Unfortunately people are being encouraged to use LLM in docs, emails, and presentations so it's probably a losing battle.
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?).
https://croissanthology.com/earring
We like whispering earrings. We'll follow a low friction happy path even if it leads us off a cliff.
No. We hated that too.
Actual research is, of course, fine.
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.
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.
"Do not make negative assumptions" basically. But also a drop in how often and quickly I did reviews.
If you _could_ do that and hand the information to Claude, you could also just…give the person that information directly, and avoid wasting their time and the tokens.
I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny, but this is such an unintellectual take that it veers into caricature. Props if that was your purpose.
If your question can be answered by Claude, and you didn't ask Claude yourself, and when other people do it for you, you complain that you could have done it yourself, then my honest reply is that you should just shut up and learn to use Claude.
In business, a lot of the time, accuracy matters. If you want an accurate answer, and there's a human who knows, don't ask Claude.
You are assuming that people that send you a Claude answer would send you any Claude answer. This is your assumption- basically a negative prejudice towards those who use LLMs- and has nothing to do with sending a Claude answer per se. Do you understand the difference?
You are assuming that I am making an assumption. Your assumption is wrong. I am recognizing that some humans are lazy and will do the minimum, and the minimum is to type in some query and copy-paste the results. If you like, yes, I am prejudiced - prejudiced against that behavior.
(I mean, I still trust a human who knows their stuff more than I trust Claude...)
I don't want to know what Claude thinks.
If you don't know the answer, say that. "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer, albeit one which I might follow up with something like "Well why don't you know? This is literally your job to know", which is kind of what 90% of my emails at work for the past three weeks have been.
In a human interaction, when used confidently, it means 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front. I don't have to do the slightest thing to impress you. My foundation is so secure it doesn't need defending or justification at all". Also, 'that turns out to be outside the massive quantity of stuff I do know, how interesting'. Think Holmes, perhaps erroneously saying 'Now that I know that, I shall do my best to forget it' on the grounds that his work wasn't helped by the fact.
It could get ruined by an AI normalization of the idea that 'everybody should know literally everything, because asking an AI is the same as knowing and then you know the thing, having been told it'. Plenty of money is now marketing this position to the world, and so it's possible 'I don't know' will become ruined, a shameful response.
I feel like that may not happen in practice, though, because that pro-AI position is what used to be called 'pants-on-head R-slur' and I feel like the people who buy into this extreme position will make SUCH a disaster of things that it will tend to make that position, instead, the shameful response… and 'I don't know' will remain a valid signaling mechanism to convey 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front', all the more if it's more of a shocking response to get.
They will invent crazy workarounds to avoid those 3 words.
Even if I ask "Do you know X?" they will not just say "no" most of the time, unless it's really outside their wheelhouse. If they think they should know it, they'll spit out statements worthy of an LLM.
And I admit, I felt the same at first. The first few times I told the CTO (my boss) that, I cringed. But he just told me to put aside time to research it. He knew I couldn't know everything, especially about things that we hadn't done before.
;-)
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?
> 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.
That’s all you have to add to make this into a much more pleasant interaction
The amount of text isn’t equal and the benefit is primarily that I can push the LLM into a basin you don’t know the keywords for — something that takes a few minutes to type a couple sentences and me scan the results to make sure they’re roughly on track. And much, much less time than me trying to (re)write a treatise on a topic.
Dropping you an LLM reply is the equivalent of dropping you a link and telling you to learn about the topic — and appropriate in roughly the same circumstances.
> if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.
If I send you some text copied and pasted from Claude, it means that I have read it and I think it's worth for you reading it. In this sense I'm already owning it. The problem is not the pasted answer, it's your assumption that a Claude-generated text must be "slop" that I haven't read.
I feel like these things are pretty trivially obvious. When there is noise, you have to make sure your signal is not taken for noise, if we assume that your intention is to produce signal in the first place.
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.