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.
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'd argue that it's worse because now you have no idea what the actual original context was, just the AI's hallucination of it.
The difference with AI is that the agent becomes the first level of triage. It (many times) asks the easy initial questions (did you turn it off and on again?) so I don't have to. Doesn't always work like this, but often enough.
Context is everything.
Btw, Claude code sent my first accidental AI email yesterday. I guess permissions changed? Before it could only draft. Uhoh, waiting for the onslop.
1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter
2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good proxy for my opinions on this is that I think https://nohello.net/ is a crutch for undersocialised (or overworked/near-burnout OR undiagnosed autistic) engineers & should not be normalised. The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room & saying "hello", then leaving & not being around when someone eventually replies: in that context nohello is pragmatic, but taking it beyond that to modern high-frequency realtime chat is an antisocial overstep. Leading with the entire context of your query may have some practical benefits but they're honestly overstated in exchange for killing natural social tendencies towards human dialogue. Similarly, a non-technical user giving you zero info about a problem is an opportunity for conversation & mutual education. It's relationship-building & helps build a foundation for further interactions with this person. It was never a problem in the first place; "solving" it is just another milestone on the road toward de-socialising humanity.
Because that would be super out of place, and you understand that intuitively.
That’s all nohello is about. It’s not trying to say “don’t be nice and say hi”, it’s saying “batch your hello and your question in the same message please”. Asynchronous communication mediums need an asynchronous communication style, it’s not that hard.
I would love to spend more time and talk to the people with their issues so we can come to a common understanding… but neither have the capacity for this, and now things are getting worse I think.
Maybe someday agents are good enough that we just discuss direction and implementation details, and every “developer” becomes more of an executive in a company, free to chat about more than just work, focusing on building human relationships and leaving “the tech stuff” to their agent teams…
And old geezers like us who actually know how to write ourself out of a for loop would be the premium - wizards holding forgotten knowledge, incomprehensible to mere uninitiated mortals. I wonder what distinctive dress and hair styles will we develop :-D
> a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y”
These people had below than average communication skills (or at least they were putting below than average effort communicating with you), so LLMs improved their output.
However, the society kinda expects people can and Should improve themselves over time. The issue is that LLMs improved their output, but not necessarily them.
I've sees some chat logs where I completely empathized with the AI trying to make sense of the information it was being drip fed. Always incomplete, often incorrect.
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.
Yes, but the kind of engineer that used to say "X is broken" will send you some slop with missing context and Claude will try to apply general solutions from its training data rather than from the specific context. As somebody on the Ops side that usually helps devs fixing things here and there, in those cases I'd rather them say "X is broken" and then I ask the question to Claude with all the context I have.
Probably the best solution currently is a shared skill with at least some curated context.
I think that's the key. Generally people would rather not receive slop because the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication.
In your example, the more context the better. I think there's an interesting nuance there.
That's an interesting thought. The message can have metadata that says the sender's spent 1/5/10/60/120 minutes or some other metric of how much thinking over the communication happened. Just need a way to monitor people's thoughts and digitize them to make that happen.
Really? How does Claude gather that context?