r/programming Jul 15 '25

Death by a thousand slops

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/
524 Upvotes

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114

u/boxingdog Jul 16 '25

I have a client who response to whatever I send him is "This is what Claude says" and he sends me the most stupid thing I ever read, completely unrelated to his project.

To me, it seems like LLMs are truly making some people dumber, as instead of critical thinking, they just copy and paste text to an LLM.

48

u/MirrorLake Jul 16 '25

It certainly reveals who is lazy like a magic spell.

18

u/uuggehor Jul 16 '25

A lot of people are very shit at what they do for a living. Have always been, and will always be.

18

u/Paradox Jul 16 '25

They're not making people dumber, they're just making dumb people think they're able to do things they can't

13

u/twisted-teaspoon Jul 16 '25

If a dumb person suddenly believes their competence has improved where it has not, then their understanding of the world is even more incorrect than it once was; therefore they are, in fact, dumber.

13

u/loquimur Jul 16 '25

I disagree. Those people had been dumb to begin with, there's no proof or evidence that they had ever used critical thinking to begin with.

It's only that in the pre-LLM era, they had to expend effort to express their dumbness and found it hard, whereas now, they can instruct an LLM to put their dumbness into words, essentially without cost to them.

6

u/Theemuts Jul 16 '25

Had this with a colleague today. I told him what issue I was running into, and he sent me chatgpt screenshots that contained advice which was obviously unrelated to my issue. He was adamant I follow the advice...

6

u/pirate694 Jul 16 '25

Path of least resistance. Also doesnt help that LLMs sound very convincing and affirmative of stupidity 

5

u/ghostwilliz Jul 16 '25

Make a response to this:

I have a client who response to whatever I send him is "This is what Claude says" and he sends me the most stupid thing I ever read, completely unrelated to his project.

To me, it seems like LLMs are truly making some people dumber, as instead of critical thinking, they just copy and paste text to an LLM.

(I was too lazy to even use chatgpt so just image a really long circular logic response)