9 ms·

I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making thes

by seer 28d ago

I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions. Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me. Otherwise each of these coaxing sessions is something I have to keep in my head until resolved, which is a load in and off itself. And even better - I can point Claude to that message and gives me a summary. You might say this is silly because we are paying the LLM tax, but knowing what to share, and then verifying against my situation are two different things. Sometimes they have checked the wrong thing, sometimes they need guidance, sometimes I need to investigate before I can answer. A full LLM message with context is like “summary of their working context that I can resume on my end” so I don’t waste cycles asking or rechecking etc. And it is still possible to be a learning experience for both of us since the initial message is the start, we can then talk to each other like humans, both much more in sync than before… It is kinda ironic but I think it does push things in a better direction. Would I have loved it if the message was human, direct and to the point - obviously, but we are all busy, we got shit to do, and this is a useful “resume” mechanic

dr_dshiv 28d ago
Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy. Context is everything. Btw, Claude code sent my first accidental AI email yesterday. I guess permissions changed? Before it could only draft. Uhoh, waiting for the onslop.
- seer 28d ago
  Hah, I guess we are not far away from the “Avogadro Corp” future - and that book was written just _before_ LLM, chatgpt and the attention is all you need paper :) That author had quite the insight
- quectophoton 28d ago
  > Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. Relevant comic from 2014: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576 https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576
- randcraw 28d ago
  > Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy. I can't imagine why. You have become a robot. You've automated yourself out of existence. And due to your consistently mindless replies, everyone now knows there's no point in talking to you ever again. How is that healthy?
gwd 28d ago
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… And I think this is where one key argument on the page itself I think fails: > The person on the other side has the same tools you do. Yes, the person on the other side has Claude; but in many cases, their Claude doesn't have the same context as my Claude. Saying, "This thing happened in an area of the code I don't have any expertise in. Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess" is I think a valid time to copy and paste LLM output. [1] The other thing to say is that it can be a "LMGTFY" style response; i.e., "Why did you ask me that, when you could have gotten a perfectly good answer from ChatGPT?" [1] In the particular case I'm thinking about, it was a bug in an ocaml component; I don't know ocaml or need to know it; handing Claude's analysis 'caveat emptor' to the maintianers who do know ocaml I think is more helpful than not.
- Semaphor 28d ago
  > Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess I’m reading a bunch of game modding discords, and this exactly what happens, and what’s hated. Because Claude is also not qualified to assess it. Not by default. The modder’s Claude might be because of the extra context and steering, but the user’s produces usless slop, instead the actual log, and context what the user did is what’s helpful. I’d say this (when you don’t understand it yourself) is pretty much the worst time to send AI output. Quick edit: Yeah, I get it in situations like GP where the user is unhelpful, doesn’t want to learn, doesn’t care, and you also can’t tell them to fuck off. But just because the user gives Claude the context they should have given you in the first place, doesn’t make it good.
- skerit 28d ago
  I agree that "The person on the other side has the same tools you do" might be technically true, I have myself encountered it often enough that they don't even use it at all. People don't always want MY take on it, they just don't want to bother finding the solution on their own at all. So in that case replying with a verbatim copy-paste of a Claude response has the same energy as a lmgtfy link.
- jeremyjh 28d ago
  The problem is when all we get is the output, we don't know if their context is even valid. If they don't demonstrate any human understanding of their message content, we can't really take that on faith. Especially once we've got them copy pasting blindly in the past.
ra 28d ago
> sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me I think that's the key. Generally people would rather not receive slop because the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication. In your example, the more context the better. I think there's an interesting nuance there.
- fragmede 28d ago
  > the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication. That's an interesting thought. The message can have metadata that says the sender's spent 1/5/10/60/120 minutes or some other metric of how much thinking over the communication happened. Just need a way to monitor people's thoughts and digitize them to make that happen.
  - xgulfie 28d ago
    please god no
chrisjj 28d ago
> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… Really? How does Claude gather that context?
- DonHopkins 28d ago
  [dead]
lucideer 28d ago
I take your point but I have two counterpoints: 1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter 2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good proxy for my opinions on this is that I think https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/ is a crutch for undersocialised (or overworked/near-burnout OR undiagnosed autistic) engineers & should not be normalised. The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room & saying "hello", then leaving & not being around when someone eventually replies: in that context nohello is pragmatic, but taking it beyond that to modern high-frequency realtime chat is an antisocial overstep. Leading with the entire context of your query may have some practical benefits but they're honestly overstated in exchange for killing natural social tendencies towards human dialogue. Similarly, a non-technical user giving you zero info about a problem is an opportunity for conversation & mutual education. It's relationship-building & helps build a foundation for further interactions with this person. It was never a problem in the first place; "solving" it is just another milestone on the road toward de-socialising humanity.
- seer 28d ago
  You are right - and this has been the case for me before, but unfortunately human resource constraints are not something most orgs optimise for, including my current one. I would love to spend more time and talk to the people with their issues so we can come to a common understanding… but neither have the capacity for this, and now things are getting worse I think. Maybe someday agents are good enough that we just discuss direction and implementation details, and every “developer” becomes more of an executive in a company, free to chat about more than just work, focusing on building human relationships and leaving “the tech stuff” to their agent teams… And old geezers like us who actually know how to write ourself out of a for loop would be the premium - wizards holding forgotten knowledge, incomprehensible to mere uninitiated mortals. I wonder what distinctive dress and hair styles will we develop :-D
- huflungdung 28d ago
  [dead]
scandox 28d ago
If you're absolving the other person from any understanding of the issue and the alternative is "stuff broken" then yes what you say makes sense. But that's an incredibly low bar and one would have to say - that's not a colleague, that's an end user type relationship.
deleted 28d ago
[deleted]
raincole 28d ago
LLMs have an equalizing effect. > a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” These people had below than average communication skills (or at least they were putting below than average effort communicating with you), so LLMs improved their output. However, the society kinda expects people can and Should improve themselves over time. The issue is that LLMs improved their output, but not necessarily them.
- SkyBelow 28d ago
  And did the LLM really improve their output? They gave similar output to the LLM, so if it doesn't have a harness with tools connected to fill in the blank, it might be hallucinating details. Might not even count as a hallucination as it tries to fill in the blank with the closest looking relevant information (previous chat, maybe it has access to teams/emails and scans that for anything similar, and so on). I've sees some chat logs where I completely empathized with the AI trying to make sense of the information it was being drip fed. Always incomplete, often incorrect.
wccrawford 28d ago
If they user types "x broken" or "i do y" into Claude or ChatGPT with no context, that's absolutely no better than just sending it to you. I'd argue that it's worse because now you have no idea what the actual original context was, just the AI's hallucination of it.
- Cthulhu_ 28d ago
  You'd think two decades of StackOverflow would've teached people how to ask a good question.
  - NateEag 28d ago
    Alas, what it taught people was to describe others who want to help them ask better questions as "gatekeepers". Maybe SO really is full of rude, condescending gatekeepers - I haven't asked questions there much. I haven't personally seen much evidence of it, though, despite decades of winding up there when searching for programming information.
    - bluecheese452 28d ago
      If you haven’t asked questions how would you know? A question that gets incorrectly closed as a duplicate would never get seen by you.
      - pixl97 27d ago
        Perception is reality. If everyone thinks their question will get closed, it might as well be reality because no one is going to ask and they are going to go elsewhere. Which is exactly what happened.
- redhale 28d ago
  Not quite, or at least not in my experience. The difference with AI is that the agent becomes the first level of triage. It (many times) asks the easy initial questions (did you turn it off and on again?) so I don't have to. Doesn't always work like this, but often enough.
darkwater 28d ago
> I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions. > Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me. Yes, but the kind of engineer that used to say "X is broken" will send you some slop with missing context and Claude will try to apply general solutions from its training data rather than from the specific context. As somebody on the Ops side that usually helps devs fixing things here and there, in those cases I'd rather them say "X is broken" and then I ask the question to Claude with all the context I have. Probably the best solution currently is a shared skill with at least some curated context.
sharperguy 28d ago
The irony is that this is the exact opposite of the "let me google that for you" meme of the previous decade. If you have a question that could've been answered by AI, maybe you should've used AI in the first place.
- mtrovo 28d ago
  I have the totally opposite sentiment from the previous LMGTFY meme. It was easier before to ask humans rather than do some research using Google, that's not true anymore with LLMs. Now if I ask a question to humans I'm looking for their personal opinions drawn from their personal experience, be it ticket size for a feature on a legacy codebase, a design decision or a product strategy decision.
  - sharperguy 28d ago
    I agree that if someone asks you something, you should at least write "I asked AI and it said..." rather than pretending the AI response was your own. If you ask me something and my first response is to ask AI, it's probably because I only know enough on the subject to ask AI, and don't know much more beyond that, which would be the real answer.
Gareth321 28d ago
I agree. Poor communication is one of the most expensive and frustrating things about life and society and business and development. LLMs are helping people better structure their thoughts and that's fantastic. Sure, it can feel impersonal, but once you get past that, I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. The exceptions are spam, advertising, and propaganda. Because the barrier to writing now is effectively zero, there is no cost to writing unlimited tripe. So LLMs work well if the parties know each other is real. However I think it poses a major threat to the existing internet as it stands.
- bluecheese452 28d ago
  Not just the internet, but written work in general.
colincooke 28d ago
My take is that the friction is the point, and I'd much rather have a colleague communicate poorly to me than have them give the LLM response. The reason being I view my relationships at work as investments, and working together (communicating) helps build that investment through learning and feedback. If someone says "x broken" and that's a bad response it becomes a learning opportunitity, something I can invest in. When I communicate poorly, I hope my colleagues help me understand why and give me pointers to improve. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but I've had the best growth with co-workers when actually engaging at a meta level and trying to help (and be helped) communicate better. Using AI shifts that burden and entirely demoralizes any investment motivation I have. It's a view that communication is transactional rather than collaborative (we're all on the same team). I want my team to work better, and be better, and if people offload their comms to an external system to generate I've lost that opportunity for growth.
jayd16 28d ago
If people are not being clear, you can just tell them to dial that in too. It's a false dichotomy to suggest the choice is either endless noise or no information at all.
alexpotato 27d ago
Everyone is also assuming that each person's Claude has the exact same context. e.g. a DevOps person's LLM may have very different context than a marketing person. In other words, if I'm in marketing and the website is down, I would rather hear from the DevOps claude than my claude. (sure, there can be MCPs etc etc that everyone can share but it might not get converted into a level of detail that I can understand).

by seer 28d ago

dr_dshiv 28d ago

Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy. Context is everything. Btw, Claude code sent my first accidental AI email yesterday. I guess permissions changed? Before it could only draft. Uhoh, waiting for the onslop.

seer 28d ago
Hah, I guess we are not far away from the “Avogadro Corp” future - and that book was written just _before_ LLM, chatgpt and the attention is all you need paper :) That author had quite the insight
quectophoton 28d ago
> Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. Relevant comic from 2014: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576 https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576
randcraw 28d ago
> Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy. I can't imagine why. You have become a robot. You've automated yourself out of existence. And due to your consistently mindless replies, everyone now knows there's no point in talking to you ever again. How is that healthy?

gwd 28d ago

> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… And I think this is where one key argument on the page itself I think fails: > The person on the other side has the same tools you do. Yes, the person on the other side has Claude; but in many cases, their Claude doesn't have the same context as my Claude. Saying, "This thing happened in an area of the code I don't have any expertise in. Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess" is I think a valid time to copy and paste LLM output. [1] The other thing to say is that it can be a "LMGTFY" style response; i.e., "Why did you ask me that, when you could have gotten a perfectly good answer from ChatGPT?" [1] In the particular case I'm thinking about, it was a bug in an ocaml component; I don't know ocaml or need to know it; handing Claude's analysis 'caveat emptor' to the maintianers who do know ocaml I think is more helpful than not.

Semaphor 28d ago
> Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess I’m reading a bunch of game modding discords, and this exactly what happens, and what’s hated. Because Claude is also not qualified to assess it. Not by default. The modder’s Claude might be because of the extra context and steering, but the user’s produces usless slop, instead the actual log, and context what the user did is what’s helpful. I’d say this (when you don’t understand it yourself) is pretty much the worst time to send AI output. Quick edit: Yeah, I get it in situations like GP where the user is unhelpful, doesn’t want to learn, doesn’t care, and you also can’t tell them to fuck off. But just because the user gives Claude the context they should have given you in the first place, doesn’t make it good.
skerit 28d ago
I agree that "The person on the other side has the same tools you do" might be technically true, I have myself encountered it often enough that they don't even use it at all. People don't always want MY take on it, they just don't want to bother finding the solution on their own at all. So in that case replying with a verbatim copy-paste of a Claude response has the same energy as a lmgtfy link.
jeremyjh 28d ago
The problem is when all we get is the output, we don't know if their context is even valid. If they don't demonstrate any human understanding of their message content, we can't really take that on faith. Especially once we've got them copy pasting blindly in the past.

ra 28d ago

> sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me I think that's the key. Generally people would rather not receive slop because the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication. In your example, the more context the better. I think there's an interesting nuance there.

fragmede 28d ago
> the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication. That's an interesting thought. The message can have metadata that says the sender's spent 1/5/10/60/120 minutes or some other metric of how much thinking over the communication happened. Just need a way to monitor people's thoughts and digitize them to make that happen.
- xgulfie 28d ago
  please god no

chrisjj 28d ago

> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… Really? How does Claude gather that context?

DonHopkins 28d ago
[dead]

lucideer 28d ago

I take your point but I have two counterpoints: 1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter 2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good proxy for my opinions on this is that I think https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/ is a crutch for undersocialised (or overworked/near-burnout OR undiagnosed autistic) engineers & should not be normalised. The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room & saying "hello", then leaving & not being around when someone eventually replies: in that context nohello is pragmatic, but taking it beyond that to modern high-frequency realtime chat is an antisocial overstep. Leading with the entire context of your query may have some practical benefits but they're honestly overstated in exchange for killing natural social tendencies towards human dialogue. Similarly, a non-technical user giving you zero info about a problem is an opportunity for conversation & mutual education. It's relationship-building & helps build a foundation for further interactions with this person. It was never a problem in the first place; "solving" it is just another milestone on the road toward de-socialising humanity.

seer 28d ago
You are right - and this has been the case for me before, but unfortunately human resource constraints are not something most orgs optimise for, including my current one. I would love to spend more time and talk to the people with their issues so we can come to a common understanding… but neither have the capacity for this, and now things are getting worse I think. Maybe someday agents are good enough that we just discuss direction and implementation details, and every “developer” becomes more of an executive in a company, free to chat about more than just work, focusing on building human relationships and leaving “the tech stuff” to their agent teams… And old geezers like us who actually know how to write ourself out of a for loop would be the premium - wizards holding forgotten knowledge, incomprehensible to mere uninitiated mortals. I wonder what distinctive dress and hair styles will we develop :-D
huflungdung 28d ago
[dead]

scandox 28d ago

If you're absolving the other person from any understanding of the issue and the alternative is "stuff broken" then yes what you say makes sense. But that's an incredibly low bar and one would have to say - that's not a colleague, that's an end user type relationship.

deleted 28d ago

[deleted]

raincole 28d ago

LLMs have an equalizing effect. > a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” These people had below than average communication skills (or at least they were putting below than average effort communicating with you), so LLMs improved their output. However, the society kinda expects people can and Should improve themselves over time. The issue is that LLMs improved their output, but not necessarily them.

SkyBelow 28d ago
And did the LLM really improve their output? They gave similar output to the LLM, so if it doesn't have a harness with tools connected to fill in the blank, it might be hallucinating details. Might not even count as a hallucination as it tries to fill in the blank with the closest looking relevant information (previous chat, maybe it has access to teams/emails and scans that for anything similar, and so on). I've sees some chat logs where I completely empathized with the AI trying to make sense of the information it was being drip fed. Always incomplete, often incorrect.

wccrawford 28d ago

If they user types "x broken" or "i do y" into Claude or ChatGPT with no context, that's absolutely no better than just sending it to you. I'd argue that it's worse because now you have no idea what the actual original context was, just the AI's hallucination of it.

Cthulhu_ 28d ago
You'd think two decades of StackOverflow would've teached people how to ask a good question.
- NateEag 28d ago
  Alas, what it taught people was to describe others who want to help them ask better questions as "gatekeepers". Maybe SO really is full of rude, condescending gatekeepers - I haven't asked questions there much. I haven't personally seen much evidence of it, though, despite decades of winding up there when searching for programming information.
  - bluecheese452 28d ago
    If you haven’t asked questions how would you know? A question that gets incorrectly closed as a duplicate would never get seen by you.
    - pixl97 27d ago
      Perception is reality. If everyone thinks their question will get closed, it might as well be reality because no one is going to ask and they are going to go elsewhere. Which is exactly what happened.
redhale 28d ago
Not quite, or at least not in my experience. The difference with AI is that the agent becomes the first level of triage. It (many times) asks the easy initial questions (did you turn it off and on again?) so I don't have to. Doesn't always work like this, but often enough.

darkwater 28d ago

> I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions. > Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me. Yes, but the kind of engineer that used to say "X is broken" will send you some slop with missing context and Claude will try to apply general solutions from its training data rather than from the specific context. As somebody on the Ops side that usually helps devs fixing things here and there, in those cases I'd rather them say "X is broken" and then I ask the question to Claude with all the context I have. Probably the best solution currently is a shared skill with at least some curated context.

sharperguy 28d ago

The irony is that this is the exact opposite of the "let me google that for you" meme of the previous decade. If you have a question that could've been answered by AI, maybe you should've used AI in the first place.

mtrovo 28d ago
I have the totally opposite sentiment from the previous LMGTFY meme. It was easier before to ask humans rather than do some research using Google, that's not true anymore with LLMs. Now if I ask a question to humans I'm looking for their personal opinions drawn from their personal experience, be it ticket size for a feature on a legacy codebase, a design decision or a product strategy decision.
- sharperguy 28d ago
  I agree that if someone asks you something, you should at least write "I asked AI and it said..." rather than pretending the AI response was your own. If you ask me something and my first response is to ask AI, it's probably because I only know enough on the subject to ask AI, and don't know much more beyond that, which would be the real answer.

Gareth321 28d ago

I agree. Poor communication is one of the most expensive and frustrating things about life and society and business and development. LLMs are helping people better structure their thoughts and that's fantastic. Sure, it can feel impersonal, but once you get past that, I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. The exceptions are spam, advertising, and propaganda. Because the barrier to writing now is effectively zero, there is no cost to writing unlimited tripe. So LLMs work well if the parties know each other is real. However I think it poses a major threat to the existing internet as it stands.

bluecheese452 28d ago
Not just the internet, but written work in general.

colincooke 28d ago

My take is that the friction is the point, and I'd much rather have a colleague communicate poorly to me than have them give the LLM response. The reason being I view my relationships at work as investments, and working together (communicating) helps build that investment through learning and feedback. If someone says "x broken" and that's a bad response it becomes a learning opportunitity, something I can invest in. When I communicate poorly, I hope my colleagues help me understand why and give me pointers to improve. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but I've had the best growth with co-workers when actually engaging at a meta level and trying to help (and be helped) communicate better. Using AI shifts that burden and entirely demoralizes any investment motivation I have. It's a view that communication is transactional rather than collaborative (we're all on the same team). I want my team to work better, and be better, and if people offload their comms to an external system to generate I've lost that opportunity for growth.

jayd16 28d ago

If people are not being clear, you can just tell them to dial that in too. It's a false dichotomy to suggest the choice is either endless noise or no information at all.

alexpotato 27d ago

Everyone is also assuming that each person's Claude has the exact same context. e.g. a DevOps person's LLM may have very different context than a marketing person. In other words, if I'm in marketing and the website is down, I would rather hear from the DevOps claude than my claude. (sure, there can be MCPs etc etc that everyone can share but it might not get converted into a level of detail that I can understand).