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ffsm8 | on: Don't be a meat proxy
At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise.

They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him

Complete brainrot

Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point

Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea

prymitive | parent | next
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
ungreased0675 | root | parent | next
I’m not a developer, but when I watch devs whose work process is prompt, copy-paste, try to run, paste error into code, try to run, etc. I can’t help but think they’re unskilled. There’s no brain engagement, no understanding of the bigger picture, just being a worse slower agent.
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randusername | root | parent | next
All paradigm shifts and regime changes happen because of a coalition of people that have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the current system.

But I think we should decouple mediocrity from laziness. I haven't seen any team invest in the mentorship required to develop juniors in years, for example.

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xyproto | root | parent | next
It's also very easy to dismiss everyone falling into the "AI trap" as being mediocre in the first place, though. But one just can't know this without having seen their work pre-AI.
bigfishrunning | root | parent | next
I think the "meat proxy" people are mediocre regardless of whether or not the were brilliant pre-AI. They've reduced themselves to a copy-paste go-between for claude and slack (or github or jira or whatever) and are mediocre now. If only they could turn back the clock...
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embedding-shape | root | parent
I think people tend to forget that not only do we ourselves have different skillsets and can be amazing at one thing but horrible but another, but this also applies to other people in the world! Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.

Maybe this «spearheading AI person» just sucks at AI related stuff, as clearly that approach is bananas, but they could still be a OK developer.

skydhash | root | parent
> Far all we know, there is an amazing developer out there who without LLMs, might have been the single best developer in the country, but even this person might not be able to figure out how to effectively work with LLMs. And vice-versa too.

If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results or be a reverse centaur, then I’d be glad not to be able to work with them.

I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow. No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools. Because they are great levers that lets you create more with less effort.

vehemenz | root | parent | next
Many developers have narrow job descriptions, and the creative, productive uses of AI aren’t really obvious.

Where it shines is glueing systems together or building one-off automations that would take days, or weeks, to figure out. It’s for things you don’t have time to figure out or didn’t think were possible.

embedding-shape | root | parent | next
> If working with LLMs effectively means accepting subpar results

Why would it mean that? That's one way of using them, sure. Personally, my code is better as I have more time to think about the software design than before, and I'm less avoidant of refactoring in my personal projects.

> I’ve never seen a good example where AI is a net positive to any development workflow

Alright, does that mean you also believe it's impossible then that anyone out there is using AI in a "net positive" way for their development workflow? Or just that you've never seen it, but you're open to it existing?

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tdeck | root | parent | next
I think many people did argue against these things when they were new. Compilers, for instance, were seen as a waste of the computer's resources and produced less than optimal code.
yoz-y | root | parent | next
Eh. The useful LLM usage I see is in internal tools (bugs don’t matter because the output or UI is the only thing that counts and they are throw away) or personal projects that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Both of these can be quite invisible. But the benefit is there.

rightbyte | root | parent
> No one argues against compilers, build tools, IDEs, task runners, deploy and orchestration tools.

Uhm ... I've heard quite alot arguing against IDEs. And I feel IDEs are too much of a lock in.

surgical_fire | root | parent | next
Maybe that's how you get people in HN claiming to be infinitely more productive now thanks to AI.
kooi | root | parent | next
Infinitely, that's a stretch.

Over the past year maybe 1.5x to 2.0x for me. As in: I can work on two projects at the same time with reduced amount of context switch. But that's it for me.

Maybe I don't have the brains for 1000x terminal agent coding, but 2 parallel projects seems like my saturation point.

q3k | root | parent | next
I do believe there's a tiny subset of people who are more productive with AI, in the same way that Erdős was more productive with amphetamine.

But most who keep on going about their 10x productivity gain are indistinguishable from that one obnoxious guy at a party who won't shut up about his Ayahuasca retreat last spring. And they think they're Erdős.

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bonoboTP | root | parent
The ones who get more productive are either the very incompetent who get pulled up to the AI-floor level, or the very competent who know when and how to use it and for what. The midwits are too proud to use it and instead placate themselves that their precious skill is more special and immune to mechanization than it really is.

Many many people have jobs where their contribution is granting access to deliberately undocumented things, like knowing where the config files are and some such. They hate the idea of AI. For my non IT friends its great for diagnosing wifi issues. It's also great for competent network engineers. It's not great for those who gain a salary due to having memorized some actions or settings that they don't even understand much. Note that this group has also already resisted traditional script automation, just like US dock workers who resist automation.

nmeagent | root | parent | next
I would bet real cash money that many many people, including your coworkers, think that anyone who unironically uses the term "midwit" is completely and totally obnoxious.
projectazorian | root | parent | next
If you use it in a work context (or any normal social context really) then yes, that is obnoxious. That doesn't mean it's not a real phenomenon.
bonoboTP | root | parent | next
Mweh, I'm not a native English speaker. It's a definitely existing archetype, though, just like "Spießbürger" points at a thing in German.
delian66 | root | parent | next
Is he wrong though?
vehemenz | root | parent | next
More cringe than obnoxious, but yeah.
Jensson | root | parent
People who uses the word "obnoxious" are also obnoxious. There are many unpleasant words, you have to use some of them and people don't like any of them.
dml2135 | root | parent | next
The word “obnoxious” does not carry the connotation of smug superiority that “midwit” does.
nmeagent | root | parent
Would you refer to someone as a midwit in a typical office environment and expect your professional reputation to remain intact? If you were to do this on an ongoing basis for whatever reason, how long before you're asked to have a little chat with the folks in HR? Would you then attempt to explain it away as one of those unpleasant words that you just had to use? I want to be there for that conversation.
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surgical_fire | root | parent
> very competent who know when and how to use it and for what.

More productive? Sure, to an extent.

Being merely more productive is a tame claim for what some people unashamedly post here

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meowface | parent | next
Everyone I know, including myself, is simultaneously extremely pro-AI and anti-AI for this reason.

I always put myself in the shoes of the reader when relaying Claudeslop. I either use it as a reference and write it by hand or make Claude edit it 10+ times until it's conveying only the needed information, and in simple, clear words, and without annoying Claudeisms.

trueno | root | parent
we've been calling it meatware at work.

i just like dont read peoples md files they send me from claude anymore

chii | parent | next
He's basically asking other people to do his job for him, because he knows that the AI doesn't truly do it well enough.

I would say to him that if he wants me to do his job, he needs to pay me his salary.

datakan | root | parent
My VP boss calls me 6 times a day to help him understand his copilot responses and asks why we aren't doing what copilot says we should do. I then have to spend multiple hours explaining why. His peers call him to understand their copilot responses which he then copilots and calls me to help interpret. On and on and on
72deluxe | root | parent | next
This sounds like true hell. I am very sorry.
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hoppp | root | parent | next
Sounds to me like developer jobs are not going away after all. Somebody needs to understand what the AI communicates.

Sounds more like job security to me.

brlewis | root | parent | next
Have you tried putting those explanations into your repo?
natsucks | root | parent
wow. what a nightmare.
javcasas | parent | next
I am that person on the blast radius. The most effective response I have found is dumping the documents into the AI, and asking it to review them, then posting back the AI response.

Any resistance to this is met with a "But I'm also using AI as the board demands!"

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lukeschlather | parent | next
How correct is the documentation? You seem to be coming from the same standpoint as a lot of people in this thread which is "don't make me read AI output, I can prompt the model myself" but what this person is doing sounds much more sane - have highly skilled subject matter experts prompt the AI once, generate all the answers you might want, and review them carefully for correctness using all available context.

That sounds far preferable to individuals independently asking questions that are not covered by the documentation and independently reviewing a bunch of potentially hallucinated slop that no one else will ever read.

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lelanthran | parent | next
> Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point

So... back to a currency backed by gold?

Kostchei | root | parent | next
As an Au stralian I am offended you went with gold psychosis instead of whatever the aussie zeitgeist is cooking up with extra crazy. Our equivalent of "Florida man" is "queensland man" or "western suburbs man"- about half the country at this point. Its cooked.

In all seriousness, actual AI psychosis is my 3rd risk behind 1. public interactive agents and 2. whatever devs are doing with agents to prod

HPsquared | root | parent | next
All that trickles is not slop.
richrichardsson | root | parent
Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold! Actual Intelligence could grasp this was a simple keytranspose typo...
BigTTYGothGF | root | parent | next
> Aren't you clever knowing the periodic table symbol for gold!

I don't usually like to gatekeep but knowing that "Au==gold" is one of those basic facts that everybody on a forum like hacker news should know and find unremarkable.

You might even say it's puts on sunglasses periodic table stakes.

kruffalon | root | parent | next
I disagree...

Actual intelligence might be[0] to know what typos (of any kind) are fun to riff off.

Maybe this didn't hit the mark for you, but it got a chuckle out of me (especially considering the last hype before AI was crypto).

-----

[0] I don't even try to figure that out anymore, in a few years I'll pick the definition that I think best captures my thoughts

dwedge | root | parent | next
> ...

See that way too often in comments like this. Anyway, it was pretty likely they knew it was a typo, it was just a funny response.

| root | parent | next
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richrichardsson | root | parent
My mistake, I was under the impression Reddit was the place for facetious "funny" comments.
dwedge | root | parent
LinkedIn is the place for mid-intellectual condescension with an ellipsis at the end.
pringk02 | root | parent
I think you missed that the actual intelligence knew that it was a typo, and that the joke they made riffed on pretending that they did not know.
ForHackernews | parent | next
On the contrary, I kind of love this as form of malicious compliance. I'd wager money that the PO/BAs have been demanding "comprehensive documentation" for a very long time, and now they are getting what they've asked for good and hard.
RA_Fisher | parent | next
AI be used to make reviewing it easy, eh?
shimman | parent | next
It's okay, when enough terrible decisions impact a company they tend to do really poorly thought out layoffs so you'll be in the blast radius sooner or later.

Too bad there's no real accountability.

gjvc | parent | next
>Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea

yes you are

yourapostasy | parent
When some people call this "Verification Debt" or something similar, that is setting the Overton Window upon this phenomena adversely upon the verifiers. I call it an application of Brandolini's Law:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.""

Until you put in at least the same amount of energy required to verify the AI output as you are asking others to put in to verify it, the AI output you are wielding must be considered bullshit. Really, it should be based upon the verification requestor's historical trust score and how many human verifiers are looped in. A Verification Tax, so to speak:

The energy the creator must spend (Ec) is determined by a function of the number of reviewers requested (N) and the historical trust score of that creator's AI outputs (T).

Ec = N * (1 - T)