The "I don't know, Claude wrote this" pandemic

zknill 17 days ago |

I read the first two paragraphs and the post presumably criticising folks for using AI is so clearly written by AI. It's got all the tell tail claude-isms in it.

Analogies about 'students and exams' that don't quite fit. The sentences ending in artificially punchy short phrases. The 'correction' and dash-as-reveal in "they can't answer it - no one can".

It's not good, or a compelling read, and I think it's lazy not to have swept through and fixed these things.

brador 17 days ago | |

Still cost more than you paid for it eh.

26 years of startups and no one has made a way to pay $0.01 for an article.

pjc50 17 days ago | | |

It's advertising. People should be paying us to read it.

mydreamof 17 days ago |

IMO it depends on the company. If everyone in the company has to provide a lot of PRS etc. you have to stop care about the quality and just get the paycheck. The CEO decided not you. (Of course not when the product may charm ppl etc.)

pjc50 17 days ago |

Oh, this is advertising blogspam :(

netsharc 17 days ago | |

Flag the article to hell, please..

newsomix9xl 17 days ago |

I always use AI to understand big diffs.

And you can always reject a PR, bro with "I don't understand it to approve it. Maybe make it smaller or documents it better?" Etc

I've had code approvers who gave me tons of crap, even over smaller edits. You too can be that kind of reviewer!

rags2riches 17 days ago | |

My favorite reviewers are those that say "I'm not sure I see the whole picture, can you walk me through this?"

nasretdinov 17 days ago | |

Yeah that's quite odd that people somehow now think you can't reject a PR because you can't understand it -- but initially that was one of the reasons to have code review in the first place.

DarmokTanagra 17 days ago | |

Do it enough and you become the problem.

I ran into this at my previous company and ended up getting scolded for being a bottleneck when I was just sending back AI slop code.

newsomix9xl 17 days ago | | |

Yes, I couldn't complain at one place as the code Nazi reviewer was my manager, and one of the best I've had (managers not code Nazi reviewers).

bigstrat2003 17 days ago |

It is genuinely awful to work with people who do this. I lose all respect for such people immediately because what are you even providing to the picture in that case?

whstl 17 days ago | |

I fired a report for doing that.

It was quite easy to explain why to HR. They were just an interface between me and Claude.

No productivity lost.

znpy 17 days ago | | |

A (former) colleague of mine got fired for doing essentially thar and frankly i see the point.

Speaking with him was essentially like speaking with cursor, sometimes literally: in a call with him, he would type my questions about their work into cursor, he would wait for cursor to spit out a reply and then read it out loud. All while sharing the screen.

The real issue is no brain involvement. He had a couple of initiatives assigned to him that failed repeatedly because cursor told him to do a/b/c and he would trust cursor blindly.

whstl 16 days ago | | |

I recently had a non-techie doing this kind of stuff as well.

Sending me a bunch of JSON files generated by Claude and saying "here's the JSON files you need", not understanding that JSON can have different shapes.

It's frankly infuriating because now people don't know but also waste your time.

jdw64 17 days ago |

Personally, one thing I like about Claude is that before, specifications kept changing through verbal explanations. Now, with Claude, everything is communicated in writing, so there's no room for shifting blame.

Does this kind of difference vary depending on the engineering organization?