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AI/ML

Claude Says

A blog post argues that opening a reply with "Claude says" undermines the speaker: deferring to an LLM signals the topic is outside their expertise, and the reader has no way to judge whether the concern was even communicated properly. The author blames AI for runaway stack complexity, citing an example where a model proposed forking and maintaining every dependency from source instead of using an artifact repository's built-in patching feature. Prompting a chatbot, the post concludes, flatters a false sense of critical thinking, and feeding presuppositions into an LLM only poisons the well.

The discussion

Most commenters land on agreeing that “Claude says” is tiresome while rejecting the article’s claim that AI caused our overengineered stacks, because creesch argues the abstraction pile-up predates LLMs and grew from gatekeeping and vendors selling acceleration. The live argument is what to do instead: pyfisch reaches for Claude as a fast way to confirm a suspicion he is 80% sure of, and pralkarz answers that the hour of manual research is the point, since vetting sources and fact-checking are skills that atrophy when outsourced. The sharpest objection is to gspr’s “just send me the prompt you used”, because tonyarkles and rustybolt note that useful output arrives only after many rounds of steering a session, so a first prompt conveys almost nothing — rustybolt’s analogy being that asking for the prompt is choosing the lottery ticket over the prize.