alt Hacker NewsDon't be a meat proxy
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One way to prevent obvious AI language from sneaking in text destined for other human beings is to ask the model to produce ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English bullet points.
This will result in a list of sentences that are clear and explanatory, easier to double-check, and convenient for the user to rewrite into a more readable format with a human voice.
On social media, I saw the much more vulgar
“Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod”
And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though
If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
// Claude said: [giant response verbatim]
I am lucky that I work with great teams and so when someone says "this is how Claude (or Gemini) summaries the situation" it does mean "I read it and it's right-enough to be helpful, so I am passing it along without editing"
Obviously for this to work you need (1) a team that's smart and mature enough to own the AI output it puts forward and (2) shared understanding that people are operating this way.
I do find that when you have 1 and 2 this is a real accelerant. I asked a sales rep the other day what was going on in a key account and he forwarded along a 10 page Claude synthesis.
The reality is this is better intel than I would have been able to get in a pre-AI era this quickly. And yes once I went into the weeds on the doc I found one thing that didn't make sense and I asked the rep he stared at it and said "you are right that's a hallucination I don't notice" but overall it was still worth it.
At my $work, people do this frequently, but instead of it just being insensitive, they have their personal Slackbot responding on their behalf. After I realized I wasn't even talking to a person, I've stopped opening their DMs.
A while back, I noticed that using Claude all day left me feeling mentally tired. After thinking it over, I realised the problem was Claude’s complex language. I’ve used English daily for years, so that shouldn’t be an issue. To compare, I switched Claude to my native language and had the same problem the author described. The text still needed to be literally deciphered before I could understand it. After talking with Claude, I updated the settings to ask for simpler language and less dense information. Natural language works better with some entropy in the text. This change has made things easier.
Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.
All I can say is you're lucky that your meat proxies are still identifying themselves as such.
I've had people forward AI responses … sans "Claude said". I'm quite literally talking to Claude via proxy, and I've caught more than one person pulling this stunt. It's a nightmare of negative productivity, though. Just why? And invariably the kicker is they still want me to solve their problem, whatever that might be.
I like to point out that if all people do is copy paste from an AI, then I can advocate to replacing them with AI directly. Usually wakes people up.
It happens outside the developer world as well.
People get information from Google AI mode and take it as 100% truth. In reality, blogs, reddit, and junk are often sourced link...which is fine if you inspect the sources...which some people don't!
Have has examples of people AI-moding a questing and they get one answer based on how they asked. Then another person asks and they get another answer.
Issue: People read what they want to read, don't listen to humans anymore beacause the AI will tell them what they want.
"Claud said" is a hedge. It is abdication of responsibility. That said, a meat-proxied answer should come with more credibility based on the proxy.
I'd put more weight into my developer proxying system information than my sale's intern. I am expecting the proxy to have given the response a sniff test
A related problem is people not understanding where AI is/isn't of use.
A news article I read today said they asked Claude whether a song's lyrics were AI generated - as if it were some kind of legitimate authoritative test.
There's enough problems already with the existing 'AI detection' tools for text, but this was a big red flag - its the journalist clearly assuming these AI tools have some unique insight into the text they generate, which was deeply concerning to see being used in an article that had a real bearing on the reputation of the person they were accusing of using AI.
At a company I work for, I was recently discussing the need for an AI Code of Conduct plus a discussion - as this is exactly the sort of thing that started creeping in as soon as the corporate Claude account went live. In this case, the company isn't in a computer-related area, so this was essentially a 'normie' response to first having Claude available.
Interestingly, there seemed (small n) to be a correlation between this behaviour, and (my view of) people's existing competence, which might make sense.
This is particularly frustrating on social media, and abases what might be good ideas.
Too often, my Twitter experience now is - start reading a post with some kernel of insight - read some claudism in the post - stop reading immediately
It seems like people turn over their raw kernel of insight to an LLM to give it polish, likely in order to increase its appeal to the audience. But most of that appeal is lost amongst people that consume LLM written content regularly.
It's also likely that social media engagement does not filter for this. A majority of people are still not neck deep in LLM-talk, and cannot distinguish between LLM and human written content.
It'll probably take us another year or two to develop herd immunity against meat proxism.
I agree but to be fair, often people could have asked an AI to get their answer. Especially seniors are prone to this (thinking the AI could not possibly know this or other biases). The responder wrote they asked Claude so as to not take credit for the answer and also to indicate they did not vet it. Then the person asking can decide if they want to read the answer or not (often a 1 sec glean can reveal if it is promising or completely off track.
I love the word "meat proxy" :)
For me what matters most is whether the person understood the core of the thing they are forwarding. Usually a wall of text is contraindicative of that.
I want my team to be able to write the core idea on a whiteboard without any help before going ahead and sharing or implementing it.
Wrote it up here of when (instead of if) to use AI in any given context: https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/ai-bowtie
In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
While I agree with the article, I would carry the idea further: the huge value in AI is improving ourselves. By all means use AI to help design, write tests, and implement code and while I understand this might be the big value add for corporations that may employ you, the important investments in life are in learning and self improvement. I built a good career primarily improving my own knowledge and skills, and along the way doing some useful work for my employers. I am an old man and retired so now I 100% use AI for learning.
> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
Whats is wrong with this?
I work with durable tracing (not using NATS, or k8s though) and this looks almost exactly what I would expect to see in a coordinator log after repartition of a storage cluster.
Obviously I don't know what your actual context was, though.
The tricky bit is politely conveying this to people that lets call it don't think about things too deeply.
They genuinely think they're helping by shoveling 5 pages of LLM output they didn't even bother reading into teams...
This is like pre-LLM, you presenting a problem to the team, and they google and send you the top few links thinking they have found the solution and have done their job.
I actually banned this and made it part of onboarding.
I can google too. You need to read yourself, ground the solution to our setting and then propose a plan.
Last week, I built a search engine as a side project over electoral data.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
I do it, on purpose: it teaches people to do basic research by themselves, and not hit me with questions they could have gotten with a simple chat with their llm. It's a kind of RTFM for current days.
This is one of my pet peeves too.
Like when someone says “ChatGPT says: …” I just want to stop them and say “Look, you are a human with a functioning mind and thoughts and I’m sure YOU have something valuable to contribute here, I want to hear what you think, not what the bot outputs.”
Heck, even if you are just gonna prompt chatgpt, if you read and understand and agree the the output would be useful, feel free to rephrase it as your own (so long as you take accountability for it if it’s wrong, which I guess is often why people hide behind “chatgpt says…” in the first place, it allows them to pass accountability on to the machine).
We've already started firing people for being meat proxies at my company. Was reviewing a huge and awful slop code base that a vibe coder only had been working on getting started. I started giving my feedback to the developer, and it became quickly clear that I was the only human involved in developing this "software" and the only one that had ever read the code and evaluated it.
Cost the company a ton and had to take it over from scratch. AI is unleashing a small army of 0.01x engineers and making them harder to catch, so not only are you burning the tokens, you're also setting that labor cost on fire.
Woodworkers often will have a preference for their favorite tool. Once they become comfortable with that tool they will sometimes prefer to use it for things it wasn't designed. For me it was the band saw. When I needed to split a board, bandsaw. When I needed to cut a curve, bandsaw. Cut a horse figure? bandsaw!
I once saw a woodworking television show that seemed to do everything on the table saw. Rip, make frames for paintings, everything. It seemed the next step of every design was accomplished "over at the table saw".
Right now it seems that's what people are doing with AI. Need a bandsaw? use AI. Need a table saw? Use AI. Need to think of a solution of any kind, better consult AI.
Right before this trend I recall kids wanting to check YouTube first before doing anything. Now they ask AI.
There's an app for that, there's a website for that, there's a magazine for that, there's a phone number you can call, and so on and so on.
As with everything, I say this: do your own thinking and proceed with caution.
This too shall pass.
There's a certain etiquette to it. When someone asks me something and I use an LLM to research the answer (notice that I said 'research', not 'produce'), I frame the findings as something that I've investigated with, say, Claude. I also take the time to edit the response and read if myself at least twice, because I don't want a stochastic machine to take over my identity.
On one hand, I understand the frustration; and if I know I'm dealing with smart people who are pretty capable of Clauding themselves and who won't ask me if they can ask Claude, I would never do this.
On the other... people really don't bother Googling or asking AI sometimes, and if the question doesn't require local context, that's a very appropriate response.
Realistically many people's jobs are turning into being a meat proxy. But the point should be that you need be a good meat proxy. A good meat proxy injects human reasoning and taste, it doesn't blindly forward LLM-isms into the organization. A human should be able to reasonably compress an LLM conversation into a couple of sentences or follow-up questions that are actually relevant for the team.
Shameless plug: indeed, instead let the other person's claude talk directly to yours and figure things out. I've been working on a framework to enable this, https://aweb.ai (OSS, https://github.com/awebai/aweb). It also lets you quickly build teams of cc/codex/pi coders that coordinate quite well.
Great security talk about how humans aren't setup to deal with LLMs as tools.
I love the bullet point(s) : we don't trust [aircraft] pilots to catch automations mistakes (e.g. autopilot), but we are expecting humans to catch LLM mistakes.
Artificial Intelligence Natural Stupidity - Brandon Sherman
> Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words
In the past, avoiding this process was called plagiarism, and it was frowned upon, to put it mildly. Now, because the LLMs say it's OK, it's become the norm.
The, "this is what Claud said", response also comes off like an appeal to authority. When these LLMs have no authority and get the basics wrong constantly.
"AI says" – if you interpret it and think it's correct and stand by it (and I trust your judgement) then I really don't care where you got it from initially, you don't need to tell me you used AI. But if you're just taking my question and 'meat proxying' it for me, what value are you adding? I can also do this.
The core issue is people replying without putting in any effort, not the fact that they quote AI. Saying, "I heard this might be wrong," isn't much better. If you think it might be wrong, spend a little time figuring out whether it actually applies before posting it.
I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.
would you call that proxy-bait?
Someone should have sent Claude's output, which spotted the trivial bug behind the recent bitcoin heist, to the Coldcard developers.
It might be rude to send LLM output. It's also rude not to check basic things with an LLM before wasting someone's time.
This is becoming frustrating, it shows up in conversation with friends and while working. If I have to hear what ai had you do before you called me, I'm charging double right away. Especially when ai is a fantastic teacher if used correctly.
We desperately need a Let Me Google That For You-style saying to appropriately shame people who do this.
I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing or that I don't really understand.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
Worse, don’t be a “meat shield” either! https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2026-04-16-ai-meat-shields
Don't come to me with something your mandated rubber ducky can handle; never in my life have I worked so hard to achieve so little.
The only reason I don't do an equivalent of this, shared convo links, is that I simply don't use Claude directly. I use it through hundreds of other people. Meat proxies all the way down.
>Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense.
You can set up custom instructions to be less verbose and less jargon dense. You seem to be confusing the default RLHF personality with the inherent nature of AI. It will write however you ask it to write.
I’ve been saying for a long time that most fights in your personal life are a proxy war but I never thought of a single person as being a meat proxy. Nice.
Thank you for saying this. I’ve been dealing with this at work and it’s incredibly frustrating
I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?”
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.