Claude Says: Why Deferring to AI Is a Sign of Weakness
A frustrated author pushes back against people who use AI as a crutch in technical discussions. If you can't answer a question without asking Claude, you've shown you lack authority on the subject. Worse, AI hype leads to overengineered solutions—like forking every dependency instead of using a built-in artifact repository feature. Spewing information isn't intelligence, and regurgitating it atrophies your brain.
Spewing information is not intelligence. When you regurgitate it as your own work, you atrophre your brain.
- atomicnumber3
I tire of all of this discourse at this point because people who don't need to hear it are reading it and nodding, and the people who DO need to hear it are busy making everything worse, earning leadership accolades (or are the ones handing them out), and are completely closed to any criticism or input.
Anyone with intellectual curiosity and any sense of subtlety or balance is operating in a separate reality from people who are so AI-pilled and very proud of it and there's basically no possible cross talk (usually because the AI-pilled people are the ones who own all the shares).
I say this as someone who really likes LLMs and what roles they'll play in software engineering in the future (and already are, right now).
I can't wait until the AI craze is in the same spot that the crypto craze is currently. People are still using and building with crypto, but the sale of ape PNGs has mostly stopped, and now if I have a problem that a blockchain could solve, I could actually talk about it instead of accidentally picking up a battle standard in the middle of a trench war.
- blktiger
I have to disagree a bit here, people (including me sometimes) can take the lazy way out and just tell you what an agent said in response to a question which we shouldn't do. At that point it's little better than a let me google that for you link. However, while I may be passing along what I found using an agent, but usually I still had to do the work of prompting it, asking it to lookup information for me, and otherwise filtering the agent down to the relevant information. There is a good chance that I'm doing that because of my specific expertise in the subject area which is something outside of what you could have found by just asking an agent yourself.
- aranelsurion
It took maybe a decade to teach people to not use "@here" on Slack, and avg. response time of an email isn't 10 minutes. Technology comes out, many people fumble through for years, until finally some etiquette is formed. Happens all the time.
I don't remember the last time someone dropped me the first link out of a Google search, telling me they haven't read themselves and have no idea about its contents. Yet I see it happen in various 1-1 and public settings with Claude all the time.
In those discussions people often don't use this as a "Here let me Claude it for you" kind of protest, but genuinely they mean "I copy pasted this topic to Claude, and Claude said this. I'm meat-proxying to you, and absolutely haven't invested a single microsecond of my time on it". Obviously the expectation is you'd invest the effort they haven't.
My strategy and hope, is to give it a decade. It will probably get better.
- MisterKent
I'm reasonably opposed to LLMs, mostly from a human perspective. They reduce us to our output without factoring in any of the actual thoughts and experiences that go into that work, it's literally not in their training data.
It's unfortunate that we live in a world that has decided to push in this direction.
I have started a work project that is 100% vibe engineered, as an experiment to see where it would land. While it seems to be working, I can see that it has made so many mistakes along the way that it is still unclear if we can dig ourselves to production ready.
I was at an art museum recently, and was looking at a marble statue. And I thought to myself: this artist probably spent more time sculpting the big toe than anyone has spent appreciating the entire statue.
That speed is what we used to have in software engineering. So much careful craftsmanship, no line just yeeted out. And now we're just heading into a direction with no clear end, just prayers that bigger and better models will lift us forward.
What's the point of being human if we're so gung ho to remove that which separates us from other animals (our intellect)?
- jchw
The one thing I do find extremely frustrating is how there can be some ridiculously painful obstacle that hits you in the face all the time when trying to ship code, and everyone is seemingly sympathetic, but it can't be changed for dubious compliance reasons, or maybe because if the barriers were lowered it would threaten the quality control for the code. Fair enough.
Then, of course, all of those speedbumps are demolished in record time, only for the AI agents and not for the humans, regardless of what caveats remain unsolved, with little regard for whether or not it meets compliance standards.
The obstacle is fixed. Just ask the AI agent to bypass it for you!