alt Hacker NewsDon't be a meat proxy
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Thank you for saying this. I’ve been dealing with this at work and it’s incredibly frustrating
If I wanted to know what the AI said, I would have asked it myself.
Don't give me AI feedback at all.
Last week a colleague did this to me; pasted to me in chat "Gemini said". I just ignored it and went with talking about the issue on another thread. I like LLMs and I use them every day, but I'm not gonna answer copy&pasted LLM stuff in human to human conversation. Distill it and let me know your thoughts; I don't need to read you LLM output, I can generate that myself.
That is super actual in my team. The biggest problem is that Claude tends to write long prose and use jargon which is not common for us. Often, to understand the whole idea I have to read all the text. The best if the writer rephrases what Claude has written, as wording/jargon will be familiar for the reader and will make communication easier.
Recent models have had a worrying lean towards longer output. If you're going to serve up some AI slop, at least distil it to the smallest possible footprint possible.
Nah, I disagree let them pay for my query dude. I want all the tokens I can get.
PS: Ideally set thinking to max and research mode or whatever anthropic calls it.
I append "sound kinda dumb but be factually correct" to my Claude requests and get much less jargony responses.
> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
this is perfectly understandable?
I'll always give people my honest effort and benefit of the doubt initially, but those who violate it are treated likewise. The only way to put down this kind of behavior is to charge it a social cost. If we do not do this, the cost is externalized to everyone else who conducts themselves with care.
Why are LLMs producing this super tense text more often now? Is it because they are being optimized to use fewer tokens?
I've gone another route when I found myself simply replying with an investigation made from an AI: Actively encouraged my coworkers to ask the knowledge-bank AI I've setup instead of asking me. It has read-only credentials for all our environments and access to our non sensitive codebases, so it can answer any question much faster and accurately than I can. It works too! We use grafana less, we get more accurate bug reports, we understand the bugs/issues far better.
The "problem" here is that AI is too great at providing answers, so lean into it instead of fighting it. It won't go away.
Some version of this needs to be hosted on a dedicated domain like nohello.com that I can respond with as needed. I might just do it
claude said u cant call its users meat proxies. Now back to watching 'ow my balls!'
It's our absolute obligation to make sure "meat proxy" sticks as hard as "vibe coding" did. It's too good not to.
When it comes to cost per implemeting SPEC, agents are far cheaper than human salary. So, it's not going to go well.
That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
> Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. I recently got this sentence from Claude: "NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn." Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.
I'm always puzzled when I see this kind of commentary. How are people using LLMs that they find this type of thing problematic? Just do:
- "It's verbose" -> prompt "Explain briefly"
- "plausible nonsense" -> Yes, it happens, but less frequently than with older models, and arguably far less than your average human. Mitigate by prompting "Run a search to check that X, Y, Z is correct".
- "I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this." -> Does this really happen frequently? It doesn't to me. Mitigate by prompting "Breakdown that sentence and explain each term in plain English".
Of course your grumpy coworker might then respond: "So if you can ask Claude, why did you ask me then?"
We're seeing this everywhere now, people generating thousands of lines of documentation or PR feedback in seconds, then dumping the actual labor of verification onto their teammates.
Yeah, I just ignore people who do that. I don’t care what Claude or ChatGPT said. If you cannot be arsed to write yourself then I cannot be arsed to read it.
Claude's not a person. Claude is just a tool.
eventually two people will just be forwarding AI outputs to each other, each assuming the other one read it
If people say: AI said "X". It usually means you should've asked AI before going to the human.
This is mostly a problem with the product. It should write better. But maybe the priorities now are not on this part.
> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
> Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.
There's a lot to say about this, but I would just start with why are you using NATS if you don't understand it at all, and how did this become AI's fault?
I've been on the receiving end of too many "Slop Grenades" as well, to the point where I simply reply with https://noslopgrenade.com/ these days.
"That's great for you, I'm not going to read it" is a phrase I have had to use.
Thank you!
Finally I have a word I can use for this
I am sure this will lead to can you dumb this up prompt which will miss the important details
It's my very same exact opinion and as an EM I'm trying to push this everywhere (team, peers, upwards) but it feels like speaking to a rubber wall. It starts to be exhausting and infuriating. This is not an "LLMs are bad" issue, this is a "humans are lazy" issue. (shit, I wrote the it's not X it's Y construction!)
In these situations I always use AI to respond
I do this often for stupid questions. It's like sending someone a lmgtfy link.
Don't waste my time by asking me a question that:
A.) I know no more about than Claude, and
B.) You could have answered yourself using Claude
All of the questions I respond to this way fulfill both A and B. Responding with "Claude said" is both more polite than most ways to respond to such questions, and a subtle hint to the other person that they should be using the LLM first for those types of questions, rather than coming to me first.
Friends don't make friends read slop.
If I have something Claude wrote then I will offer the LLM output. But I generally prefer to at least give the option.
I have seen conversations where it has boiled down to an exchange of A's Claude responding to B's Claude with a retort and fixes from A's.
When using AI to generate content, content of any kind - then I urge the author to evaluate the true cost for the organisation, not just for him or her. Using AI to generate 20 pages of documentation in 30 minutes looks good for you - but having 100s of people read through that slop will cost the organisation, not only in plain work hours, but also in lost trust, respect, joy of work as well a sense of purpose.
And yes, I've gotten '50 pages tech spec' docs sent my way from upper management -- as a 'help'....
When "ai slop" became a concept, it mostly came into spaces where "human slop" had already been firmly established.
Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.
That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.
thank you for this post, this is absolutely happening i just did not have words to put on it and it is festering.
Remove meat proxy before flight
I wrote about this a year ago: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/
Sending LLM outputs to people is worse than useless, because you don't even know what they prompted with. For all you know it was "write me a paragraph justifying my opinion".
You either get the AI notice or you don’t. The AI output will still be posted.
It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
The real reason people do it:
1. It's quick
2. It's not their problem anymore because they've replied.
No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that.
Yes
We added this communication rule to our company handbook: "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort" (coming from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609) and it's working well so far.
Just my boss..
niceee
I call it BI Slop now [0]. It's everywhere. Usually "claude said" is used a a proxy for authority, as in there is some validity in this statement. But it's disguised as humbleness. i.e. I don't know if this is true, but claude said xyz, with your expertise you might know more than me...
People do this all the time though w "paul graham said" "elon musk said". Why not "Sum Total Avatar of All Human Knowledge Said ..."
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I read this a couple weeks back and its appeal really stuck with me: if you expect someone to give their attention to something you made, make sure you've given your own attention and effort first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497609 https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/