Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | treesknees's commentslogin

This exactly reflects my feelings lately. I have a specific coworker who has gone somewhat overboard - every single code review, answer to any question on email or Teams, every new story, even their personal opinions during a design or ideas meeting, are all direct AI output with no massaging or human touch or review. They're working on planning out an upcoming project, and I just get verbose and long documents to review, and based on the issues I find I doubt they are even looked over first beforehand.

I understand that the information may be accurate, even helpful at times, but feeling like I'm constantly talking to an AI chat bot all the time gets tiring. And I don't appreciate having to double-check everyone else's AI generated responses for them.


I've seen this, too. There is a workplace personality that sees the job as a 2-player game between themself and the corporation. They think the game is to min-max their effort to personal career benefit, and they don't care how much it inconveniences anyone else.

Before AI they had to actually put in work, or at least play games of trying to steal credit from other people without getting noticed. Now that AI appeared, they see it as the ultimate way to take credit for work they didn't do: Put everything into Claude, let it do the work, copy and past output back to someone else. Minimum effort invested, maximum visibility achieved.

It will continue as long as they think they're getting away with it. If managers aren't willing to intervene, or worse if they encourage this due to the volume of output that seems to be appearing, it's only going to get worse.


I’m conflicted after reading this comment, because I think I would be that personality in my workplace, largely because I believe that’s the only sane position to take as a worker with ~0 power over the decisions made that can entirely destabilise your life.

On the other hand, my priority isn’t maximising my personal career benefit, but the collective benefit of my team, so I suppose I either see it more as a 2v1 sorta game, or perhaps my “player” is an amalgam of myself and my teammates. Playing this way, outsourcing everything you do to an LLM is the worst move, because you lose the touchpoints that tell you where the friction is in your team.


I think everyone should be looking to balance their work effort against the payout of the job. They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.

The problem with the personality above is that the person isn't playing like a team (like you said) but as an individual maximizing their own visibility while loading their coworkers up with the review effort. They found an asymmetry to abuse (they generate text easily, coworkers get a lot of extra work to review it). They don't care what it costs their coworkers. They just like that it makes them look good.


Whenever I try to articulate this issue to people during more casual AI discussions, I always refer to “study guides” in college.

I don’t know how many of y’all did these, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only person. At my undergrad it was very common for a group of students to all to get together, compare notes from lectures and readings, and basically come up with a group study guide of sorts. People were given specific sections to share, you didn’t just send all of your notes - usually 2 people per section’s take on that portion. You could always tell who just copy and pasted their shorthand (usually indecipherable) and who actually took the time to edit it/clean it up. This was at a time when almost everyone did it on laptops.

The people who took the time to make their portion(s) digestible for others were asked back, the others weren’t.


> They should also be changing jobs when the effort to reward ratio starts to become unfavorable compared to other jobs on the market.

The problem here is that all tech companies look alike. Take for example the interview process (copied by almost any company out there that thinks they are google). Another example: the under/meets/above expectations BS. And now the most recent example of “token usage as sign of productivity”.

So, it’s getting tremendously difficult to simply switch jobs that offer something different


My experience couldn't be more different. The tech companies I've worked for in the past 10 years have been so completely different from each other, from interview process to company culture, that I can't agree that all tech companies are the same.

You can also look to change to different roles (product management, even sales) or jump to a different career completely.

There are options if you look. You're not going to find a dream job that pays $600K for 4 hours of no-pressure work per day and perfect coworkers, but there are a range of job options with tradeoffs along the compensation-effort pareto front.


If you're self aware of this, you're probably already ahead of 95% of others in similar shoes.

That is their job. Their job is whatever gets rewarded, and that's what gets rewarded, apparently.

Instinctively I think the move is to ignore it. I guess that would look different in different contexts.

Obviously you have to communicate with your coworkers. But I think the solution has to essential be: "Im not going to read that."


Either that, or call them / walk up to their desk and pick a point from the wall of text and ask them to explain what they mean by it. Then watch them turn red as they have no idea what the message they sent to you means.

I think you're over-estimating how much some people care.

I have had coworkers say "Oh I don't know, Claude added that" in response to questions like that without even a hint of shame or self-reflection.


I had someone submit a PR that was 3000 lines of shell scripts. Totally useless crap. I tried repeatedly asking him why he made particular choices and it was so painfully obvious that he had absolutely no idea and was just inventing bullshit answers. I would rather he have just said "I don't know, Claude added that", then tell obvious lies to my face.

Sure, some people have no self awareness. In that case you can change your approach, if you are a manager or otherwise invested in the company you can put pressure on them to increase the quality of their work and to own the things they submit. Bring up specific examples of poor quality work, errors in documents/messages, etc.

Or if you don't care you can just ignore this persons messages.


I got sent a 6-page spec document with a footnote that says "this spec was created with AI, so it may have nonsensical sections. Feel free to fix them."

And that's the point where you can stop to hide your true opinion, no? "How am I supposed to review a thing the supposed author didn't even read or understand himself?"

I tried this when my skip level boss sent us a wall of text from ChatGPT that didn’t make any sense. He didn’t care. He said it was “just an idea”. He likely spent all of 5 minutes on it, while we spent a collective 15 hours dealing with it, before finally going to him and calling it out.

He’s sent a couple more emails like that since. I don’t even bother to read them once I see the format.


This feels like a BOFH response but I'm strangely not opposed to it; If you generate something, you should own it ... regardless of what tool you used to generate it.

I told something like “your value lies in reviewing the output yourself before sharing it, not in calling Claude. I can also use Claude.”

Management, responding to someone who takes your advice to "ignore it": "So we've noticed that there's this guy who is doing tons of work, and you have chosen to do no work?"

I've had a colleague call it out 'Is this AI slop? Please write your opinion'. I don't think I could do that myself, but I really appreciate that they were drawing attention to it

Communicate with your boss. "I'm ignoring this guy's slop because he's spewing slop, but not actually doing his job, and if I stop to deal with all of it, I won't be able to do my job".

Yes, "not actually doing his job". If he's sending you un-reviewed, un-filtered, untouched AI output, that's not doing his job.


100% agreed. I've shared output I didn't fully understand, didn't feel good good about it, and now I really try to digest, understand, and be able to actually talk about it if I expect other people to do the same. I hope in time your coworker comes to similar realizations.

I hope he's thought out his next vocation, since he's so eager to automate his current one.

And you also have people who out an idea in ChatGPT or Claude, come back with bunch of documents and think they have created a business.

Another idea to slow down the stream of slop of big PRs: request to split big PRs into smaller PRs. This typically keeps the author+clanker busy for quite some time. E.g. I got a 5k lines PR to review; requested to split that into 7 smaller, self-contained PRs. Took them about a week to finish this work.

Suggest to him to automate what he's doing.

I can't imagine my opinions just being AI slop that I've parroted. Surely you embellish just a little? Claude's so often bone-headed about things, this horrifies me. Gemini's worse. Even when the model agrees with me, it starts making me wonder if I'm not somehow wrong.

GitHub Copilot refuses to do any security testing or proof-of-concepts for exploits. While I understand why, we pay for Enterprise and I’m working on our proprietary code base. It’s incredibly annoying.

I’ve actually had luck taking the analysis from GHCP and pasting it into our M365 Copilot and getting a useful poc to stick into my bug reports.


Location is used for tracking distance/speed for certain activities and measuring VO2 max levels, and for finding a lost ring.


I was stuck between the two, Oura won for its better sleep tracking and battery life.

I suppose one option would be to enable data syncing to Apple Health, and periodically delete/create new Oura accounts to purge historical health data. Not a great workflow, but would let you benefit from E2EE with Apple Health while using Oura (assuming Oura’s “delete account and all data” does what it claims)


>Microsoft was effectively paying Anthropic for thousands of seats. Switching to internally-developed tools eliminates that cost while strengthening Microsoft's own AI product portfolio

This is just shifting the cost around. At the end of the day, whether developers are using Claude models through Claude Code or Copilot, Microsoft is still paying Anthropic.


For the price, they could buy an exact replica bare metal server and still save money.


> they could

They could, but they didn't and instead they wrote that blog post which, even being generous is still kinda hard to avoid describing as misleading.

I would not have written the post I did if they had presented a multi-node bare-metal cluster or whatever more realistic config.


> They could, but they didn't and instead they wrote that blog post which, even being generous is still kinda hard to avoid describing as misleading.

What do you feel was misleading?


That they get the exact same level of service for $1,199 less per month.

They don't.

And reading the article, they don't seem to understand that.


> What do you feel was misleading?

Erm. I already spelt it out in my original post ?

I'm not going to re-write it, the TL;DR is they are making an Apples and Oranges comparison.

Yes they "saved money" but in no way, shape or form are the two comparable.

The polite way to put is is .... they saved as much money as they did because they made very heavy handed "architectural decisions". "Decisions" that they appear to be unaware of having made.


They could but then that exchanges cost savings for complexity. You now need to keep them in sync and it is double the cost.

I agree with the other poster, this is fine for a toy site or sites but low quality manual DR isn't good for production.


Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I don’t think it’s API costs. Their Sonnet 4.6 is just 1x premium request which matches the 1x cost of the various GPT Codex models.


Sonnet is the worse model though, therefore it's expected that it is cheaper, the comparison would be Opus and GPT. That Anthropic's worse model is the same request cost as the best OpenAI model is what I mean when talking about Microsoft flexing their partnership.


You’re not locked into vscode. There are plugins for other IDEs, and a ‘copilot’ cli tool very similar to Claude Code’s cli tool.

I also wouldn’t say you’re locked into Microsoft’s ecosystem. At work we just have skills that allow for interaction with Bitbucket and other internal tooling. You’re not forced to use GitHub at all.


I thought, good thing I've already hit my 5-hour session limit.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: