzword laden cliches confidently in response to every request, then transferring the real problem to the grumbling employees who have to solve the actual hard parts of the problem which lie in the nuance.

This is a core problem of short-form social media (including HN): it’s easy to signal understanding or expertise without having to demonstrate it.

I think a lot of workplaces would do well to ban LLM-based replies in certain spaces.

While I don't disagree with you, they shouldn't have to. This should be one of those things like covering your mouth when you cough in a crowd and not playing loud music in your cube that people with basic social skills should know not to do. Unfortunately, like much basic courtesy, we apparently now have to make rules.

I agree, but it seems that some people actually need to be told that copy/pasting a bunch of LLM slop into chat is like farting on an elevator.

I wouldn't even say that it comes down to "social skills" in a lot of cases, it's just people who seem to be performatively using AI. I'd classify them as corporate climber "yes, boss" types more than lacking in social skills.

Your analogy is better than mine. :-)

> Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.

Communicating well has always been a sign of skill. Talking to most devs was like pulling teeth even before LLMs.

Meat proxies. Artificially intelligent.

This was already true (as sibling comments note) but it's _way_ sharper now. Even if you use an LLM to research or answer a question, editing it down for other people takes effort, and doing it well demonstrates understanding.

That's why I tell my Claude to keep its responses short :V

caveman mode good

https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

Reply on news.ycombinator.com