I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?”
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day.
Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
what is often overlooked in corporate culture: if you take a step back, two coworkers refusing to cooperate, regardless of the reason, is a typical "corporate kindergarten" scenario for the manager to take care of.
To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.
They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.
The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.
Because engineers don’t decide on hiring and firing. The managers all have KPIs to transform the org into AI-native. This is the kind of behavior that organizations encourage right now.
It seems that this is largely coming from higher ups who are probably (consciously or not) testing the waters for LLMs being able to replace the people they're dumping the walls of text on. I don't mean in any sort of malicious penny pinching scheme either, but simply people wanting to be able to do things quickly and as close to their own demands as possible, while getting rid of the 'middle man.' It just so happens that as LLMs become ever more capable of delivering on e.g. software tasks, software engineers start to become the middle men.
My experience is it’s over eager engineers who we would have historically considered not strong who suddenly feel able to contribute in a different way
> and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?
If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
I had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"
It’s truly unhinged behavior that has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry. You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
I have a friend who works in healthcare and he says patients now regularly pull out their phone and ask him to talk to their chatbot. Anything he says to them, they immediately repeat to ChatGPT and ask if it’s correct.
> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.
I will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.
Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
Last week, I built a search engine as a side project over electoral data.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
This is becoming frustrating, it shows up in conversation with friends and while working. If I have to hear what ai had you do before you called me, I'm charging double right away. Especially when ai is a fantastic teacher if used correctly.
A related problem is people not understanding where AI is/isn't of use.
A news article I read today said they asked Claude whether a song's lyrics were AI generated - as if it were some kind of legitimate authoritative test.
There's enough problems already with the existing 'AI detection' tools for text, but this was a big red flag - its the journalist clearly assuming these AI tools have some unique insight into the text they generate, which was deeply concerning to see being used in an article that had a real bearing on the reputation of the person they were accusing of using AI.
At my last job, a coworker did this to me. The first time it happened, I ignored it. The second time, I responded in public saying “thanks but I can ask Claude myself.” Nobody ever pasted me an LLM response again. YMMV with team size and seniority though
If I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it's because I took the time to reformulate your question for Claude including all the relevant implicit context, waited for it to go through its reasoning, answered any extra questions it might have posed, corrected it if it went off course, filtered out the hypotheses and picked one that convinced me, if any. Finally I took the most relevant part of it- the one that contains the important justifications- and pasted it back to you with clear attribution.
You can do this yourself if you want, I won't be offended.
Last week a colleague did this to me; pasted to me in chat "Gemini said". I just ignored it and went with talking about the issue on another thread. I like LLMs and I use them every day, but I'm not gonna answer copy&pasted LLM stuff in human to human conversation. Distill it and let me know your thoughts; I don't need to read you LLM output, I can generate that myself.
When "ai slop" became a concept, it mostly came into spaces where "human slop" had already been firmly established.
Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.
That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.
That is super actual in my team. The biggest problem is that Claude tends to write long prose and use jargon which is not common for us. Often, to understand the whole idea I have to read all the text. The best if the writer rephrases what Claude has written, as wording/jargon will be familiar for the reader and will make communication easier.
In this scenario the answer for me is C. I say “Ask an agent about terms X, Y and Z and it should be able to explain this well for you. Try that and see if it works for you or if you have any follow up questions”
However, you have to distinguish when someone is asking for your judgement vs just general knowledge about a subject. If I’m asking for your judgement, you have to be the one delivering and owning that call in your own words. It’s fine if you verify or research your understanding with an LLM before answering, but I want to hear your voice and ownership not Claude’s. Whatever you get from the LLM you should understand and if possible, verify. If I came back and say “You said X, can you expand on that” you can’t reply “lol - Claude said that, I dunno”
I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
> Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
Do you tell people you used a hammer to hit the nails? Do you go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t use your bare, bleeding knuckles to punch in the nails?
Give people some credit and don’t treat them like idiots.
Also don’t treat your LLM as some “super-power”, it’s just a fancy hammer and still hits your fingers if you don’t know how to use it.
That's a very good question that I also don't have an answer to (yet). But I believe part of the reason for that is that were currently still in the middle of this shift, so there's issues of both knowledge about AI and how people relate to it. And of course there's so many different situations here.
Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.
Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.
A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.
Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.
I am a software engineer. Most of the times, the people asking are from product management or devops. Devops contractors are the most difficult ones. They have access to the code, they have access to Claude. But they don't use it.
There are typically middle paths, like pointing where they should look approximately (if you are an expert on a project, you typically have a better idea where to look). And then they can look or point their agents at it, or whatever they prefer.
In the past "RTFM" or "LGMTFY" have been responses, so why not something like, well, "I'm not aware of the top of my head, you afaik <brief explanation>. Also feel free to ask Claude on the technical details :)"
"Hey, here's what I found. By the way I used Claude to get this info. It might be worth trying that yourself if you have similar questions, it's quite good at this in my experience. Give it a go"
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Literally just ignore these people if they don't get the message. Let them complain to their supervisor and hopefully their supervisor will bring up the fact that you asked them to use AI instead. It's an easily defensible position. Some people need to learn the hard way.
Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.
In the end it's really just the same thing as with stackoverflow answers. If you knew how to combine certain keywords for an answer you were searching for, then it took you like 5 seconds to find the relevant SO answer for that. Even then people got mad about it 'why can't they just search themselves if it's so easy to find?' - well, maybe it's not that easy and obvious to a lot of people and that will get even worse now
I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing or that I don't really understand.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
I'll always give people my honest effort and benefit of the doubt initially, but those who violate it are treated likewise. The only way to put down this kind of behavior is to charge it a social cost. If we do not do this, the cost is externalized to everyone else who conducts themselves with care.
I'll try that. I'm constantly telling it to be "brief, plain and on the point" or something similar. Tried caveman, but I think it had it's own issues.
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
I'm pretty sure the other answers are wrong and it's a side effect of RL (see thinking machines post about inkling training). It's also exacerbated in fable and sol--I think it's token efficiency effect--bc it's about to reason with fewer tokens the density of the token information goes up.
I think they're overcorrecting for being too long-winded in previous generations (and still, in some cases). I guess this is a hard balance to get right.
Quite a few people do believe that a good specification is long, has multiple levels of headings, interspersed bold text, bullet points, and so on. Definitely, this is what they have seen happen throughout their lives: competent people have heaped praise on documentation which has had these signs, so this must be what good documentation looks like.
Yeah, I just ignore people who do that. I don’t care what Claude or ChatGPT said. If you cannot be arsed to write yourself then I cannot be arsed to read it.
It's my very same exact opinion and as an EM I'm trying to push this everywhere (team, peers, upwards) but it feels like speaking to a rubber wall. It starts to be exhausting and infuriating. This is not an "LLMs are bad" issue, this is a "humans are lazy" issue. (shit, I wrote the it's not X it's Y construction!)
Directives want results, positive numbers and growth. How well done is and the queality of the product is something trivial.
Until february/april I was super dead serious about the quality of my apps and my code, I was super strict and always looking for excellence and quality. But people were delivering shit faster than me and someone who doesnt give a fuck about anything of this just got promoted. So now i just let opencode do my work while I watch and play dota in the background. I deliver faster and nobody has ever talked about quality of my code or the ellegance of it.
I still programming by hand in my personal projects, but in corporative projects? Fuck it, i'll let the llm do my job until it lasts and Ill watch the world burn.
Sending LLM outputs to people is worse than useless, because you don't even know what they prompted with. For all you know it was "write me a paragraph justifying my opinion".
I call it BI Slop now [0]. It's everywhere. Usually "claude said" is used a a proxy for authority, as in there is some validity in this statement. But it's disguised as humbleness. i.e. I don't know if this is true, but claude said xyz, with your expertise you might know more than me...
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
So... back to a currency backed by gold?
Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.
Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.
Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
To avoid rushed or incorrect decisions, conflicts intentionally move through gradual escalation. If someone behaves unprofessionally, for example by submitting a code review they do not understand, the first step is to establish the likely cause.
They may ultimately be at fault, but that does not absolve the surrounding environment. The culture may be toxic, deadlines unrealistic, or communication poor.
The best course of action for someone directly affected by uncooperative coworkers is to avoid assuming ill intent. Get them on a call and let them explain their pull request, however trivial the issue may seem. Even if the gesture is misinterpreted, you still have a far stronger position than righteous indignation.
If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
This shit has progressed well past seriousness and into the absurd
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
It is clear though that virtually all degradation we have is in human capital and social sphere against the background of staggering technical capability.
AI is just another tool they can use to be stupid and lazy while pretending to contribute.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
I doubt people running those agents know much about stuff
A news article I read today said they asked Claude whether a song's lyrics were AI generated - as if it were some kind of legitimate authoritative test.
There's enough problems already with the existing 'AI detection' tools for text, but this was a big red flag - its the journalist clearly assuming these AI tools have some unique insight into the text they generate, which was deeply concerning to see being used in an article that had a real bearing on the reputation of the person they were accusing of using AI.
Then do it and don't ask questions.
If I paste back to you an answer from Claude, it's because I took the time to reformulate your question for Claude including all the relevant implicit context, waited for it to go through its reasoning, answered any extra questions it might have posed, corrected it if it went off course, filtered out the hypotheses and picked one that convinced me, if any. Finally I took the most relevant part of it- the one that contains the important justifications- and pasted it back to you with clear attribution.
You can do this yourself if you want, I won't be offended.
Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.
That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.
Should I a) give a worse answer b) ask claude and launder it as a meat proxy or c) tell them to ask claude?
b and c piss people off but often get them to a better answer.
However, you have to distinguish when someone is asking for your judgement vs just general knowledge about a subject. If I’m asking for your judgement, you have to be the one delivering and owning that call in your own words. It’s fine if you verify or research your understanding with an LLM before answering, but I want to hear your voice and ownership not Claude’s. Whatever you get from the LLM you should understand and if possible, verify. If I came back and say “You said X, can you expand on that” you can’t reply “lol - Claude said that, I dunno”
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
Do you tell people you used a hammer to hit the nails? Do you go out of your way to explain to people that you don’t use your bare, bleeding knuckles to punch in the nails?
Give people some credit and don’t treat them like idiots.
Also don’t treat your LLM as some “super-power”, it’s just a fancy hammer and still hits your fingers if you don’t know how to use it.
If the answer is wrong and people trust your judgement, then they will take a lot longer to figure out, that your answer is not to be relied upon.
Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.
Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.
A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.
Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.
Like a human, not like a robot. Either just present them the answer or explain them how you got it.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
At the same time, I use the Q&A cycle to improve my vetted knowledge base, which I also share (and can reference in answers).
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
1. It's quick
2. It's not their problem anymore because they've replied.
No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that.
Directives want results, positive numbers and growth. How well done is and the queality of the product is something trivial.
Until february/april I was super dead serious about the quality of my apps and my code, I was super strict and always looking for excellence and quality. But people were delivering shit faster than me and someone who doesnt give a fuck about anything of this just got promoted. So now i just let opencode do my work while I watch and play dota in the background. I deliver faster and nobody has ever talked about quality of my code or the ellegance of it.
I still programming by hand in my personal projects, but in corporative projects? Fuck it, i'll let the llm do my job until it lasts and Ill watch the world burn.
Sending LLM outputs to people is worse than useless, because you don't even know what they prompted with. For all you know it was "write me a paragraph justifying my opinion".
Finally I have a word I can use for this
It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/business-intelligence-slop