The complaint here is about lazy answers. But what about all the lazy questions?

What's the equivalent of "Google it yourself" these days? When you ask something of somebody, the expectation of the other side to drop everything and do work for you isn't always appropriate/balanced/appreciated.

The underlying problem here is that communication is hard; especially if it's not face to face. People can't read your mind or might not get the full context of your question.

Back in the day I learned the hard way that sending a long reply to an email just ensures the other side won't read it. You can't assume that you dealt with their request effectively that way. And that was when there was a lot of email to deal with. Lots of people demanding all sorts of things via email and creating more work for each other by sending more email.

I learned to 1) never reply instantly to low priority requests, 2) be very brief and clear, 3) that talking to people is almost always the better choice when you get tempted to write a long reply.

If you don't like the answers you are getting, maybe reflect on what you are asking, how reasonable that request really was, and how you communicated it. Maybe your question was entirely reasonable and the answer really inappropriately bad. If so, give feedback or talk to the person. But maybe the other side didn't get you. Or maybe they were busy and you are interrupting them. There can be all sorts of reasons why you aren't getting what you expected.

It all depends on the context of course. If you are delegating something to somebody that reports to you, you can just tell them off. But if the other side is a colleague, your boss, or a friend you have to be a bit more considerate.

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.)

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

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"

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

Oh sweetie... I've been getting paid to "Google things" for 26 years. AI isn't going to change that transaction. When I was in high school it was assumed that everyone would be tech savvy. That didnt happen and in fact my kids were LESS tech savvy because of smartphones and refined aka dumbed down consumer tech.

AI;DR This is the broader symptom of a global toxic corporate culture.

We are afraid that one badly phrased message can hurt our reputation or even our jobs, so optimizing every message with softer wording, more political correctness, less directness is safer.

But the real problem is the culture underneath it. If people are constantly worried about how every sentence will be interpreted, eventually they stop speaking plainly, stop challenging decisions, and sometimes stop speaking up at all. So this is like attacking the consequences not the root causes. There should be some sort of measurement of how broken is a community or a company by letting a bot scan Slack/Teams and let the bot remind everyone the importance of lowering the fake index.

I remember back in the day when you could apply this to Google search results. When I was freelancing, I had a number of people I worked with who would fire off fast questions, but they would still pay me for my time. Then I would return what was essentially a Google search result shortly after. Yes, I would send my own answer, not some paste from Google.

But the point is. They had search, so why didn't they think to do the search? They had the same tools as I did. And yet regularly they couldn't think of the answer. I still deal with this with AI today. When you ask a question, maybe you're asking for the interpretation of the question by the person on the other side. And it's that interpretation that goes to the LLM. Or otherwise some filter of how that person thinks about the question differently than you do.

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

I beg to differ. I'll often do a short LLM session to figure out an issue and will use my existing knowledge and experience to drive the LLM towards some solution. When the answer seems legit enough, I'll copy it back to the one asking.

It's not that different to what we were doing back in the day when search engines were still useful. I often wound up replying with a link either to a stackoverflow question or a blog post. There was still a knowledge/experience component involved in evaluating if the proposed solution fits the original question.

Ever since my boss has transitioned to doing code reviews by AI and off loading his brain fully to AI, I could just use my AI to do the same to fix the things and I no longer have to deal with petty design arguments. I no longer have to deal with stylistic problems and that's great. When somebody offloads their communication to AI, it's easy to deal with. Meet with the same energy. Let the AI waste their time in the communication because the lack of effort on one side deserves the same type of communication-style.

As I wrote this i switch to the phrase communication-style because I realize that when he does his code review it's literally just a quick pass and a paste, but unfortunately when I do AI code reviews I review every single review item and push back individually on each item, research the items, write tests against what the review says and basically curate the code review I give out, which takes me 3 hours and then I have a boss angrily messaging me asking why the code review isn't done.

So on the one end I've managed to reduce toxicity in the reviews, but the tradeoff is toxicity in the expectation of a rubber stamp.

> The person on the other side has the same tools you do. If they wanted the generic answer, they would have gotten it in four seconds. They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement.

I beg to differ. Most of my life, as “the computer guy” — basically since I was a kid — I’ve always been surprised by how lazy people can be, and how they often prefer to ask “the computer guy” or some other human trusted source rather than work out the answer themselves.

There was even a website called “Let Me Google That for You” back when Google was a trustworthy source of answers, precisely to point out how easy it was to find the answer yourself. Obviously, that didn’t stop people from asking, and I don’t think LLMs will either.

People will continue to turn to “the computer guy” — aka you. And if your judgement is that copying an LLM response verbatim is the best answer, then yes, you’re fulfilling your role perfectly well.

> (1) Just read what it gave you, (2) then write your own take on it

completely agree except a crucial step is missing here:

(1.5) validate the accuracy/truth/relevance of it

your own sincere and human take on rubbish will still be rubbish. validating is indeed the more uncomfortable/demanding task here but if you omit it you become just a "human ai beautifier", and this will actually undermine the trust in you as a human. if you are going to omit validation just paste away, be honest and let it be obvious, you can then blame the ai.

I enjoy, when arguing with friends, dumping an AI wall of text supporting my position and immediately following up with "What, no response? Argument over, I win."

I have been using the term "meat proxy" from Gruhn's blog [1] but was worried about sounding uncouth in an office setting. The "polite" version of this page solves that problem nicely. The "angry" version is funny, too.

[1]: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

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

Here's what Claude said:

There's a delicious irony in pasting dontpastetheai.com into an AI chat, and I choose to believe that's deliberate.

It's well written though. The parody answer in the middle is the sharpest part — "this mild Google search you could've done in 3 seconds" — because it nails the exact texture of unedited model output: the fake enthusiasm, the numbered scaffolding, the conclusion that concludes nothing. The tell isn't that AI was involved, it's that no human judgment was applied afterward. You can't fake the presence of taste.

The "guess who the AI will replace first" line is the real argument underneath the humor. If your contribution is indistinguishable from a prompt box, you've made the case for your own redundancy better than any automation study could. What survives is the part the page calls "the thing the model doesn't have" — your opinion, your context, your willingness to say "actually I disagree."

It's also a close cousin of something you've presumably thought about with Kindship: when agents message each other or humans, the same failure mode applies. An agent that just relays raw completions is exactly as useless as the coworker this page is roasting. The value is in the editorial layer — deciding what's true, what's relevant, what you're willing to stand behind. That's arguably what SOUL.md-style identity is for: giving an agent something to have an opinion from.

Were you filing this as cultural artifact, or is it aimed at someone specific in your orbit?

I agree with the general sentiment. However, there are a lot of people asking obvious questions where they are just abusing your time and offloading work onto you.

Pasting AI output verbatim is the modern day equivalent of “let me google that for you.”

If I spent an hour or two going back and forth with an LLM, I will write my understanding of the issue, and what I think it means for us. Then at the end I'll put "This is what [llm name] said:" and paste in the detailed ai summary at the end. I think that is the most honest, and effective way to do it.

Before an LLM, I would have worked for much longer, then written the same short description, but without the detailed summary at the end. The llm output is really just extra clarifying info I never would have bothered to do on my own. By clearly marking it, I give people the option to skip it and just trust me.

DontMakeWebsitesFullOfObviousAISlopThatComplainAboutUsingAITheIronyIsTooThickForMe.com

Well not sure if I agree fully. On one hand it does make a lot of sense to process and answer w/ your own words. But, sometimes if what the agent says make sense and you just want to handoff findings that is also fine - I legit don't feel the need to be super strict. In startup environment where people are more chill about this, this seems totally fine. It would be more frustrating in a corp/executive environment where thing have to get more structure before being communicated and passed around. Someone would probably be justifiably tagged as lazy.

But I think ideally agents should speak to agents when this kind of comm goes through. What a nice opportunity here ;)

The problem to me is, if people slowed down enough to carefully review and also rewrite model output in their own words (even if we're not counting code output), then what you have is a tool that probably makes you slower overall instead of much faster. I don't think that is a bad idea per se, but it is generally the opposite of how you're expected to perform with AI tools.

Luckily I don't have this problem since I am so full of shit that one of the things I still enjoy the most is answering people with my own crap.

Don't make the "Don't paste the AI website, please" site. You can rather use some kind of search tool to find one of the many that already exist. If it's not quite saying what you want, maybe just reach out to the author with an ask for them to update it. Then we get one place everybody knows about, rather than the many many sites (likely all AI generated anyway) that dilute the message.

I recently wrote an analysis for a proposal my company was working on.

I did not use any AI. I had a couple conversations with agents while mulling some approaches, but they never edited my work nor did I have any chat open while I wrote. Every word was my own.

I notified my other stakeholders - "here's my analysis, none of it was written with ai". It sounds silly to say, and I worried others could take it as an attack. But I needed to communicate "This is a long document but its actually worth reading".

I liked what I wrote. The final author of the proposal liked what I wrote. All of my ideas made it in to the proposal. We landed the contract. Its a nice chunk of $ for us.

Its still worth putting the hours in.

I read this somewhere: "send me instead the prompt you used to ask the AI to tell me something, so I know what it was that you wanted to say"

One trend that I've noticed recently is that I find myself discussing things with an LLM through a human proxy.

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

Dont be a meat proxy! simple

To "They asked you because they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement." actually I'd ask even for more than that:

For any given <subject> I'd want:

- Your context - your taste - your judgement - clarify what bet <subject> encourages to support - be ready to elaborate your thesis of that bet

With that we have the basic complete building block that used one after another can model a basic lifecycle of a dialogue that can make progress towards something (a goal, a mission, something useful)

Similar in spirit to my site, https://stopcitingai.com

Fits the topic :) https://nader.io/posts/ai-dr/

Actually tbh AI outputs can be pretty good and I have been surprised to see a lack of copy / pastes of them in the format of:

Unique human prompt + AI output which is useful and does a good job expanding on the prompt topic and which when pasted saves people the time of having to go prompt AI on the same topic (fully reviewed by a person before sharing it, to ensure the content has relevance)

just me or does this entire site/text read as 100% LLM generated? extremely ironic if so, they just pasted the AI.

Here for once is something HR can actually do to be useful, make an internal campaign around do’s and don’ts of AI in the workplace. They can add how clients don’t pay us to type things in a box for them either.

This is a sidenote, but I really like the design of the website. It’s very tasteful.

While I agree with the sentiment it seems unnecessary for things like this to have their own domain name. Surely a blog post would cover this?

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

Strictly speaking, not true. I have Gemini Pro; my friend doesn’t.

> It's a great drafting partner

This I have been doing a bit. I strictly asks it to never give me suggestions but raise questions, concerns, tell me if it feels if something can be better, style-wise or otherwise without giving me those options.

And a bit of other overall feedback requests.

And if the model adheres to this and doesn't jump the gun, it indeed works quite nice. But it often jumps the gun, forgets, doesn't give a f- about my instructions, or whatever. Maybe more robust local models will better.

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.

https://noaislop.net/

@dang this is both an obviously AI-generated post and also versions of it have been posted ad nauseam over the past few weeks/months. why no flag?

Does anyone else think the angry version reads like AI? “Here’s what you just did”

Verbatim AI responses to my PR review comments drive me up a wall

Had an offshore dev respond to me with copy pasted Claude response for the first time the other day.

My reaction was of immediate visceral disgust.

I can say in no uncertain terms that I do not care if your English is completely broken. I prefer that over AI slop. You will not improve your writing and language proficiency if you do not practice them! If you do not care about your language proficiency then you have zero business doing offshored work.

The answer was also wrong. I pointed Claude to the micro service repo in question and asked it myself. Got a different but correct answer, after verifying it myself.

Their code is so trash I wonder if we’re even using the same models. Every PR I need to go over it myself and have Claude refactor and restructure everything. Claude generates decent code that can be made great with just a few iterations. I don’t even think these guys are running the code to test it, let alone read it. Just slop and ship.

Can’t rely on them to understand the code or even answer simple questions about it.

What is even the point of all this?! AI has made me personally more productive but overall it’s still a net negative because when you’re a “-x dev” the force multiplier from AI is overwhelming and soul crushing to everyone around you.

The point is valid but I'm 90% sure the delivery was ironically AI generated.

I find it shocking this needs to be said.

Of all you’re doing is copying and pasting anyone else’s stuff, then you’re adding little/no value. You should be paid nothing.

Related:

Don't Be a Meat Proxy: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

No Meat Proxy: https://nomeatproxy.com/

How to Passive-Aggressively Shame People Who Use LLMs Selfishly: https://joshmoody.org/blog/selfish-ai/

AI;DR: https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/aidr-ai-didnt-read

The article says they could have asked an AI themselves, but that is missing that I may have an agentic context with exactly the right information to answer the question well, which they do not have. For example because I worked on something closely related. Such an agent output is very useful, and taking the time to rewrite that to a short personal answer is not always worth it.

Pasting AI slop is a strong signal. It tells the world "I add no value. I am a proxy for ideas generated by others". It's sad to see people I otherwise respected debase themselves.

I'll say this clearly. Using AI for writing is bad. Don't do it. Ever. If you can't formulate a coherent thought yourself, just don't. I don't want to hear what the LLM said. I want to hear what you said. Loudly proclaiming you have nothing to add is a strange flex. Just stay quiet.

This is like an earlier internet era when it was common for people to just copy-paste directly from other websites into a forum response.

I want to mindlessly copy-paste this link to so many people rather than think for myself on how to respond to them.

We need a dontpastethedontpastetheai.com to get ahead of this.

I wish the author lived by the same principle, seeing how the text on the webpage is pretty evidently AI-generated.

The funny thing is: this website reads like AI.

The premise of the article is that everyone has access to the “same tools” but that’s glossing over the specialization inherent in a specific expert’s harness config (memories, skills, rules, repos, etc) that produce actually helpful responses (eg engineer’s view vs product manager’s view).

Very ironic this page is full of AI text

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

Unless I'm your research assistant, why would I be asking AI questions for you when you could do it yourself? If you need an answer I already have I will gladly share it with you. If you need my help to find an answer, then tell me that and I gladly will help.

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

I wanted to suggest just not talking to people who do this, but apparently you get paid to talk to them.

> Don't Paste the AI, please

You're gonna need a stronger language. Why do you think people love AI? If I have to think and god forbid read the response I might as well live in the woods or something

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.

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 checked 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..

[edit] to extend the connections The charm of a messaging board like this is bringing "join attention" to a topic, not just sharing separate monologs.

And also, always wondering if something was written by a human or statistically generated could be seen as Epistemic Hypervigilance, leading to stress, and loss of epistemic trust. This could reduces opportunities for taking on new information of feedback, and cause rigidity and isolation.

i recently created https://needsmoresalt.org/ with a similar intent

figuring out the most useful epistemic and conversational norms around AI in work communication is still a work-in-progress.

there's times when "go talk to claude a bit and then get back to me with a more precise question" is reasonable, and other times where it inhibits learning and culture.

similarly, there are many occasions where i don't mind quoted AI with a human precis.

the most objectionable behaviours are not that different from pre-ai ones.

don't copypasta stackoverflow code without understanding it. don't submit PRs you can't explain to a colleague. don't waste time asking people things you can easily figure out. don't send unreviewed work to people expecting them to figure it out. don't quote authorities you don't understand.

all the same stuff applies to AI, but AI seems to have expanded the scope and scale of the bad behaviours, making the need for better defences more pressing.

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.

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

this is equivalent to nohello.net/en/ club, deserves to be in pinned in every messaging app

Feels like a lost cause. You can’t just push a highly addictive slop machine in front of users and then blame them for using it.

I don’t think it’s that Sol loves to cheat; rather, every GPT model since 5.4 seems to have had that tendency.

I don't really seem to be sent very much unfiltered AI output - do other people? I'd love to hear horror stories.

my favorite tell is when a pasted answer opens with 'Great question!' — you can hear the model clearing its throat before the human even types.

“Paste this AI generated text to your coworkers telling them not to paste AI generated text to you.”

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

There's a very deep irony in this page being a bunch of pasted LLM output.

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

Sorry this website is too polite.

DO NOT FUCKING PASTE AI RESPONSES TO ME, EVER, PERIOD.

When someone tells me they "talked to Claude" they sound retarded. Just tell me you looked into it, and I fucking swear to god if you just took what Claude said verbatim and do not understand the problem then you are a cunt and I will stop working with you.

When someone pastes LLM output in chat I completely ignore it. I will just continue the conversation as if they said nothing and silently mark them as cretinous in my mind.

This is not up for debate, you will talk to me in short well formed sentences and get to the fucking point or you will fuck off

Just sent this to my CEO - thanks!

"written by a human, on purpose."

idk about that

Thanks for sharing my little rant again <3 we are looking for translations too!

What if i have used the AI, it answered, but I don't understand the answer?

Worst case you just ignore it. Best case there is something useful in it. Shrug.

This site feels like AI slop, and it’s also not something I’d be able to send without feeling like asshole.

I found this blog post to be much better at getting the point across: https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/

> The world is filled with people that don't want to read or think about things

Ignore them and move on with your life.

You see a lot of his on reddit and i resort to just scan it like a trash

https://dontpastetheai.com/angry/

Almost certainly written by AI

pencil pushers gonna pencil push

Yes - lazy AI answers from generic AI are lazy. Don’t do that please.

But this leading statement is not necessarily true:

“The person on the other side has the same tools you do”

Aren’t we all imbuing our AI with our own thought patterns? Folks I speak to spent a tremendous amount of time building tooling and (hierarchical) context around LLMs such that the output it produces is definitely not the same as what the stock model produces.

I don't see why I should have to "uglify" or compress needlessly the perfectly distilled analysis, just because people associate perfect formatting and details with AI slop.

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.

sometimes I get asked stupid shit they can figure themself really so in quotes I do like "This is what gpt-6 luna gave me:" [quote]then in quote the almost full AI answer.[quote end]

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

Nah.. people will start to check for 'watermarks' first...

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

No, they don't. I have access to heaps of raw information about customers and their systems that I can easily provide to my AI. That AI can also dig through all the communications we've had with other customers who have asked us similar questions, and draft a coherent on-brand response.

I often paste AI-generated responses with significant success, and all I have to do is make sure the answer isn't wrong and doesn't include sensitive info, and to remove a few extra adjectives and em-dashes that I don't want.

If the customer has access to my tools, that's a critical security incident. They contact me because I have access to info they don't, and unlike and AI, I can guarantee my response is valid.

As for people who copy/paste AI generated text blindly: That's firable in my books.

Awww... Soz. Is that not so good for your model training!

My response when someone is pasting AI is “Thank you for the tokens”.passive aggressive - effective. Feel free to use it

Ironic for this to be full AI Slop.

the angry version is... not very angry.

Don't be a MEAT PROXY

It's the modern era lmgtfy

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

what a complete waste of time

> Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't.

This is just demonstrably false. It often IS very helpful. It's annoying that people continue to ask basic factual questions without taking easy steps to solve the problem themselves. I can't remember the last time I "asked someone a question" that it was possible to figure out for myself.

It's the people who keep asking basic, easily researched questions and then wait for you to explain it to them, without first trying to resolve it on their own, that are being anti social, not the people trying to help them.

This is much the same as when Google was relatively new, and people hadn't adapted to it yet. I would get asked questions constantly like "what is the name of the class that does X" and since I usually try not to be too much of a jerk, I would often stop and go open a source file or look in the docs for the person. I know there is a class, and I think I remember what it's called, but I need to go double check it. That usually meant googling for the docs, clicking the first result, and sending them that link along with the specific answer. Sometimes when they asked me I was frustrated about something else or just in a bad mood, and I would tell them to f**g google it, I am not their research assistant.

Ignoring AI is the same scenario as ignoring Google but worse. I am not your research assistant, and worse, there is an artificial research assistant standing by 24/7. If I have to paste something in AI and paste the result back to you I am not the asshole in this situation. If you go do the work to check yourself and it's not something you can just verify conclusively and you need to be sure it's not the AI fooling you, then I am more than happy to look at what you have and lend any expertise I can add to the situation.

And in general do not use its words as your own. Its words are its, not yours.

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

"Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't."

Excellent advice, with one very large exception based upon human foibles.

Occasionally there are people who do not ask things in good faith. They ask you a question not because "they wanted your take on it... Your context, your taste, your judgement". Instead they ask the question because they're then going to go to extensive lengths to find every possible counterpoint or opposition to whatever answer you give. In 2026 those sorts of people who will ask and then revert 30 minutes later, after you've carefully detailed a well thought out answer, that "ChatGPT says..." Add that for time eternal they will hold the fact that you answered something for them as a liability that you must atone for, and for which you are responsible for every ramification of their interpretation of your answer[1].

If you ask someone something and they just copy an AI answer, it's such a cop out that I imagine there are many cases where the person knows they're dealing with someone who "asks questions" like this. I have people who I give thoughtful, considered answers to, but then I also have people that I basically say "I don't know...Google it", because giving an iota of an answer always turns out to become something I regret.

[1] - This is not unlike helping someone with their computer. There are people who we love to help, but then there are people that will then ascribe everything that ever goes wrong with their computer for time eternal to that time you showed them a shortcut in Excel. CPU died six years later? Probably because of that shortcut.

Don't be a meat proxy.

The inverse of this is. Don't ask me a question a 9b llm could have answered.

If you are getting blocks of llm text perhaps it's because you don't deserve their input and could have satisfied your query by not making it someone else's problem.

A much better and straight to the point example is https://noslopgrenade.com

Similar in spirit: https://stopsloppypasta.ai/en/, discussed a few months ago [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389570

Wish there was another version more "angry" than the angry version

> If you don't have anything to add, it's okay to say so. "No strong opinion here" is a real, helpful reply.

This is really useful, I wish more people would understand this: you don't have to have an opinion on everything. In fact, you probably shouldn't have an opinion on most things.

My own take on the AI issue: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/

This resonates. Had this in the start of the year with clients sending me their “research”, which, of course, was just a Deep Research result. Lead me to send this article when I work with folks: https://www.marcia.no/words/etiquette

I like to think it helped, but likely what helped was that nobody seems to use Deep Research anymore, haha.

Don’t link the AI slop, please

I can really only imagine the social context you would want to use this response in would be inappropriate / anti-social. If you had a well-meaning work colleague send you something AI, sending this back is kind of not a good look. If it's meant to be an education piece we got the memo...

Weirdly, this post speaks for everyone.

Beautiful theme. Author has style.

This site is AI slop.

personally i like editing much more than writing (the scare of the white page or how it was called…)

and i detest ai slop

so my solution is to speak combined with an ai cleanup like macwhisper or wispr flow of all the uhs and ahs and repetitions or rephrasings etc

you can even use ai to pretend a conversation or interview style

then i have stuff to edit

boom

uff.. HN is degrading rapidly. (Yes, also all your comments about "AI SLOP SPOTTED, AI;DR". Regurgitating the same crap over and over again.... pff...)

Meh. Ask the agent to be succinct.

Make it a standing rule.

"written by a human, on purpose."

The site owner me doesn't work with incessantly helpless people. Good for them.

I do. "They all have the same tools as I do" is exactly what's infuriating. They either blatantly don't use them, or are too incompetent to do so effectively, which would track.

I have been making an effort to provide an "AI;DR" section as well, even before the term existed, because of brevity. But sending along the full(er) text as reference I think is perfectly fine in such cases.

lmao love it. Although I'm guilty too though

> A short reply from you beats a long one from a model, every time.

Disagreed. Bad writing from a chatbot beats worse writing from its user every time - regardless of length.

One reason we have so much bot slop is the attractiveness of bad-writing bots to the many people whose writing is even worse.

>Someone asked you a real question. You popped it into a chatbot, copied the answer, and sent it back. It felt fast. It felt helpful. And it usually isn't.

OMFG! Even the "don't send AI answers" page text is fucking AI slop.

Can't they be bothered to write 200 words of their own?

coming from a site pasted with ai :)

I disagree strongly. Nearly every time this comes up it seems people are not doing a good job giving their AI context. My AI environment is REALLY context aware based on a whole bunch of things I have access to that others don't. When my AI respond to a question it is full of information the person asking the question just didn't have access to. You can also train your AI not to give a wall of text but to give very concise answers. This whole web page stinks of being a total skill issue with using AI. I much prefer AI answers to my questions ( most of the time the answer is going straight into my AI, so I don't really care if an AI generated the response, I'd probably trust it more.). This is all about you build your projects, the documentation you build, how that is shared, it means many questions don't need to be asked because everyone has access to good context whether its built things, things coming up, ideation, market research, product research, or whatever stage you are at. Build pathways for context to move around and go through stages. Not only that, my guess is everyone is mostly reading AI responses to things ALL the time anyways, what difference does it make if you get to ask a question and get a response from another AI with a different context? None. Avoid these kinds of sites as they lead people astray. Much like the advice "Share the prompt, not the response" ... absolutely ridiculous, different context means you get different responses with the same prompt. If you want to pursue something that's actually useful, think about context engineering such that questions largely don't need to be asked.