Don't Paste the AI: Why Your Unedited ChatGPT Reply Is a Missed Opportunity

The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions?

What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated.

The underlying problem here is that communication is hard; especially if it's not face to face. People can't read your mind or might not get the full context of your question.

Back in the day I learned the hard way that sending a long reply to an email just ensures the other side won't read it. You can't assume that you dealt with their request effectively that way. And that was when there was a lot of email to deal with. Lots of people demanding all sorts of things via email and creating more work for each other by sending more email.

I learned to 1) never reply instantly to low priority requests, 2) be very brief and clear, 3) that talking to people is almost always the better choice when you get tempted to write a long reply.

If you don't like the answers you are getting, maybe reflect on what you are asking, how reasonable that request really was, and how you communicated it. Maybe your question was entirely reasonable and the answer really inappropriately bad. If so, give feedback or talk to the person. But maybe the other side didn't get you. Or maybe they were busy and you are interrupting them. There can be all sorts of reasons why you aren't getting what you expected.

It all de […]

I have non-English speaking coworkers that use AI to translate.

This just comes as Karen-like behaviour: shaming people for using a tool in a way you don’t like.

No way this individual is fun at parties!

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

yes, its all ai writing. A bunch of the metaphors here dont make sense.

"read it all, yes even the bullets. especially the bullets"

if you read one thing from a large wall of text, its gonna be the bullet points, right? thats a big part of what they're for?

"It is the conversational equivalent of forwarding the email."

this is a terrible metaphor. it seems to rely on the idea you would be mad if you sent an email to someone and they forwarded to someone else? but thats useful, theyre literally sending it to someone who is presumably better placed to help you, or raising it to someone more important because they think what youre saying is important

Interesting to note the page also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"

Ever since my boss has transitioned to doing code reviews by AI and off loading his brain fully to AI, I could just use my AI to do the same to fix the things and I no longer have to deal with petty design arguments. I no longer have to deal with stylistic problems and that's great. When somebody offloads their communication to AI, it's easy to deal with. Meet with the same energy. Let the AI waste their time in the communication because the lack of effort on one side deserves the same type of communication-style.

As I wrote this i switch to the phrase communication-style because I realize that when he does his code review it's literally just a quick pass and a paste, but unfortunately when I do AI code reviews I review every single review item and push back individually on each item, research the items, write tests against what the review says and basically curate the code review I give out, which takes me 3 hours and then I have a boss angrily messaging me asking why the code review isn't done.

So on the one end I've managed to reduce toxicity in the reviews, but the tradeoff is toxicity in the expectation of a rubber stamp.

AI;DR This is the broader symptom of a global toxic corporate culture.

We are afraid that one badly phrased message can hurt our reputation or even our jobs, so optimizing every message with softer wording, more political correctness, less directness is safer.

But the real problem is the culture underneath it. If people are constantly worried about how every sentence will be interpreted, eventually they stop speaking plainly, stop challenging decisions, and sometimes stop speaking up at all. So this is like attacking the consequences not the root causes. There should be some sort of measurement of how broken is a community or a company by letting a bot scan Slack/Teams and let the bot remind everyone the importance of lowering the fake index.

Same but shorter: https://noslopgrenade.com/

I remember back in the day when you could apply this to Google search results. When I was freelancing, I had a number of people I worked with who would fire off fast questions, but they would still pay me for my time. Then I would return what was essentially a Google search result shortly after. Yes, I would send my own answer, not some paste from Google.

But the point is. They had search, so why didn't they think to do the search? They had the same tools as I did. And yet regularly they couldn't think of the answer. I still deal with this with AI today. When you ask a question, maybe you're asking for the interpretation of the question by the person on the other side. And it's that interpretation that goes to the LLM. Or otherwise some filter of how that person thinks about the question differently than you do.

> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.

Oh sweetie... I've been getting paid to "Google things" for 26 years. AI isn't going to change that transaction. When I was in high school it was assumed that everyone would be tech savvy. That didnt happen and in fact my kids were LESS tech savvy because of smartphones and refined aka dumbed down consumer tech.