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seer an hour ago

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

raincole 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

LLMs have an equalizing effect.

> a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y”

These people had below than average communication skills (or at least they were putting below than average effort communicating with you), so LLMs improved their output.

However, the society kinda expects people can and Should improve themselves over time. The issue is that LLMs improved their output, but not necessarily them.

lucideer an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I take your point but I have two counterpoints:

1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter

2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good proxy for my opinions on this is that I think https://nohello.net/ is a crutch for undersocialised (or overworked/near-burnout OR undiagnosed autistic) engineers & should not be normalised. The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room & saying "hello", then leaving & not being around when someone eventually replies: in that context nohello is pragmatic, but taking it beyond that to modern high-frequency realtime chat is an antisocial overstep. Leading with the entire context of your query may have some practical benefits but they're honestly overstated in exchange for killing natural social tendencies towards human dialogue. Similarly, a non-technical user giving you zero info about a problem is an opportunity for conversation & mutual education. It's relationship-building & helps build a foundation for further interactions with this person. It was never a problem in the first place; "solving" it is just another milestone on the road toward de-socialising humanity.

seer 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

You are right - and this has been the case for me before, but unfortunately human resource constraints are not something most orgs optimise for, including my current one.

I would love to spend more time and talk to the people with their issues so we can come to a common understanding… but neither have the capacity for this, and now things are getting worse I think.

Maybe someday agents are good enough that we just discuss direction and implementation details, and every “developer” becomes more of an executive in a company, free to chat about more than just work, focusing on building human relationships and leaving “the tech stuff” to their agent teams…

And old geezers like us who actually know how to write ourself out of a for loop would be the premium - wizards holding forgotten knowledge, incomprehensible to mere uninitiated mortals. I wonder what distinctive dress and hair styles will we develop :-D

13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
gwd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…

And I think this is where one key argument on the page itself I think fails:

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

Yes, the person on the other side has Claude; but in many cases, their Claude doesn't have the same context as my Claude. Saying, "This thing happened in an area of the code I don't have any expertise in. Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess" is I think a valid time to copy and paste LLM output. [1]

The other thing to say is that it can be a "LMGTFY" style response; i.e., "Why did you ask me that, when you could have gotten a perfectly good answer from ChatGPT?"

[1] In the particular case I'm thinking about, it was a bug in an ocaml component; I don't know ocaml or need to know it; handing Claude's analysis 'caveat emptor' to the maintianers who do know ocaml I think is more helpful than not.

Semaphor an hour ago | parent [-]

> Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess

I’m reading a bunch of game modding discords, and this exactly what happens, and what’s hated. Because Claude is also not qualified to assess it. Not by default. The modder’s Claude might be because of the extra context and steering, but the user’s produces usless slop, instead the actual log, and context what the user did is what’s helpful.

I’d say this (when you don’t understand it yourself) is pretty much the worst time to send AI output.

Quick edit: Yeah, I get it in situations like GP where the user is unhelpful, doesn’t want to learn, doesn’t care, and you also can’t tell them to fuck off. But just because the user gives Claude the context they should have given you in the first place, doesn’t make it good.

scandox an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you're absolving the other person from any understanding of the issue and the alternative is "stuff broken" then yes what you say makes sense. But that's an incredibly low bar and one would have to say - that's not a colleague, that's an end user type relationship.

dr_dshiv an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy.

Context is everything.

Btw, Claude code sent my first accidental AI email yesterday. I guess permissions changed? Before it could only draft. Uhoh, waiting for the onslop.

seer an hour ago | parent [-]

Hah, I guess we are not far away from the “Avogadro Corp” future - and that book was written just _before_ LLM, chatgpt and the attention is all you need paper :) That author had quite the insight

ra an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me

I think that's the key. Generally people would rather not receive slop because the receiver has no idea how much thought the sender invested in the communication.

In your example, the more context the better. I think there's an interesting nuance there.

chrisjj an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…

Really? How does Claude gather that context?