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 show 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.
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.
There is a third case where the other party doesn't realize that the asker lacks the relevant experience to discern good LLM answers from bad answers for that topic.
Same solution as case one though - don't be afraid to say "Claude said X but that doesn't sound right".
When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.
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.
Which is funny because a huge number of people post this in responses to online asynchronous messages, on public forums, when they could also do literally anything else - like close the browser tab.
I’m assuming this person did ask in the second way, it’s hard to imagine someone working through a problem that has already tried a bunch of stuff just going in cold and not providing any context and saying “How do I do X?”
Good advice obviously if it’s not being followed already but also likely over-simplifying the problem. Also a normal person on the receiving end would probe a bit about what has already been tried. Which to be fair makes the whole thing a bit weird and does sound more like she’s being brushed off.
Anyone who recommends to ask an LLM in the first situation will do so in the second because they're a shit engineer.
"Ask the LLM" is not at all a valid answer in a professional context where part of your job is to educate the less experienced, no matter how little effort is put in the question.
This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice.
Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
Yeah, I don't love this part of the work. Especially since it's completely exploded out the text of basically everything. I'm also suspicious that the person that generated that text didn't read any of it.
> It's closer to what happens when I ask a friend for a food recommendation and get a top-10 list back. I'm not asking what Eater thinks is the best kind-of-quiet spot for late-night drinks, or for a great coffee shop in the city where they used to live
Argh, I've had this with a couple friends. I ask them a question and I get back some bullet points over text which was obviously generated by an AI. Like, I know how to use AI.
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).
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
I find a llm in a harnes combined with manual ripgrep exploration is really effective of getting codebases. But you font always want to find what you find.
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.
Going to agree with you here. There's two types of "ask an llm." There's the "I don't know but whatever the llm said is probably right" and the "lmgtfy, did you even try?"
Based on the post his exact quote sounds more like 1 but obviously some people deserve the 2 sometimes.
90% of the questions people have, advice they solicit, entire Discords, and so-on, could just be private LLM based research.
"Let Me Google That For You: LLM Edition"
Even opinions are often better served by an LLM, perhaps counterintuitively. It's a "third party" intelligence to all human intelligence - value in that alone.
You're telling me that the people that I hired and that I work with don't have any knowledge or opinions of any value, and 90% of the time I can just ask a machine instead of talking to them.
If that's the world we live in I fucking hate it. It's so solipsistic and dehumanizing.
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.
ask supercomputer earth. it will figure it out in ten million years provided the computer doesn't get destroyed before that by that hyperspace bypass the vogons are planning.
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.
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 show 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.
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.
There is a third case where the other party doesn't realize that the asker lacks the relevant experience to discern good LLM answers from bad answers for that topic.
Same solution as case one though - don't be afraid to say "Claude said X but that doesn't sound right".
When I post a technical question in Forums, I usually add something like "Tried Copilot, got useless answer ...". The trouble with asking an LLM is that there are a huge number of people (this predates LLMs) who post answers on forums along the lines of "turn it off and turn it on again" LLMs pick that up as the consensus solution.
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.
So, if you want to have any decent company culture, make it reflect poorly on them.
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.
Agreed, you can also preface the question. I've checked A, B, and C with AI, curious to get your opinion/thoughts?
I don't think anyone in any industry regardless of seniority would redirect you back to AI assuming you're having a genuine conversation.
— 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?
— Ask Claude.
Its a way to say I don't care, don't waste my time
Which is funny because a huge number of people post this in responses to online asynchronous messages, on public forums, when they could also do literally anything else - like close the browser tab.
Intelligence is outsourced so now people who don't like to think they don't have to do it anymore.
Yes, the importance of asking a question to demonstrate you've invested effort cannot be overstated.
Without knowing what/how they asked, it's difficult but I would be tempted to suspect this was actually a way to say "please stop asking me questions"
I’m assuming this person did ask in the second way, it’s hard to imagine someone working through a problem that has already tried a bunch of stuff just going in cold and not providing any context and saying “How do I do X?”
Good advice obviously if it’s not being followed already but also likely over-simplifying the problem. Also a normal person on the receiving end would probe a bit about what has already been tried. Which to be fair makes the whole thing a bit weird and does sound more like she’s being brushed off.
I lost track how many times I heard or read "I asked Claude to do X. It seems to work".
Anyone who recommends to ask an LLM in the first situation will do so in the second because they're a shit engineer.
"Ask the LLM" is not at all a valid answer in a professional context where part of your job is to educate the less experienced, no matter how little effort is put in the question.
Sometimes part of the education is teaching people how to ask better questions, and that they need to do their research before asking you
LMGTFY for you was infuriating because it was 100% of the top Google responses to specific searches.
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/
This drives me absolutely crazy. My colleagues send me huge PRs to review (say 2000+ lines). I don't just paste comments from the LLM, I ask the LLM to review it, but I also review it myself. I only include ideas from the LLM if I think a) the LLM has gotten the issue right and b) it's worth having the developer take the time to address the issue. I always write the comment myself so I can add relevant context and put it in my own voice.
Then, after I've put in all this work, the developer just replies with a copy-paste of what the LLM thinks about my comment. I have no idea if the developer read or understood my point. I have no idea if he agrees or not. It doesn't just seem disrespectful to the effort I put into the review, it also leaves me in a difficult position as a tech lead because I have no idea if the person who is ultimately responsible for this code understands the code, my feedback on the code, or the changes that the LLM made to address my feedback. If you're responsible for a feature, I want to be able to feel like you're thinking critically about how that feature works. Right now, I just feel like you're blindly doing everything that I tell you. It also feels like I'm shouting into the void. We're colleagues, we should be able to have a conversation about technical subjects!
Yeah, I don't love this part of the work. Especially since it's completely exploded out the text of basically everything. I'm also suspicious that the person that generated that text didn't read any of it.
People are lazy... just get used to it.
> It's closer to what happens when I ask a friend for a food recommendation and get a top-10 list back. I'm not asking what Eater thinks is the best kind-of-quiet spot for late-night drinks, or for a great coffee shop in the city where they used to live
Argh, I've had this with a couple friends. I ask them a question and I get back some bullet points over text which was obviously generated by an AI. Like, I know how to use AI.
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).
It's just the new "I don't know, Google it?"
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
I find a llm in a harnes combined with manual ripgrep exploration is really effective of getting codebases. But you font always want to find what you find.
>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.
Going to agree with you here. There's two types of "ask an llm." There's the "I don't know but whatever the llm said is probably right" and the "lmgtfy, did you even try?" Based on the post his exact quote sounds more like 1 but obviously some people deserve the 2 sometimes.
I think the opposite-
90% of the questions people have, advice they solicit, entire Discords, and so-on, could just be private LLM based research.
"Let Me Google That For You: LLM Edition"
Even opinions are often better served by an LLM, perhaps counterintuitively. It's a "third party" intelligence to all human intelligence - value in that alone.
This is fucking dystopian.
You're telling me that the people that I hired and that I work with don't have any knowledge or opinions of any value, and 90% of the time I can just ask a machine instead of talking to them.
If that's the world we live in I fucking hate it. It's so solipsistic and dehumanizing.
100% this. In the end, I just don’t care about the answer that much.
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.
What was the question?
ask supercomputer earth. it will figure it out in ten million years provided the computer doesn't get destroyed before that by that hyperspace bypass the vogons are planning.
Ask an LLM.
Your question was: "What was the question?" -- GPT 5.5
[delayed]
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.
Ask AI