Often I am 80% confident that something is wrong, to me the appeal of Claude is that I can quickly check, and be certain that it is wrong and how it is wrong.
I tend to agree that it is annoying if people state “Claude says…”, however I am not sure what a good alternative is:
Ask the LLM but don’t disclose the fact.
Don’t ask an LLM, just ask the other person: “I believe that is wrong, can you please double-check?”
Spend an hour searching and integrating information from different sources, to finally say “this is wrong and I can prove it”.
Used to be you could say : “I searched and found this : [link]”
This was sort of helpful, because searching took at least a little effort, established some sort of common baseline as articles or stackoverflow responses normally establish question context, as well as not implying that the responder really knows what they’re talking about. Still, it was not entirely polite, as your interlocutor could have, and probably had, searched themselves.
“Claude says” seems strictly worse, but I can’t express why very well in communicable terms. I would rather people simply didn’t, and just said “I don’t know, ask claude”, rather than proxying it for me.
The real issue with both cases is: it takes knowledge to vet an explanation, be it linked or generated. «I found this and it explains in a way I endorse with more detail and polish than I care to write myself» is a pretty big value add on top of searching — or on top of prompting (but for people who read faster than type, this is cheaper than to provide an explanation personally). However, one cannot reliably signal how attentively one reviewed a text. So the often most efficient use of expertise, looking at a few available explanations and picking the one that actually makes sense, becomes impossible to use properly.
Often I am 80% confident that something is wrong, to me the appeal of Claude is that I can quickly check, and be certain that it is wrong and how it is wrong.
I find that this is most appealing when it’s my own idea that might be wrong. My local LLM is a surprisingly capable critic of my ideas. And it is very good at finding the one nasty corner case that will send my entire design back the drawing board. Of course, I’d find that corner case eventually, but it might be 12 hours of work later, or perhaps when I’m working on version 2 and I find out I committed to a bad API. Like any outside technical criticism, I’ll decide that half of it is probably wrong, and filter the other half through my own knowledge.
But none of this excuses either outsourcing my own thinking, or just parroting Claude at my coworkers.
Often I am 80% confident that something is wrong, to me the appeal of Claude is that I can quickly check, and be certain that it is wrong and how it is wrong.
I tend to agree that it is annoying if people state “Claude says…”, however I am not sure what a good alternative is:
score 1 · canonical
Used to be you could say : “I searched and found this : [link]”
This was sort of helpful, because searching took at least a little effort, established some sort of common baseline as articles or stackoverflow responses normally establish question context, as well as not implying that the responder really knows what they’re talking about. Still, it was not entirely polite, as your interlocutor could have, and probably had, searched themselves.
“Claude says” seems strictly worse, but I can’t express why very well in communicable terms. I would rather people simply didn’t, and just said “I don’t know, ask claude”, rather than proxying it for me.
score 1 · canonical
The real issue with both cases is: it takes knowledge to vet an explanation, be it linked or generated. «I found this and it explains in a way I endorse with more detail and polish than I care to write myself» is a pretty big value add on top of searching — or on top of prompting (but for people who read faster than type, this is cheaper than to provide an explanation personally). However, one cannot reliably signal how attentively one reviewed a text. So the often most efficient use of expertise, looking at a few available explanations and picking the one that actually makes sense, becomes impossible to use properly.
score 1 · canonical
I find that this is most appealing when it’s my own idea that might be wrong. My local LLM is a surprisingly capable critic of my ideas. And it is very good at finding the one nasty corner case that will send my entire design back the drawing board. Of course, I’d find that corner case eventually, but it might be 12 hours of work later, or perhaps when I’m working on version 2 and I find out I committed to a bad API. Like any outside technical criticism, I’ll decide that half of it is probably wrong, and filter the other half through my own knowledge.
But none of this excuses either outsourcing my own thinking, or just parroting Claude at my coworkers.
score 1 · canonical