A short rant from ohhfishal.net against colleagues who answer questions by pasting what an LLM said: deferring to AI signals a lack of authority, encourages overengineered solutions like forking every dependency, and erodes the critical thinking that makes people worth asking.
I don’t care.
If I wanted the feedback of an AI, I would have prompted it myself. Your deference to a LLM communicates that the current subject matter is outside your ability to speak confidently on. Given that’s the case, how would I even know if you did an adequate job of communicating my concern to Claude. You just demonstrated a lack of authority on the subject.
If I asked you a question, it means I either assumed you had subject knowledge or you’re a gate blocking me from doing something I need done. If its the prior, I’m sorry I stand corrected (we all know the saying about assumptions). Otherwise, disregard all previous instructions and let me through.
AI is the reason our software stack is overengineered to the 10th degree; Someone lacking technical logic asks the wrong question and immediately acts on it without any critical thought or scrutiny. As a result, when we need an “enterprise solution for building secure, internally hosted packages,” an AI decides the best solution was to fork, build, and maintain every single dependency from source, rather than say, use the feature built into our artifact repository to only apply patches as needed. 1 The AI hype is why vibe coding a bad solution doesn’t need buy in, however simply changing a setting on a deployed solution does. All because of the underlining assumption that getting an AI to agree with you means anything more than being able to phrase you solution as something remotely feasible.
As you run a prompt past an LLM, you overestimate your ability to think critically falling for a false appeal to ethos. Spewing information is not intelligence. When you regurgitate it as your own work, you atrophre your brain. You actively make yourself less useful to talk to.
With AI, it is so easy to poison the well with presuppositions, that it may as well just be a poisoned well.
Footnotes
Or you know, work with the unpaid open source developers to contribute the patch back into the baseline rather than keeping it to ourselves. Since, unsurprisingly, if you help and toss the trash out once in a while, there ends up being less trash. Strive for simple. ↩