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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.