> I already did.

They repeat multiple times in the article that asking Claude was something they already did. So this isn’t an anti-LLM article.

This seems to be a communication problem. The other party either doesn’t know that they’ve put a lot of effort into researching this already, or their trying to give a gentle let-down instead of saying they don’t have time for this.

For the first case, the solution is to explain what you did to reach this point. People are more interested in helping those who have already tried helping themselves.

The second case is more of a social situation with an infinite number of explanations. Some times you have to read the room and realize that someone may not be interested in having those conversations with you. Some times it’s only in the moment (we all have bad days where we want to be left alone) but other times it’s a signal that they’re not interested in discussing this topic with you or maybe even anyone else.

Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM.

>LMGTFY

I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that google results had a high chance of getting with "I'm feeling lucky".

If you've already done a bunch of research, and already asked the LLMs, when someone says "Honestly, ask Claude", you should be able to come back with what results you got to your question and what you need clarification on.

I've been doing programming and sys admin for 40 years. When I run a coworkers question through the AI tooling and talk through the answer with them, it's because my 40 years of experience tells me that's the next step.

Compare:

— What's the best way of doing X?

— Ask Claude.

vs:

— I thought about this and found there are options A, B, and C of doing X, I like A more but C is the fastest; what do you think?

I believe a normal senior engineer won't suggest to talk to Claude in this case.

I was talking to a very tired friend of mine and she described renting a small tiller from Home Depot. They didn't know how to set the choke and so flooded the engine. They spent hours troubleshooting, no one at Home Depot knew anything about the equipment they were taking money to rent. They eventually figured it out and were tilling their backyard garden well into the late night.

I told her next time just ask ChatGPT. I would have done it myself if I'd been there. She hadn't even thought of it. But a few pictures and descriptions would have gotten them rolling in half an hour tops.

junior developers on my team are often asking questions about our code base without even attempting to explore or self direct. “ask claude to look at <subsystem> and explain how its designed the key files and dependencies so that i can better understand it” is unsurprisingly effective and far cheaper than a couple of hours of opex

That is, the author asked for

    the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't

    I have forgotten that thing

LLM's are good at learning from whatever humans have posted online. But with the agentic workflows getting more popular, more and more problems those AI agents figure out are not posted online, and the next time another agent running into the same problems they would have to figure it out from the scratch again. It'd be nice if there's a mechanism these agents would share the lessons they learn with each other, which could save a lot of trials and errors and wasted tokens. Humans share knowledge online. AI agents should be able to do so too. The moltbook thing from half year ago could have this potential, but too bad it's flooded by spams.

Of course, to make this AI knowledge sharing truly work, there may need to be a peer-review mechanism to ensure the knowledge being shared is truthful, reliable, non-trivial etc. That can probably be all worked out if somebody (or AI agent) really put effort into it.

Do you need to know if X is faster than Y? Do both. Measure. Sometimes the answer requires actual research.

Maybe you need a real Subject Matter Expert because it turns out that nobody ever published something on the internet about something so that an LLM could soak up the real world information.

Before the internet, we would consult with books. After the internet, it seemed faster to search and find answers in things like blog posts, (paid) articles, and CDs. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are great resources. Maybe you need an answer from Hacker News - ask HN.

By relying on LLMs more than these other sources and allowing LLMs to write articles and posts to these other sources, we lose subject matter experts.

Add to that companies like Microsoft and Meta and others laying off and offering retirement packages to get rid of institutional knowledge as fast as possible, and we are headed towards a gigantic crash of knowledge.

These are not trivial things even though they are things that senior developers tend to trivialize.

If you’re describing the wrong problem, you’ll get a right answer that doesn’t fix it.

If you’re describing the right problem wrongly, you’ll get another wrong answer that talks past being right.

If you’re describing a difficult problem that maybe isn’t even solved in existing stuff, you can get help figuring out the necessary steps if you have an idea where to start.

If you don’t know where to start you can start by asking where to start.

Anyway, point is, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know (or think you know) and what you don’t know. I don’t have a magic wand, I have years of experience grinding down problems until they submit.

Its now a polite way of saying "I dont want to work on this project" without having to go through the effort of thinking hard enough about the problem to put the "go away" price on it (or even worse having to DO the work I dont want to do).

Well the people who keep bugging me verifiably do not, so that's tough.

On the off chance they do, they either spectacularly self-sabotage, or treat the response like they do a typical message box popup. So I'll be asked to essentially read the same thing out aloud, only for them to go "ok-ok". It's beyond insulting.

I'll 100% keep telling people to ask an LLM when I suspect this shit. They do NOT respect my time and attention, and have robustly demonstrated so. But then these are the same people who cannot internalize the idea behind nohello.net either (gotta remind them every few weeks/months), and have demonstrated this kind of helplessness even before LLMs, so it's clearly a deeper issue, likely cultural.

It seems your peers might have a similarly low opinion of you, or at least I'd definitely feature that as one of the options.

Instead they are telling me that literally any other human could do their job and their only value is prompting a chat bot.

The thing is they aren’t even accelerating outcomes. Since they can’t be bothered to learn they pump out stuff that looks good but the detail that matters is trash and requires someone else to actually finish to an acceptable standard.

Doesn’t that mean his answer was that he, with all of his years of experience, would ask Claude?

It's not about what you did or didn't do. It's about not being competent enough to help you and directing you to the more competent available entity. If it couldn't help you I won't be able either. Next time you lead with the information that you already asked the best available paid LLM, if you don't want to be directed there. Or explain your problem to a rubber duck instead because I won't be any more helpful.

"What did an LLM say about it?"

"What did the docs say?"

These are all better follow-ups than telling someone to do a specific thing.

15 minutes later a different coworker responded pointing out that everything Claude said was wrong.

I asked on slack for a reason! It's not like i don't know how to ask Claude.

People are really really tired.

Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the <panic about XYZ>", our employers are making us work much harder, with a subtle but palpable panic in their emails, with WAY less promises of any kind of job security, companies that never had layoffs for decades are now doing them regularly, our githubs are flooded with people pointing robots at our issues to generate tepid pull requests, and at our pull requests to generate tepid reviews, and look shit is just crazy now.

So I think the whole "how would you approach this interesting problem..." thing is, for now, at least for me it feels a little bit on hold. Like oh that problem. How to scale? how to horizontally shard PostgreSQL? sure, real problems. But geez whatever we're building, it will be replaced in three months anyway. That's a hard problem you have there! I remember when I used to have problems like that, and my solutions sucked anyway and it was replaced with a node.js app two years later. Whatever advice I have, Claude is going to have 98% of it plus another 10% that I didn't even have.

This is all bad. So I think your post is possibly extremely useful. Maybe we should, for people we know and trust as humans in the real world, actually take the time and approach an issue as though we didn't have the Matrix to approximate it for us. I'm going to think about this and consider it.

Maybe the people in your life are just trying to be helpful instead of effectively saying "Go away."

But hey, sure, it's AI so you should definitely hate on them. FUCK AI!!1!! AMIRIGHT?!?!

I don't know, maybe if you were generally not very informed the AI might seem knowledgeable by comparison?

How do people get jobs at jar opening factories by deferring jar opening to someone capable? These are your collages who have full time jobs, not monks at some monastery, go do that if that's what you want.

It makes sense to hate and despise that answer.

And yet, I'm not 100% sure I've never used it myself. I will have to watch out for that.