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This smells an awful like a post-hoc justification of why you can’t answer it yourself.

If you _could_ do that and hand the information to Claude, you could also just…give the person that information directly, and avoid wasting their time and the tokens.

Uh? I don't understand, are you saying that instead of asking Claude myself I should write a question for other people to do it? Which is by the way only the initial part of the work I described?
You can do whatever to get answers to questions, but don't just forward said answers to other people, tell them in your own words / interpretation. Prove that you understand the information you've been given instead of being a meat proxy.
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You can also respond ‘I don’t know’ instead of doing the equivalent of responding with the first page of an ‘I feel lucky’ google search
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> Then do it and don't ask questions.

I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny, but this is such an unintellectual take that it veers into caricature. Props if that was your purpose.

No, it was a suitably nasty reply to someone who boasted of being nasty to colleagues trying to help.

If your question can be answered by Claude, and you didn't ask Claude yourself, and when other people do it for you, you complain that you could have done it yourself, then my honest reply is that you should just shut up and learn to use Claude.

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If I've asked *you* a question, it's because I want to know what *you* think.

I don't want to know what Claude thinks.

If you don't know the answer, say that. "I don't know" is a perfectly good answer, albeit one which I might follow up with something like "Well why don't you know? This is literally your job to know", which is kind of what 90% of my emails at work for the past three weeks have been.

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"I don't know" is an extraordinarily powerful answer, but maybe it's getting ruined. I'm not sure it can be entirely ruined.

In a human interaction, when used confidently, it means 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front. I don't have to do the slightest thing to impress you. My foundation is so secure it doesn't need defending or justification at all". Also, 'that turns out to be outside the massive quantity of stuff I do know, how interesting'. Think Holmes, perhaps erroneously saying 'Now that I know that, I shall do my best to forget it' on the grounds that his work wasn't helped by the fact.

It could get ruined by an AI normalization of the idea that 'everybody should know literally everything, because asking an AI is the same as knowing and then you know the thing, having been told it'. Plenty of money is now marketing this position to the world, and so it's possible 'I don't know' will become ruined, a shameful response.

I feel like that may not happen in practice, though, because that pro-AI position is what used to be called 'pants-on-head R-slur' and I feel like the people who buy into this extreme position will make SUCH a disaster of things that it will tend to make that position, instead, the shameful response… and 'I don't know' will remain a valid signaling mechanism to convey 'I'm so authoritative I don't even have to front', all the more if it's more of a shocking response to get.

I definitely appreciate being told "I don't know", but I've found in business settings that people expect to get reprimanded for saying that more than a couple times a year, and they refuse to say it.

They will invent crazy workarounds to avoid those 3 words.

Even if I ask "Do you know X?" they will not just say "no" most of the time, unless it's really outside their wheelhouse. If they think they should know it, they'll spit out statements worthy of an LLM.

And I admit, I felt the same at first. The first few times I told the CTO (my boss) that, I cringed. But he just told me to put aside time to research it. He knew I couldn't know everything, especially about things that we hadn't done before.

We are talking about questions in the context of reviewing a pull request. If I ask you a question about the code, and you have to ask Claude, or otherwise cannot tell me why the code that you wrote is the way it is, that is strike one of two.
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Most people who post LLM output don't do what you do though.
If someone asked you a question, it's most likely because they value you. Whether it's your skills, your domain knowledge, or something else, people ask you questions because they know you can provide some value. When you give them a Claude response, not only are you being rude, but you're devaluing yourself in the eyes of those around you. They learn that you can't be relied upon any more, and so they stop asking you questions.
Asking the LLM a question _is_ a skill, just like googling. The problem is not asking a LLM, but pasting the 300-chars response without any context.
"I've been asked to confirm that our random number generator satisfies section 14 of the Foo-Bar Accord of 2021. I'm fairly certain it does, and that foorandom.c is a good choice. Assuming I'm broadly correct, write one short paragraph that would confidently assuage anyone of concern without raising any new concerns. Cite the specification and link to it. Afterwards, for my benefit, write a short bullet list with any non-trivial reasons I might be wrong."
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If I asked a question to Claude, it's because I couldn't answer it myself, but also, because I used my skills and domain expertise to explain clearly the problem to Claude.

And if I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it means that I have read and evaluated what Claude wrote back, and I have extracted the part of it that most clearly contains the answer as well as the diagnosis- if I gor anything relevant.

Of course I could instead pretend I came up with the answer myself in 5 minutes thanks to my superior analytical skills, and write down two short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?

But that’s not what happens - people are posting the question into Claude and pasting back saying “here’s what Claude said”. There’s 0 value add in that - I don’t know if you agree, disagree or have even read it. My experience is that most of the time it’s just verbatim,

> write down to short lines that point to the solution without any explanation. Would you find it better?

Yes. That’s why I asked you and not an LLM.

> hey, I don’t know the answer to your question but I went through Claude and got this response. Let me know if that answers your question otherwise we can dig deeper together

That’s all you have to add to make this into a much more pleasant interaction

I agree. However, since I work in a small team and everyone knows me, I don't need to provide this entire context every time. I usually just prepend "according to Claude ..." and try to provide a one line recap of the main point. Then paste the relevant section of Claude's answer (two to three paragraphs).
Your response misses the words most critical to this interaction: "I don't know"
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You took all this time to reformulate the question, add the relevant implicit context, and do back and forth BUT you did not have time to reformulate the answer to something human readable that YOU own and can take responsibility for? This does not make sense to me. Nobody said not to consult an llm while formulating an answer. But if you give an answer, own it. Don't throw slop grenades.
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I do not think people should stop asking questions. What is the point of teams / departments / orgs ?