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Don't Paste the AI, please

88 points1 hourdontpastetheai.com
seer40 minutes ago

I’m not convinced tbh, a lot of my colleagues messages are “x broken” or “I do y” … no context whatsoever, and then I have to coax their context for making these decisions.

Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything… might be too much sure, but to be honest over-communicating seems better than under-communicating - sure it’s boring and tedious but that shifts the blockage to me.

Otherwise each of these coaxing sessions is something I have to keep in my head until resolved, which is a load in and off itself.

And even better - I can point Claude to that message and gives me a summary. You might say this is silly because we are paying the LLM tax, but knowing what to share, and then verifying against my situation are two different things.

Sometimes they have checked the wrong thing, sometimes they need guidance, sometimes I need to investigate before I can answer. A full LLM message with context is like “summary of their working context that I can resume on my end” so I don’t waste cycles asking or rechecking etc.

And it is still possible to be a learning experience for both of us since the initial message is the start, we can then talk to each other like humans, both much more in sync than before…

It is kinda ironic but I think it does push things in a better direction. Would I have loved it if the message was human, direct and to the point - obviously, but we are all busy, we got shit to do, and this is a useful “resume” mechanic

gwd30 minutes ago

> Since people started using Claude now I get full context of everything…

And I think this is where one key argument on the page itself I think fails:

> The person on the other side has the same tools you do.

Yes, the person on the other side has Claude; but in many cases, their Claude doesn't have the same context as my Claude. Saying, "This thing happened in an area of the code I don't have any expertise in. Below is Claude's analysis, which I'm not qualified to assess" is I think a valid time to copy and paste LLM output. [1]

The other thing to say is that it can be a "LMGTFY" style response; i.e., "Why did you ask me that, when you could have gotten a perfectly good answer from ChatGPT?"

[1] In the particular case I'm thinking about, it was a bug in an ocaml component; I don't know ocaml or need to know it; handing Claude's analysis 'caveat emptor' to the maintianers who do know ocaml I think is more helpful than not.

dr_dshiv37 minutes ago

Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy.

Context is everything.

Btw, Claude code sent my first accidental AI email yesterday. I guess permissions changed? Before it could only draft. Uhoh, waiting for the onslop.

disillusioned51 minutes ago

Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is:

Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)

mscbuck28 minutes ago

Just want to say, "Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else" is something that I don't think I really internalized until you wrote it in that way. Which I think is evidence of what you are talking about.

RugnirViking48 minutes ago

yes, its all ai writing. A bunch of the metaphors here dont make sense.

"read it all, yes even the bullets. especially the bullets"

if you read one thing from a large wall of text, its gonna be the bullet points, right? thats a big part of what they're for?

"It is the conversational equivalent of forwarding the email."

this is a terrible metaphor. it seems to rely on the idea you would be mad if you sent an email to someone and they forwarded to someone else? but thats useful, theyre literally sending it to someone who is presumably better placed to help you, or raising it to someone more important because they think what youre saying is important

Interesting to note the page also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"

bjourne37 minutes ago

I had the same feeling. The terrible metaphors smells like Claude.

mickhua26 minutes ago

Disagree - most people aren't bothered to ask AI and have a conversation with it, they will go to you to get an answer so they have someone to blame when it's wrong.

totetsu26 minutes ago

I was recently listening to a podcast about mentalization theory therapy methods for BPD .. for a friend .. Mentalization being the activity of understanding whats going on in other peoples minds, or in ones own. And they idea of pseudomentalizing or "pretend mode" was put forward, where a person looks or sounds like they are .. engaged in mentalizing communication, but are actually check out. Then I started to think about all the AI slop going around .. and the phenomenon, this meme site is responding to, or AI posting responses.. and I wondered, is this a symptom of.. a global society wide phycological functional deficit, where A) we're none of us communicating as if there is people on the other end.. and B) we're not thinking about our own minds, and taking time to understand things..

mkayokay56 minutes ago

Same but shorter: https://noslopgrenade.com/

jvuygbbkuurx27 minutes ago

No. Don't ask a question that AI can answer.

pammf45 minutes ago

Agree that it isn’t nice to just copy & paste, but the assumption that your AI generated answers will the same of someone’s else is wrong. Everyone using AI for a while built a different set of preferences, memories and context in general which influence the answers.

parasti28 minutes ago

Similar thoughts here. My gut tells me "if I wanted AI responses I would just ask AI", but in truth LLMs are not like Google Search. LLMs are more like a slot machine where you put your prompt in and out comes a combination of insights that are personalized to the inputs.

Barbing40 minutes ago

Or no memories or history.

Would be interesting if someone said “I spent $2.50 using llm-council with the three top SOTA models and think this reply makes sense: {paste}”

(But better “not sure, though after spending a few bucks on model APIs, perhaps {human-written analysis} is in the right direction”)

Also like you, I did think on the angry version “they have the same AI you do” isn’t likely to be right in the consumer space since their AI is ChatGPT (free version?!) and yours is Claude or something.

su889855 minutes ago

Ironically, almost all the content on that page sounds AI generated to me!

skippah39 minutes ago

same but shorter (already posted on hn): https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

Dont be a meat proxy! simple

DenisDolya31 minutes ago

I think this text also applies well to code written using an LLM.

amaldini48 minutes ago

Give them a second brain so they don't bother you with silly questions: https://github.com/amaldini/maldalang/blob/main/Examples/Age...

ppalata45 minutes ago

This does feel like responding to rudeness with more rudeness. My personal guess would be that people who do this (pasting AI responses) know what they are doing, not genuinely trying to help. It's the equivalent of sending LMGTFY.

Copenjin40 minutes ago

I don't understand the need of need "Satire, mostly." at the bottom, are opinion on things so dangerous?

andrewstuart27 minutes ago

Weirdly, this post speaks for everyone.

derrida56 minutes ago

People are doing this? Wow, I'm sorry folks.

usaphp54 minutes ago

What if English is not your first language and you are afraid of sounding silly when you email or text someone?

kuboble41 minutes ago

Ask the ai to point out the egregious mistakes only.

Especially today, I will prefer your slightly funny English to something that feels like AI.

And personally I do Support for people around the world and I often ask people to write in their native language.

Then I can translate myself and if the default ai translation gets something wrong I can add necessary context to improve it - which I can't really do if the only thing I get is the bad ai translation.

walrus0143 minutes ago

خب، در آن صورت، من وقت می گذاشتم و متنی را با دست می نوشتم و دقیقاً همان چیزی را که نوشته بودم از طریق نرم افزار ترجمه ماشینی اجرا می کردم.

xenocratus51 minutes ago

You write your reply and ask the AI to fix the spelling / grammar for you. It's really not the same thing

whazor43 minutes ago

Create new chat after step 2, then ask AI to fix the spelling / grammar of those three sentences

askonomm45 minutes ago

How did people do it before AI? Spellchecks have existed forever. Also, people have the ability to improve, so if you offload all your work elsewhere, you will never improve.

RugnirViking45 minutes ago

det sker nogle gange! når man er ny til et sprog, det kan være forskrakkelig at skrive i et professionelt område. Men det er bare en del af dine udvikling - du kan sagtens skrive på hvilken sprog når som helst, og de kan bruge deres værktøj til at forstå det, du siger.

Der skal kom et tid hvor du skal tale på en sprog på dit kontor. Uden hjælp. Du har bruge for at øve dig, og folk er alligevel pænere end du tror.

(this being written in a foreign language I am learning is part of the point)

myaccountonhn54 minutes ago

How will you learn if you don't practice?

dragandj38 minutes ago

At this point I would hold that silly sounding message in a much higher regard than I would hold AI slop.

jesterson38 minutes ago

Use it to rewrite your OWN thoughts, or translate it to english. Not bloat with phrases sounding fancy but carrying no meaning

proee47 minutes ago

Pasting a blurb of AI is sometimes a form of "Let Me Google That For You" LMGTFY. If someone asks me a dumb question, I will often resort to giving them an AI answer, that they could have easily looked up themselves.

rllj40 minutes ago

It literally takes you more effort to get an LLM answer, and if it doesn't, it's not really a dumb question, is it?

dude25071142 minutes ago

They did not read AI output, they will not read that page either.

reddalo56 minutes ago

It's the modern era lmgtfy

wiseowise38 minutes ago

Beautiful theme. Author has style.

ForHackernews56 minutes ago

https://dontpastetheai.com/angry/

Almost certainly written by AI

xenocratus47 minutes ago

... the page never argues that AI is bad or not useful broadly. Not sure if this getting commented again and again is because people are just that bad at understanding that context matters. Not everything has to be evil / slop or pure / virtuous, regardless of context.

RugnirViking40 minutes ago

no, but it does argue specifically against presenting people with large amounts of ai written text without reading it or checking that it makes sense.

It also ends with "written by a human, on purpose"

akie52 minutes ago

Did they really just say "genuinely useful" in a post decrying the blind copy-pasting of AI text? (it's a strong Claude indicator)

blazarquasar57 minutes ago

Ironic for this to be full AI Slop.

isqueiros56 minutes ago

"Angry" version is clearly 1-to-1 ai output. I think I prefer dontbeameatproxy

DC-356 minutes ago

that's the joke, isn't it?

avazhi41 minutes ago

This site is AI slop.

cynicalsecurity42 minutes ago

Okay, boomer.

wisty45 minutes ago

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lijok55 minutes ago

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mopsi48 minutes ago

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asah47 minutes ago

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