alt Hacker NewsThe useless suggestions are exhausting. One of my co-workers uses Claude for all asynchronous communication, including Slack messages, Jira comments, code reviews, and emails.
Every single message from him, literally every time he communicates, it's a massive wall of text, overflowing with scope-creep suggestions like nothing I've ever seen before. It's impossible to ask him a simple question and get a simple answer.
And this seems to be a broader trend with AI in general. It's getting more and more difficult to retain some semblance of brevity with AI tools. I'm constantly asking them to "be brief," and "only answer the question I asked," and "don't provide more information than I requested," but they keep churning out more than I want in their responses.
It looks like a subtle attempt to use up more tokens.
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What have your or their manager said about this? About any or all of (a) slowing everyone else down with crap, (b) wasting company resources on generating crap, (c) not doing anything that a CI integration couldn't trigger the AI to do itself?
I remember first owners of the Apple Laserwriter sending out printed texts with 8 fonts used on every page. Not all blame is on the tech.
If these people are glorified copy paste scripts why are they even employed....
That's bizarre. What does his manager think of that? I can't fathom keeping around someone that is basically a chatbot interface.
Basically me as a junior AI engineer . It was frustating it starts with just using AI to reply to questions you don't know the answer too and it ends with fully automated ai answeringmachine.
Would be pretty ironic if back to the office became the less distracting option.
As much as I don't truly love the shop I'm at now, stories like this keep me from looking for anything new. At least until the AI psychosis [hopefully] passes. I can't even get my management to approve a $100 Claude Max subscription, which is kind of annoying but also means they have not changed their expectations on what the team produces. None of my coworkers is going to be shoveling AI slop my direction because then they'd have to explain to management why they are using an unapproved tool to look at internal company code.
Have you tried to prompt inject your colleague? It works wonderfully with my boss.
They bill you per output token.
My product owner does the same. Every ticket she makes is multiple paragraphs now. It drives me up the wall, especially as some tickets are so simple I need two clear lines to know what I need to do. But no, I get 15 lines written by Claude with sometimes conflicting instructions.
I had a model yesterday suggest that I intern all float literals in my compiler to save on memory lmao
Have you ever seen him and Claude in the same room?
I have at least one coworker who literally copy-paste AI output to respond to code and doc reviews (and most of her communications like on Teams and Asana) despite me telling her multiple times to take it a notch down. Two days ago, she started answering my doc review questions with literally AI outputs (like "Good question. <insert a bunch of verbose response>" and "You're right. <insert a lot of fluff with little substance>").
That really bothered me that I finally announced AI "code of conduct" (more like AI usage expectation) and stressed that if one is not so kind as to have his/her coworker review AI output as it is, then I'll take formal measures to address that. We'll see what happens in the near future.
Really worrying that some people are totally comfortable with relying 100% on AI to do their work. Then what's human agency? What's the point of having them in the team (as opposed to just building an AI agent and work with that)?!