Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

turtleyacht

What was the question?

ventana

One of the ways not to get LMGTFY / Ask Claude as a response is to provide more information and proof of work when asking a question. 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.

sscaryterry

It's just the new "I don't know, Google it?"

Aurornis

The subtitle is: > 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.

theorchid

I once wrote a similar essay on this topic. When I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer: https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/

bvcp

this is just effort equilibrium something that wasnt as effective with “google it”. but ask a low effort question and get “ask claude” as a response is entirely appropriate. 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

linsomniac

>I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him 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.

mcv

I completely agree. Replying with "ask Claude" feels to me like admitting you've lost control over the subject matter and don't know anything about it or at least don't trust your judgement anymore. It feels like saying you're replaceable by AI. 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.

SoftTalker

Get used to it. People are lazy, and if they can deflect work off to an LLM, they will, as long as (crucially) it doesn't reflect poorly on them with anyone they care about.

zzzeek

OK here is the thing. Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster. 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.

perching_aix

> I already did. 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.

zer00eyz

I tell people this, a lot. 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).

zyralab

People are lazy... just get used to it.

wwind123

To be honest, I'm more worried about another side of the problem. 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.

triyambakam

Ok but he clearly used a model to write this so...

fwlr

The author considers the possibility that this is an outwardly-polite form of “you should be able to solve this yourself”. Another, grimmer possibility is that it’s an inwardly-polite form of “I should have been able to solve this myself”. That is, the author asked for the thing 30 years had taught him that a search engine couldn't And his real answer is I have forgotten that thing

dyauspitr

Not all that different from LMGTFY

mbf1

My answer is usually to make a process. 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.

jimwhite

If you've already done some research then include that up front. I get asked a lot of questions by people who not only haven't asked an AI first they haven't even googled it. So if you've asked Claude and are not satisfied with the response then include that and say what your question is now in the light of that information.