Don't Be a Meat Proxy: Why You Shouldn't Just Relay AI Output
The author criticizes the habit of relaying AI-generated responses verbatim in conversations, whether in Slack, code reviews, or WhatsApp. They argue this adds no value, as the recipient could easily query the AI themselves. Instead, they advocate for reading, understanding, and validating AI output before responding in your own words. The post highlights the increasing verbosity and jargon in AI responses, and warns that in code review, relying on AI without understanding can make you a mere 'meat proxy'.
I can talk to Claude myself. It's going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don't need a meat proxy in between.
- eddythompson80
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.
- felipeerias
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.
- gregsadetsky
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
- maccard
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
- kooi
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.
- xyzelement
// 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.
- jpnc
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?
- ltbarcly3
"The CI is failing on the main branch"
Don't be a meat proxy!
Lets not be stupid about this. Do whatever works for you, and don't let some moron set the standards for your social interactions because they got the ick one morning, just because they wrote it down and put it on a website.
- danolivo
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.
- 8by3
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.