Claude Says

I tire of all of this discourse at this point because people who don't need to hear it are reading it and nodding, and the people who DO need to hear it are busy making everything worse, earning leadership accolades (or are the ones handing them out), and are completely closed to any criticism or input.

Anyone with intellectual curiosity and any sense of subtlety or balance is operating in a separate reality from people who are so AI-pilled and very proud of it and there's basically no possible cross talk (usually because the AI-pilled people are the ones who own all the shares).

I say this as someone who really likes LLMs and what roles they'll play in software engineering in the future (and already are, right now).

I can't wait until the AI craze is in the same spot that the crypto craze is currently. People are still using and building with crypto, but the sale of ape PNGs has mostly stopped, and now if I have a problem that a blockchain could solve, I could actually talk about it instead of accidentally picking up a battle standard in the middle of a trench war.

I'm reasonably opposed to LLMs, mostly from a human perspective. They reduce us to our output without factoring in any of the actual thoughts and experiences that go into that work, it's literally not in their training data.

It's unfortunate that we live in a world that has decided to push in this direction.

I have started a work project that is 100% vibe engineered, as an experiment to see where it would land. While it seems to be working, I can see that it has made so many mistakes along the way that it is still unclear if we can dig ourselves to production ready.

I was at an art museum recently, and was looking at a marble statue. And I thought to myself: this artist probably spent more time sculpting the big toe than anyone has spent appreciating the entire statue.

That speed is what we used to have in software engineering. So much careful craftsmanship, no line just yeeted out. And now we're just heading into a direction with no clear end, just prayers that bigger and better models will lift us forward.

What's the point of being human if we're so gung ho to remove that which separates us from other animals (our intellect)?

I have to disagree a bit here, people (including me sometimes) can take the lazy way out and just tell you what an agent said in response to a question which we shouldn't do. At that point it's little better than a let me google that for you link. However, while I may be passing along what I found using an agent, but usually I still had to do the work of prompting it, asking it to lookup information for me, and otherwise filtering the agent down to the relevant information. There is a good chance that I'm doing that because of my specific expertise in the subject area which is something outside of what you could have found by just asking an agent yourself.

It took maybe a decade to teach people to not use "@here" on Slack, and avg. response time of an email isn't 10 minutes. Technology comes out, many people fumble through for years, until finally some etiquette is formed. Happens all the time.

I don't remember the last time someone dropped me the first link out of a Google search, telling me they haven't read themselves and have no idea about its contents. Yet I see it happen in various 1-1 and public settings with Claude all the time.

In those discussions people often don't use this as a "Here let me Claude it for you" kind of protest, but genuinely they mean "I copy pasted this topic to Claude, and Claude said this. I'm meat-proxying to you, and absolutely haven't invested a single microsecond of my time on it". Obviously the expectation is you'd invest the effort they haven't.

My strategy and hope, is to give it a decade. It will probably get better.

The one thing I do find extremely frustrating is how there can be some ridiculously painful obstacle that hits you in the face all the time when trying to ship code, and everyone is seemingly sympathetic, but it can't be changed for dubious compliance reasons, or maybe because if the barriers were lowered it would threaten the quality control for the code. Fair enough.

Then, of course, all of those speedbumps are demolished in record time, only for the AI agents and not for the humans, regardless of what caveats remain unsolved, with little regard for whether or not it meets compliance standards.

The obstacle is fixed. Just ask the AI agent to bypass it for you!

We live in an interesting time.

I have been in meetings where the conversation has been 'my Claude has got feedback', 'great, I'll get my Claude to take a look'.

When do you just cut out the human middleware in that process?

I disagree completely, citing your source is an amazing habit and I wish more people did it. "Webster says" vs "My mamaw told me" makes a big difference, and to all those like the author who think that drudging through manuals on specific topics will pay off in 20yrs, I really think you should look into how human memory works. One of my favorite quotes is "That guy has forgotten more about SSL than I've ever learned, and he still made a typo that broke the internet."

So please, cite your sources where relevant and don't waste people's time with your fuzzy human memories.

I feel like the author has been really lucky with their coworkers, or is not in a leadership position.

My entire professional life I have dealt with people who refuse to do basic research. They won't diagnose, they won't investigate, they won't RTFM. Instead, they'll ask me questions as the very first step.

Just like I would forward them information like "the docs say...", I'm going to start by forwarding information like "Claude says..." so as to not waste my own time until they give me a specific reason they're asking me. Odds are they're actually just being lazy / intellectually incurious and haven't even Googled it or asked Claude.

Now if someone sends me a well thought out question with what specifically they're having trouble with, I'm more than happy to actually dig in. But odds are, questions like that will include research and auditing, which I'm going to do with Claude. I'll double-check its work, but I still want to explain what information is coming from me and what information is coming from it. They can use that to evaluate the level of trust they have in that information, instead of me making the decision for them.

I am empathetic to the author's point, though. It's frustrating to get a taste of my own medicine on this, but I often take that as a sign that I'm doing the thing I hate and should have asked a better question. If I reflect and still believe otherwise, I message them politely about it. And if it repeatedly happens, I escalate to our manager - like I did before Claude existed.

This is pre-AI speak. Post-AI assumes we all maintain multiple concurrent chats and use that to search for information. “Claude says” becomes the new “I googled this”.

I started writing this as satire and I don’t like how realistic this gets.

I still don’t like it, if only because the power imbalance seems somehow worse than with Google.

It's become so frustrating when literally everyone is just using Claude for everything. Simple messages and updates are fed through Claude. It's come to the point where any human language in corporate is punished.

No problem, the next time you have an issue or ask if anyone has any idea, I'll just ignore you and mind my business, confident that you can do the prompting yourself. Voilà, problem solved.

I find it a little irritating when somebody literally copies and pastes a bot response without editing it at all. Not because it's wrong, but because it's full of cruft and slop. The core information is there, but it's surrounded by junk the author probably doesn't understand and hopes I will.

As a software engineer talking to other software engineers, I'm the controller of my domain knowledge. But my domain knowledge is now subjugated to Claude, and it tells me what it did. When someone else needs to know what I did, I have to ask Claude what it did. Then I send it over the fence and the other engineer does the same.

I don't think this is inherently bad. It's sort of like two managers talking to each other and having to talk to their employees about what's actually going on. What's bad is when the managers themselves don't understand it and just start blindly copying and pasting things. That's where you get into trouble.

This post doesn’t really add anything new. These points about AI and critical thinking have been made many times before.

It's "I saw it on Google" on steroids.

Wasn’t it also like google says?

Human slop.

If someone answers your question with "Claude says..." it's a clear indication that you should've asked the question to an LLM yourself before bothering a human.

This is just the new version of LMGTFY.

> AI is the reason our software stack is overengineered to the 10th degree

Complete BS.

Disclosing that you got some info from an AI is way better than not. We’re all using AI in some capacity just be transparent about it. If you didn’t read the findings then say it. As always there’s nuance and it depends