They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article.
This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this.
For the first case, the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point. People are more interested in helping those who have already tried helping themselves.
The second case is more of a social situation with an infinite number of explanations. Some times you have to read the room and realize that someone may not be interested in having those conversations with you. Some times it’s only in the moment (we all have bad days where we want to be left alone) but other times it’s a signal that they’re not interested in discussing this topic with you or maybe even anyone else.
> the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point
It's also helpful to the problem-solving and learning processes. For the expert, knowing what you've tried and how it didn't work refines the set of potential problems. For you, it's a free opportunity to get feedback on your methods from someone with domain expertise.
When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.
I get exasperated with the inexperience that I have run across for decades. Yes, I frobnicated the frobnitz, I transmogrified the bit twiddler, I wizzled the wobnosticator, (and this decade, I talked the three LLMs), and the problem still exists. What I really need to know is how the transmogrification affects frobnication, but no one has ever touched that configuration.
“Why would you even want to do that?”
I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given. Do you know or not? No. No one does.
I take a week to figure it out, I come back to the forum to post my response, and it’s automatically closed as off-topic.
There is a third case where the other party doesn't realize that the asker lacks the relevant experience to discern good LLM answers from bad answers for that topic.
Same solution as case one though - don't be afraid to say "Claude said X but that doesn't sound right".
Depending on the question that possibility can be quite rare these days. If you ask “How does x work in this codebase?”, it will read a bunch of files and give you a very likely to be accurate answer. If your using a platform without that context and ask it something more abstract, well, your mileage will vary.
Here's the problem, countering a lie or hallucination takes much more energy than asking Claude something and saying its true. Its the same as trying to fight misinformation on the internet, the amount of energy you have to spend to prove someone is lying or fabricating data is very high.
And having to do this on the corporate environment saps the energy and time of people that could be doing something productive by wasting their time answering a clueless person that asked an LLM about something they don't understand, got the answer they wanted (but that isn't real), and now are asking multiple people to prove it can't be done.
Here's an example, a PM decided they wanted to build a metrics framework, to track team success, with high level metrics. They asked claude to build such high level metrics (out of nowhere, these metrics don't exist), it happily produced hallucinated code that said it was collecting the metrics and the PR opened a pull request. Now we have to go there, review, find out is all bullshit and explain to the person that what they're trying to build doesn't exist.
So now we have to fight misinformation even on the clock.
If you've already done some research then include that up front. I get asked a lot of questions by people who not only haven't asked an AI first they haven't even googled it. So if you've asked Claude and are not satisfied with the response then include that and say what your question is now in the light of that information.
Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM.
>LMGTFY
I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that google results had a high chance of getting with "I'm feeling lucky".
If you've already done a bunch of research, and already asked the LLMs, when someone says "Honestly, ask Claude", you should be able to come back with what results you got to your question and what you need clarification on.
I've been doing programming and sys admin for 40 years. When I run a coworkers question through the AI tooling and talk through the answer with them, it's because my 40 years of experience tells me that's the next step.
Going to agree with you here. There's two types of "ask an llm." There's the "I don't know but whatever the llm said is probably right" and the "lmgtfy, did you even try?"
Based on the post his exact quote sounds more like 1 but obviously some people deserve the 2 sometimes.
This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice.
Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
Beyond mirroring the engineering practices that you yourself want to see other people perform, have you found any techniques to get people to … in short, do their job again? Understand context, understand what they did, why they did it, what they’re doing, etc.
The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it.
And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking points back and forth at each other feels equally harmful.
Are we really tolerating turning ourselves into LLM rubber stamps?
Yeah, I don't love this part of the work. Especially since it's completely exploded out the text of basically everything. I'm also suspicious that the person that generated that text didn't read any of it.
Well, it’s fucking annoying. When I’m asking a question and I put time into understanding the context and problem space, and already did some analysis with AI, I’m looking for a human opinion. I want my colleagues who know stuff to use their experience and their brain for a second to help the team.
I don’t need Claude to give a second opinion on something that Claude already ran through. It’s fucking useless and it’s a huge blind spot.
This shit happens when everyone in an organization is expected to use Claude to answer questions and do the initial investigation / analysis. Yeah, I did that. Now let’s get to work as humans and provide our expertise, and not turn it into an AI circle jerk.
That's the malevolent version of it. The alternative might be, I also don't know this from the top of my head and could spend some time to google/ask Claude/read the documentation/familiarize myself with the concrete code and/or problem at hand, but then again so can you and our collective time is better spent if I take care of my problems and you take care of yours, but if you really can't find a solution on your own and still need help please come back to me any time with a very concrete question you need my input on.
Which is funny because a huge number of people post this in responses to online asynchronous messages, on public forums, when they could also do literally anything else - like close the browser tab.
I’m assuming this person did ask in the second way, it’s hard to imagine someone working through a problem that has already tried a bunch of stuff just going in cold and not providing any context and saying “How do I do X?”
Good advice obviously if it’s not being followed already but also likely over-simplifying the problem. Also a normal person on the receiving end would probe a bit about what has already been tried. Which to be fair makes the whole thing a bit weird and does sound more like she’s being brushed off.
Anyone who recommends to ask an LLM in the first situation will do so in the second because they're a shit engineer.
"Ask the LLM" is not at all a valid answer in a professional context where part of your job is to educate the less experienced, no matter how little effort is put in the question.
Get used to it. People are lazy, and if they can deflect work off to an LLM, they will, as long as (crucially) it doesn't reflect poorly on them with anyone they care about.
Depends on the company and environment. If you work at a place that has an overabundance of easily-googleable questions, this behavior is a good social impediment.
Do you need to know if X is faster than Y? Do both. Measure. Sometimes the answer requires actual research.
Maybe you need a real Subject Matter Expert because it turns out that nobody ever published something on the internet about something so that an LLM could soak up the real world information.
Before the internet, we would consult with books. After the internet, it seemed faster to search and find answers in things like blog posts, (paid) articles, and CDs. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are great resources. Maybe you need an answer from Hacker News - ask HN.
By relying on LLMs more than these other sources and allowing LLMs to write articles and posts to these other sources, we lose subject matter experts.
Add to that companies like Microsoft and Meta and others laying off and offering retirement packages to get rid of institutional knowledge as fast as possible, and we are headed towards a gigantic crash of knowledge.
To be honest, I'm more worried about another side of the problem.
LLM's are good at learning from whatever humans have posted online. But with the agentic workflows getting more popular, more and more problems those AI agents figure out are not posted online, and the next time another agent running into the same problems they would have to figure it out from the scratch again. It'd be nice if there's a mechanism these agents would share the lessons they learn with each other, which could save a lot of trials and errors and wasted tokens. Humans share knowledge online. AI agents should be able to do so too. The moltbook thing from half year ago could have this potential, but too bad it's flooded by spams.
Of course, to make this AI knowledge sharing truly work, there may need to be a peer-review mechanism to ensure the knowledge being shared is truthful, reliable, non-trivial etc. That can probably be all worked out if somebody (or AI agent) really put effort into it.
The author considers the possibility that this is an outwardly-polite form of “you should be able to solve this yourself”. Another, grimmer possibility is that it’s an inwardly-polite form of “I should have been able to solve this myself”.
That is, the author asked for
the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't
this is just effort equilibrium something that wasnt as effective with “google it”. but ask a low effort question and get “ask claude” as a response is entirely appropriate.
junior developers on my team are often asking questions about our code base without even attempting to explore or self direct. “ask claude to look at <subsystem> and explain how its designed the key files and dependencies so that i can better understand it” is unsurprisingly effective and far cheaper than a couple of hours of opex
I find a llm in a harnes combined with manual ripgrep exploration is really effective of getting codebases. But you font always want to find what you find.
I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI.
It makes sense to hate and despise that answer.
And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.
You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario.
The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done.
There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively.
Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this:
"What should I do?"
"What do you think you should do?"
"X"
"Do X"
There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro.
Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.
ask supercomputer earth. it will figure it out in ten million years provided the computer doesn't get destroyed before that by that hyperspace bypass the vogons are planning.
Its now a polite way of saying "I dont want to work on this project" without having to go through the effort of thinking hard enough about the problem to put the "go away" price on it (or even worse having to DO the work I dont want to do).
Well the people who keep bugging me verifiably do not, so that's tough.
On the off chance they do, they either spectacularly self-sabotage, or treat the response like they do a typical message box popup. So I'll be asked to essentially read the same thing out aloud, only for them to go "ok-ok". It's beyond insulting.
I'll 100% keep telling people to ask an LLM when I suspect this shit. They do NOT respect my time and attention, and have robustly demonstrated so. But then these are the same people who cannot internalize the idea behind nohello.net either (gotta remind them every few weeks/months), and have demonstrated this kind of helplessness even before LLMs, so it's clearly a deeper issue, likely cultural.
It seems your peers might have a similarly low opinion of you, or at least I'd definitely feature that as one of the options.
OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster.
People are really really tired.
Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the <panic about XYZ>", our employers are making us work much harder, with a subtle but palpable panic in their emails, with WAY less promises of any kind of job security, companies that never had layoffs for decades are now doing them regularly, our githubs are flooded with people pointing robots at our issues to generate tepid pull requests, and at our pull requests to generate tepid reviews, and look shit is just crazy now.
So I think the whole "how would you approach this interesting problem..." thing is, for now, at least for me it feels a little bit on hold. Like oh that problem. How to scale? how to horizontally shard PostgreSQL? sure, real problems. But geez whatever we're building, it will be replaced in three months anyway. That's a hard problem you have there! I remember when I used to have problems like that, and my solutions sucked anyway and it was replaced with a node.js app two years later. Whatever advice I have, Claude is going to have 98% of it plus another 10% that I didn't even have.
This is all bad. So I think your post is possibly extremely useful. Maybe we should, for people we know and trust as humans in the real world, actually take the time and approach an issue as though we didn't have the Matrix to approximate it for us. I'm going to think about this and consider it.
before COVID everyone on my team travelled once or twice a year to conferences as well as to the home office for get-togethers, on the company dime. Those conferences have been turned into online only and my company hasn't flown me or hardly anyone on my team or any of our related teams anywhere in years. All of that would be considered vastly extravagant and expensive today. So some kind of belt tightening went on that was never un-tightened.
The subtitle is:
> I already did.
They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article.
This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this.
For the first case, the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point. People are more interested in helping those who have already tried helping themselves.
The second case is more of a social situation with an infinite number of explanations. Some times you have to read the room and realize that someone may not be interested in having those conversations with you. Some times it’s only in the moment (we all have bad days where we want to be left alone) but other times it’s a signal that they’re not interested in discussing this topic with you or maybe even anyone else.
> the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point
It's also helpful to the problem-solving and learning processes. For the expert, knowing what you've tried and how it didn't work refines the set of potential problems. For you, it's a free opportunity to get feedback on your methods from someone with domain expertise.
When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.
I actually hate reading posts that go “I can’t understand/fix this problem. Tried LLM…”
To me, such screams “I’m too lazy to do anything more than ask a LLM. I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas”
Show me you put a modicum effort and aren’t just looking to be spoon-fed the content from the first Google result that would have been found.
I get exasperated with the inexperience that I have run across for decades. Yes, I frobnicated the frobnitz, I transmogrified the bit twiddler, I wizzled the wobnosticator, (and this decade, I talked the three LLMs), and the problem still exists. What I really need to know is how the transmogrification affects frobnication, but no one has ever touched that configuration.
“Why would you even want to do that?”
I dunno, man, it’s the job I was given. Do you know or not? No. No one does.
I take a week to figure it out, I come back to the forum to post my response, and it’s automatically closed as off-topic.
*sigh*
There is a third case where the other party doesn't realize that the asker lacks the relevant experience to discern good LLM answers from bad answers for that topic.
Same solution as case one though - don't be afraid to say "Claude said X but that doesn't sound right".
Depending on the question that possibility can be quite rare these days. If you ask “How does x work in this codebase?”, it will read a bunch of files and give you a very likely to be accurate answer. If your using a platform without that context and ask it something more abstract, well, your mileage will vary.
Here's the problem, countering a lie or hallucination takes much more energy than asking Claude something and saying its true. Its the same as trying to fight misinformation on the internet, the amount of energy you have to spend to prove someone is lying or fabricating data is very high.
And having to do this on the corporate environment saps the energy and time of people that could be doing something productive by wasting their time answering a clueless person that asked an LLM about something they don't understand, got the answer they wanted (but that isn't real), and now are asking multiple people to prove it can't be done.
Here's an example, a PM decided they wanted to build a metrics framework, to track team success, with high level metrics. They asked claude to build such high level metrics (out of nowhere, these metrics don't exist), it happily produced hallucinated code that said it was collecting the metrics and the PR opened a pull request. Now we have to go there, review, find out is all bullshit and explain to the person that what they're trying to build doesn't exist.
So now we have to fight misinformation even on the clock.
If you've already done some research then include that up front. I get asked a lot of questions by people who not only haven't asked an AI first they haven't even googled it. So if you've asked Claude and are not satisfied with the response then include that and say what your question is now in the light of that information.
>I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him
Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM.
>LMGTFY
I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that google results had a high chance of getting with "I'm feeling lucky".
If you've already done a bunch of research, and already asked the LLMs, when someone says "Honestly, ask Claude", you should be able to come back with what results you got to your question and what you need clarification on.
I've been doing programming and sys admin for 40 years. When I run a coworkers question through the AI tooling and talk through the answer with them, it's because my 40 years of experience tells me that's the next step.
Going to agree with you here. There's two types of "ask an llm." There's the "I don't know but whatever the llm said is probably right" and the "lmgtfy, did you even try?" Based on the post his exact quote sounds more like 1 but obviously some people deserve the 2 sometimes.
I once wrote a similar essay on this topic. When I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer: https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/
This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice.
Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
Beyond mirroring the engineering practices that you yourself want to see other people perform, have you found any techniques to get people to … in short, do their job again? Understand context, understand what they did, why they did it, what they’re doing, etc.
The +/-2000 line MR was bad when humans wrote it. It’s way worse when the human didn’t even write or read it.
And just vomiting automated CodeRabbit talking points back and forth at each other feels equally harmful.
Are we really tolerating turning ourselves into LLM rubber stamps?
Yeah, I don't love this part of the work. Especially since it's completely exploded out the text of basically everything. I'm also suspicious that the person that generated that text didn't read any of it.
One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question.
Compare:
— What's the best way of doing X?
— Ask Claude.
vs:
— I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think?
I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.
— I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think?
— Ask Claude.
Its a way to say I don't care, don't waste my time
Well, it’s fucking annoying. When I’m asking a question and I put time into understanding the context and problem space, and already did some analysis with AI, I’m looking for a human opinion. I want my colleagues who know stuff to use their experience and their brain for a second to help the team.
I don’t need Claude to give a second opinion on something that Claude already ran through. It’s fucking useless and it’s a huge blind spot.
This shit happens when everyone in an organization is expected to use Claude to answer questions and do the initial investigation / analysis. Yeah, I did that. Now let’s get to work as humans and provide our expertise, and not turn it into an AI circle jerk.
That's the malevolent version of it. The alternative might be, I also don't know this from the top of my head and could spend some time to google/ask Claude/read the documentation/familiarize myself with the concrete code and/or problem at hand, but then again so can you and our collective time is better spent if I take care of my problems and you take care of yours, but if you really can't find a solution on your own and still need help please come back to me any time with a very concrete question you need my input on.
Which is funny because a huge number of people post this in responses to online asynchronous messages, on public forums, when they could also do literally anything else - like close the browser tab.
Intelligence is outsourced so now people who don't like to think they don't have to do it anymore.
Yes, the importance of asking a question to demonstrate you've invested effort cannot be overstated.
Without knowing what/how they asked, it's difficult but I would be tempted to suspect this was actually a way to say "please stop asking me questions"
I’m assuming this person did ask in the second way, it’s hard to imagine someone working through a problem that has already tried a bunch of stuff just going in cold and not providing any context and saying “How do I do X?”
Good advice obviously if it’s not being followed already but also likely over-simplifying the problem. Also a normal person on the receiving end would probe a bit about what has already been tried. Which to be fair makes the whole thing a bit weird and does sound more like she’s being brushed off.
It's highly unlikely that the conversation actually happened as reported. At the very least, something was said after "Ask Claude".
I lost track how many times I heard or read "I asked Claude to do X. It seems to work".
Agreed, you can also preface the question. I've checked A, B, and C with AI, curious to get your opinion/thoughts?
I don't think anyone in any industry regardless of seniority would redirect you back to AI assuming you're having a genuine conversation.
It's highly unlikely that the conversation actually happened as reported. At the very least, something was said after "Ask Claude".
Anyone who recommends to ask an LLM in the first situation will do so in the second because they're a shit engineer.
"Ask the LLM" is not at all a valid answer in a professional context where part of your job is to educate the less experienced, no matter how little effort is put in the question.
Sometimes part of the education is teaching people how to ask better questions, and that they need to do their research before asking you
"How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" by Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen is from before AI but still seems relevant.
(HTTP) http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/smart-questions.html
https://archive.ph/duRkf
LMGTFY for you was infuriating because it was 100% of the top Google responses to specific searches.
Generally I didn't unleash one of those without already being extremely certain that what they needed would be a top result.
However, search has become enshittified, and I've never had the same kind of confidence in an LLM chatbot.
Get used to it. People are lazy, and if they can deflect work off to an LLM, they will, as long as (crucially) it doesn't reflect poorly on them with anyone they care about.
So, if you want to have any decent company culture, make it reflect poorly on them.
Depends on the company and environment. If you work at a place that has an overabundance of easily-googleable questions, this behavior is a good social impediment.
My answer is usually to make a process.
Do you need to know if X is faster than Y? Do both. Measure. Sometimes the answer requires actual research.
Maybe you need a real Subject Matter Expert because it turns out that nobody ever published something on the internet about something so that an LLM could soak up the real world information.
Before the internet, we would consult with books. After the internet, it seemed faster to search and find answers in things like blog posts, (paid) articles, and CDs. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are great resources. Maybe you need an answer from Hacker News - ask HN.
By relying on LLMs more than these other sources and allowing LLMs to write articles and posts to these other sources, we lose subject matter experts.
Add to that companies like Microsoft and Meta and others laying off and offering retirement packages to get rid of institutional knowledge as fast as possible, and we are headed towards a gigantic crash of knowledge.
To be honest, I'm more worried about another side of the problem.
LLM's are good at learning from whatever humans have posted online. But with the agentic workflows getting more popular, more and more problems those AI agents figure out are not posted online, and the next time another agent running into the same problems they would have to figure it out from the scratch again. It'd be nice if there's a mechanism these agents would share the lessons they learn with each other, which could save a lot of trials and errors and wasted tokens. Humans share knowledge online. AI agents should be able to do so too. The moltbook thing from half year ago could have this potential, but too bad it's flooded by spams.
Of course, to make this AI knowledge sharing truly work, there may need to be a peer-review mechanism to ensure the knowledge being shared is truthful, reliable, non-trivial etc. That can probably be all worked out if somebody (or AI agent) really put effort into it.
There's also projects on hugging face like https://trace-commons-web.hf.space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u795pb/donate_...
These should be opt out. Maybe have a skill that is similar and is opt out
Have a skill enabled by default opt out that publishes them on a personal web page
“ I asked him where he'd look, personally, for the answer to a hard question I was chasing, one without industry consensus”
Doesn’t that mean his answer was that he, with all of his years of experience, would ask Claude?
"What did you find when you googled it?"
"What did an LLM say about it?"
"What did the docs say?"
These are all better follow-ups than telling someone to do a specific thing.
The author considers the possibility that this is an outwardly-polite form of “you should be able to solve this yourself”. Another, grimmer possibility is that it’s an inwardly-polite form of “I should have been able to solve this myself”.
That is, the author asked for
And his real answer isthis is just effort equilibrium something that wasnt as effective with “google it”. but ask a low effort question and get “ask claude” as a response is entirely appropriate.
junior developers on my team are often asking questions about our code base without even attempting to explore or self direct. “ask claude to look at <subsystem> and explain how its designed the key files and dependencies so that i can better understand it” is unsurprisingly effective and far cheaper than a couple of hours of opex
I find a llm in a harnes combined with manual ripgrep exploration is really effective of getting codebases. But you font always want to find what you find.
It's just the new "I don't know, Google it?"
I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI.
It makes sense to hate and despise that answer.
And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.
> Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter
Huh, what if I don't want to spend time answering a low-effort question? I will have a look if the default answers/approaches don't work.
You're projecting several layers of bias onto this scenario.
The more busy you are, the more valuable your time... the more expensive context switching is. When you are known as the person with the answers, your day is at least partially structured around getting people to leave you tf alone so that you can actually concentrate on getting your own work done.
There's a really toxic expectation that people who are senior should stop what they are doing XX times per day to help other people figure out their issues. Usually there's zero consideration given to how much each one of these interruptions takes away from them. Resentment builds cumulatively.
Before LLMs, this conversation usually went like this:
"What should I do?"
"What do you think you should do?"
"X"
"Do X"
There's only so many times that can play out before you really want everyone to just fro.
Anyhow, you should try hard not to "hate and despise" LLMs. Life is too short to invent paranoid reasons not to use the best tools available. That's another instinct you learn as an experienced dev.
What was the question?
ask supercomputer earth. it will figure it out in ten million years provided the computer doesn't get destroyed before that by that hyperspace bypass the vogons are planning.
Ask an LLM.
Your question was: "What was the question?" -- GPT 5.5
People are lazy... just get used to it.
Not all that different from LMGTFY
Ok but he clearly used a model to write this so...
I tell people this, a lot.
Its now a polite way of saying "I dont want to work on this project" without having to go through the effort of thinking hard enough about the problem to put the "go away" price on it (or even worse having to DO the work I dont want to do).
> I already did.
Well the people who keep bugging me verifiably do not, so that's tough.
On the off chance they do, they either spectacularly self-sabotage, or treat the response like they do a typical message box popup. So I'll be asked to essentially read the same thing out aloud, only for them to go "ok-ok". It's beyond insulting.
I'll 100% keep telling people to ask an LLM when I suspect this shit. They do NOT respect my time and attention, and have robustly demonstrated so. But then these are the same people who cannot internalize the idea behind nohello.net either (gotta remind them every few weeks/months), and have demonstrated this kind of helplessness even before LLMs, so it's clearly a deeper issue, likely cultural.
It seems your peers might have a similarly low opinion of you, or at least I'd definitely feature that as one of the options.
OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster.
People are really really tired.
Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the <panic about XYZ>", our employers are making us work much harder, with a subtle but palpable panic in their emails, with WAY less promises of any kind of job security, companies that never had layoffs for decades are now doing them regularly, our githubs are flooded with people pointing robots at our issues to generate tepid pull requests, and at our pull requests to generate tepid reviews, and look shit is just crazy now.
So I think the whole "how would you approach this interesting problem..." thing is, for now, at least for me it feels a little bit on hold. Like oh that problem. How to scale? how to horizontally shard PostgreSQL? sure, real problems. But geez whatever we're building, it will be replaced in three months anyway. That's a hard problem you have there! I remember when I used to have problems like that, and my solutions sucked anyway and it was replaced with a node.js app two years later. Whatever advice I have, Claude is going to have 98% of it plus another 10% that I didn't even have.
This is all bad. So I think your post is possibly extremely useful. Maybe we should, for people we know and trust as humans in the real world, actually take the time and approach an issue as though we didn't have the Matrix to approximate it for us. I'm going to think about this and consider it.
That makes sense as well, I think it's a nice human perspective. People really are uniquely tired lately.
We are not in a recession, and we (if you mean the US) recovered our economy from COVID (under Biden).
before COVID everyone on my team travelled once or twice a year to conferences as well as to the home office for get-togethers, on the company dime. Those conferences have been turned into online only and my company hasn't flown me or hardly anyone on my team or any of our related teams anywhere in years. All of that would be considered vastly extravagant and expensive today. So some kind of belt tightening went on that was never un-tightened.
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