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Comment by programmertote | Hacker News Reader

I have at least one coworker who literally copy-paste AI output to respond to code and doc reviews (and most of her communications like on Teams and Asana) despite me telling her multiple times to take it a notch down. Two days ago, she started answering my doc review questions with literally AI outputs (like "Good question. <insert a bunch of verbose response>" and "You're right. <insert a lot of fluff with little substance>").

That really bothered me that I finally announced AI "code of conduct" (more like AI usage expectation) and stressed that if one is not so kind as to have his/her coworker review AI output as it is, then I'll take formal measures to address that. We'll see what happens in the near future.

Really worrying that some people are totally comfortable with relying 100% on AI to do their work. Then what's human agency? What's the point of having them in the team (as opposed to just building an AI agent and work with that)?!

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If I were to be real, my coworkers that post AI responses straight rarely had insightful comments before AI.

Yeah, but now it’s more confidently slowing us down… It kind of sucks. Someone else said that non-SMEs can’t filter through the noise and may actually mistake the AI slop for signal, which worsens the problem.

> If I were to be real, my coworkers that post AI responses straight rarely had insightful comments before AI.

There's never been a shortage of low-value coworkers because hiring is hard and firing is unpleasant and painful in many ways.

But there's a weird phenomenon with AI where a lot of people are using it to actively call attention to the fact that they aren't doing anything but call the tools.

Rarely in the past have the I-just-want-to-coast-doing-the-minimum folks called so much attention to it!

Ironically, in synchronous conversations, the same co-worker is constantly going on about how swamped he is, and how he's being pulled in so many directions.

Apparently, it takes a lot of time and work to manage all those AI chat bots.

> Rarely in the past have the I-just-want-to-coast-doing-the-minimum folks called so much attention to it!

You seem to presume that they realize they're calling attention to it.

On Stack Overflow, there was this phenomenon for a while where people would blatantly copy and paste answers from ChatGPT, have them deleted, and then run to the meta site to complain. The complaint would either be in barely comprehensible broken English or in recognizable ChatGPT-ese. It would involve swearing up and down that no LLM assistance had been used. Looking at the user's history would reveal a gap of several years of not answering questions, and then the old answers would have the same barely comprehensible broken English (and often not be very good technically, either). The OP demonstrated a genuine complete inability to understand how obvious the ChatGPT use was.

This happened multiple times with different users.

Possibly, but the noise has increased so we're worse off.

Hard for me to even imagine being in that kind of work environment. I know that I don't always like the output for AI, and even will argue with it at times (often into submission), then ask it to restate.

For code gen and review, it's been pretty good since recent Opus versions, and I really like Fable's outputs (though a bit costly in terms of use). Fable is much closer to my own style for the couple things I've done with it.

I have yet to even consider replying to emails/messages with AI. I sometimes write a wall of text on my own, but it's entirely me.

Need to be more aggressive. There must be audits to see what value people are adding on top of agents. If there is no value———fire them.

i mean, basically your talking to claude through a human proxy at that point...

(and yes, i've experienced this exact phenomena as well)

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