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"Don't expend more effort than they are" has actually long been a good principle to have internalized. Someone done only cursory research before asking a question on a mailing list? Give a cursory answer. Someone obviously spent hours trying to figure things out on their own? Give them a good chunk of your time. Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind. Someone obviously engaging with your ideas and taking time to explain their position? Take time to engage with their ideas too.
I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.

You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer.

It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics.

You have a problem. You want someone's help. If the cost to you is effectively nil (or negative, since you're asking someone to do your job for you), but the cost to the other person is non-zero, then incentives aren't lining up here. Pretty quickly that person is going to start carrying too much load and become a bottleneck.

It can also mask that the context of the work is too concentrated in one person, and does little to nothing to help build that elsewhere in the team.

The other end of this is exactly what you're saying--put as much effort into the answer as they put into the question. You're not doing anyone a service by taking their low effort input and giving them high effort output, least of all yourself. If someone asks "how do I X", that's low effort. If you happen to know the answer off the top of your head, spare a few sentences to explain or point them where in the code they need to be. If you don't know, don't go track it down for them.

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These kinds of principles are sensible at their core, and I am a big proponent of the mindset, but the main problem as a sibling comment pointed out in a way is that this assumes that everyone is striving for an honest and accurate correlation between display of effort and value, and that everyone is looking deep enough into and behind that display to recognize the true value behind it. But actual effort, let alone value, is not always clearly visible or honestly displayed, and the perception of it is also subject to your own biases.

You could say that people have the responsibility to demonstrate that they put in the effort and created value, but then you get the situation where people naturally optimize perception of effort or value over actual effort or value, because in the end that is what is rewarded. Then you can also say that people also have the responsibility to look a bit closer before estimating real value, but that takes more effort and people naturally strife towards efficiency. I would guess that the problem today is that the balance between these two is off, and we're doing too much of the former and too little of the latter.

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> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.

"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal.

The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

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AI has collapsed the cost of producing content while leaving the cost of reviewing, verifying higher imho. This has inverted the economics of collaboration. Reviewer attention, not output volume, is now the scarce resource, this happened with my engineering teams (PR reviews) and is now happening in my world in Product.
This has been my policy for a couple of decades. When somebody posts just a bare link (especially if it's to a video), I refuse to click. If it's not worth your time to introduce why something is relevant, then it's not worth my time to go figure that out.
> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.

Or, depending on the context, perhaps give a thorough enough answer with citations that it should either answer questions on the topic fully or explain where anyone interested in the topic can do their own research, such that if the question is asked again one could just link to your previous post.

This might not satiate a poster if they're dumb enough, but it's worth remembering that the post will be searchable and usable for reference by other people.

> Either don't respond, or respond in kind.

!

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Yup. The most concise version I've heard of this, which I find useful for many situations, is:

"If it isn't important to you, it isn't important to me."

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It takes considerable energy to train models and run inference. You can't dismiss AI generated content as "low effort", but you can dismiss it as a wasteful diversion.
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