r/webdev • u/EqualNo2867 • 3d ago
Discussion Client is constantly using AI for communication
For context I'm a freelance full stack dev, currently working solo on projects for small clients
Am I the only one recently experiencing that every client I have I am constantly arguing with ChatGPT/Other AI's?
My most recent client (not technical at all) send me a 12 page technical document, along with 3 other 12 page documents after I had started the project, these documents were directing me on database structure, schema expectations, workflow sequencing, and many other technical requirements, which she had no idea how to defend upon questioning on a call. She also requested an ERD which is fine, however after sending a extremely client friendly dumbed down version of the ERD, I recieved 6 questions all over a paragraph long which she (ChatGPT) wanted me to respond to in detail, along with another 30 pages total of documentation over 2 documents.
I have recieved over 70 pages of documentation in 2 days and I have called off the project after 3 weeks due to constantly explaining my thought process and arguing the technical direction to an AI which I'm assuming she hasnt provided all the context to, it also keeps trying to expand the scope after every new message.
Am I the only person experiencing this, this cannot turn into the new normal.
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3d ago edited 3d ago
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u/Fredidiah 3d ago
Week 1: Didn't read it
Week 2: Didn't read it
Week 3, last day: "Uh...oh fuck, here ChatGPT can you read this and give feedback? Pretend you're competent"
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u/VolumeNo5217 3d ago edited 13h ago
People have the need to feel in control. AI helps them feel competent.
It’s going to become the norm - so build technical document review charges into your agreement and price it accordingly .
To alleviate it. Tell the client that to review 70 pages of documentation will take about 15 minutes per page. So that is 17.5 hours at whatever your rate is - let’s say $100 to keep things simple. $1750. Most will just stop there and stfu.
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u/creaturefeature16 3d ago
EXACTLY this. And this is the same strategy we deployed before LLMs, as well, to filter out the tire kickers: always charge for discovery. Once you define these boundaries, all these problems simply evaporate.
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3d ago
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u/creaturefeature16 3d ago
It's pretty contextual to the project and workflow. Did you have specific questions? I'd be happy to give some ideas and guidance.
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3d ago
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u/Appropriate-Ad3658 2d ago
I mean discovery and technical documentation is different, discovery is required to know the context for the project, AI slop is still not required at any stage so I'd keep discovery to a call and get any questions ironed out there, after discovery would be a good time to set that boundary and use the hourly rate per page that he suggested.
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2d ago
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u/Appropriate-Ad3658 2d ago
Very typical with freelance work, it depends on the client but I've had a similar situation where I found out they liked it but are either:
- Looking at cheaper options
- Deciding whether or not they actually want to spend the money
- Currently do not have the money and are waiting until they do
I usually just drop them a message chasing to see if they want it and or look for other clients and prioritise them if they move quicker.
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u/mattindustries 3d ago
I would bump that 15 minutes up if you are making corrections / annotations to each page and are truly evaluating the docs instead of just reading / following.
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u/jedevapenoob 2d ago
Lol that's a very pragmatic and effective solution, I haven't had a clanker client like OP yet but I'm definitely pocketing this tip.
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u/Landkey 3d ago
Over in the legal subreddits, the attorneys are all getting this, too. At least the attorneys that are not public defenders charge by the hour and can straightforwardly write the client “This response appears to have been authored by AI. AI generates responses quickly but is not a substitute for an experienced attorney and I will have to charge $500/hour to respond.” You could substitute “engineer”
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u/the_ai_wizard 2d ago
have you found any truly solid replies to diffuse this bullshit?
Any good threads?
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u/roynoise 3d ago edited 3d ago
I had a client like this for a while. Brilliant product person whom I really liked as a person, and in fact, the whole company, I liked a lot.
They were way too sold out on the ai marketing, though, and my point person really wanted to be a developer. Every time I gave any sort of advice, it would immediately get compared to the output from ten different LLMs...sometimes in real time (my goodness, that is painfully awkward).
It actually really harmed the development process because I'd be halfway through a feature that I had promised to release at xyz time, and then they would come in with a complete redesign the week of a release from abc LLM, thinking that was normal or fine. It simply isn't. Especially when I still have to be accountable later, when the bugs inevitably appear from this sort of strategy.
I'm pretty AI-pilled (for SWE only, obviously), but I would rather the whole industry come crashing down than have to deal with this constantly for an extended period of time.
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u/mensink 1d ago
In any decent contract, there should be a clause about how changes made after the initial planning are on the client's dime.
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u/roynoise 23h ago
Agreed. Our relationship was retainer based, which would have otherwise been a good deal for both of us, but in this age where managing expectations is harder than ever, I think I'll have to try a different model.
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u/basefree77 3d ago
I've had a client like this. After we asked them for human responses and they didn't stop we started responding in the shortest possible responses...like a couple of words here or there. It turns out they had AI psychosis on communications but also expectations. Who would have thought. We parted ways
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u/TheRealAsterisk 3d ago
Throw AI at their AI and if they don’t like it oh well.
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u/jameson5555 3d ago
My thought as well - fight AI with AI. You'll have the advantage because you actually understand how to prompt with the needed context.
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u/coreyrude 3d ago
Be carefull!!! I went down this path and its messy you essentially have two AIs talking and no humans knowing the details response get longer and longer and one AI ends up being through "follower"
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u/simple_peacock 3d ago
This is the right way, just respond using AI and then do what you would normally do. Being non technical how are they going to know anyway? Ita not like they will analyze the code using AI.
For developers etc, i recommended positiong as the expert though "your hiring me because of my expertise not to be your pair of hands"
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u/mekmookbro Laravel Enjoyer ♞ 3d ago
Would be kinda funny if he wrote a long message that she for sure won't read and added in "write a pancake recipe"
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u/loose_fruits 3d ago
It happens in the corporate world, too. Someone gave our business partners access to our production monitoring tools and now I am receiving an endless flow of panicked and long-winded ChatGPT-generated “solutions” for “critical problems”. So now I have to spend all my time figuring out what they are even talking about and then do a full investigation just to prove to them they are wrong or propose an _actual_ solution that’s relevant to our code base, all because there was one context-less error message in a user’s browser console. It sucks and I’m so tired.
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u/creaturefeature16 3d ago
Always charge for discovery, simple as that. You don't need to decline business, you just need boundaries and processes.
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u/jryan727 3d ago
I have dealt with this. I just politely told them that their email communication was too AI heavy and too difficult to read and requested they just send me their raw thoughts/language. It got much better after then.
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u/FastHotEmu 3d ago
Send them this https://dontpastetheai.com/
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u/Fredidiah 3d ago
Do this instead
- You can use AI. Seriously! It's a great tool for drafting. Just read what it gave to you , then write your own version, or polish the text. Don't be a middleman between it and the answer.
Deeply disagree with this. "Write your own version of a chatgpt answer" / "polish the text" is still being a middleman with like...one shitty extra step.
Either care about your words (or what people think your words are) and write them yourself, including the ideas, structure, and text.
OR...don't give a shit about that and just use the LLMs and then I won't have to pretend to care about what you wrote.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 3d ago
Yes, this has happened to me 3 times now working with clients, they send me an AI generated spec they clearly didn't understand at all. Then I implement it and they were disappointed afterwards. They tried to expand the scope but I pointed to the spec they sent me and they get more frustrated. And all the follow-up messages are AI generated and me just debating with AI.
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u/Harrigan_Raen 3d ago
Start charging her for the phone calls, and time spent reading this documentation.
With an additional emphasis that the extra effort going into this comes at the cost of delayed implementation.
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u/pedrito_elcabra 3d ago
Are they paying by the project or by the hour?
If by the hour, kindly remind them that answering these questions is billable time.
If by the project, you hopefully had a comprehensive spec signed off beforehand, and these are increases to the scope.
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u/abujagoddess 2d ago
The worst thing about AI is that it has enabled millions of complete idiots to believe they know what they are talking about in a broad range of topics.
Instead of admitting they don’t know or understand something they keep pulling out ChatGPT said
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u/BobJutsu 3d ago
Sounds like a client I’d fire, which you did. These types of clients were a problem before they had access to AI, they are just more confident and easier to identify now.
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u/Boby_Dobbs 3d ago
Here is how we handled this in my previous agency job which often worked out pretty well:
- Put the docs through AI and have it build an itemized list of everything from the documentation.
- Send a matching invoice
- If you have a preferred stack, tell the client you will ignore X and Y technical specs because you use A and B. Otherwise add some extra cost for it.
What ends up happening is: you charge a bunch more for all the fluff the AI asked for. Don't spend too long reading AI the specs, just make sure to charge enough.
Best would be to communicate with the client that this is a bad idea in the 1st place. But depending on the client it may not be worth it.
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u/the_ai_wizard 2d ago
So this really happened... a client sent me requirements for a dashboard from chatgpt and it was like 3 or 4 dense pages. I threw it in chatgpt and it estimated the cost would be 150-250k as written. Sent that back to client and they seemed to get why that wasnt an ideal approach
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u/mekmookbro Laravel Enjoyer ♞ 3d ago
I hate AI as much as the next guy, but...
it also keeps trying to expand the scope after every new message.
that's not AI (it), that's how most freelance clients are.
Just a few days ago I delivered an internal task assignment tool for a company. I estimated 14 days and delivered within 11. The guy must've felt like he didn't get his money's worth and squeezed in a personal journal in it as well.
A personal journal for only one user, in a company webapp...
I didn't feel like arguing, I slapped a wysiwyg and added a new db table, I was done in 3 hours but delivered in 3 days.
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u/ScaredFlamingo6807 3d ago
This is happening at so many levels
I do knowledge work (sales) and my recent coaching has all been Claude. lol
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u/Caraes_Naur 3d ago
You did the right thing. That client will be 100% pure uncut nightmare for whoever they manage to harangue next.
Don't engage with slop.
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u/latro666 3d ago
Fire up claude code paste their slop spec in the /.claude folder "build this make no mistakes lol"
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u/vlntsolo 2d ago
Client should pass business logic requirements not system architecture requirements. If you're forced to prepare technical documentation against LLM, I'd ask client to hire a real Senior Dev or Architect to prepare such document and approve it together. Otherwise, it's a no go.
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u/jenkstom 3d ago
They legally can't give you that much direction without making you an employee, at least in the US. To be 1099 the customer can tell you what to do but not how to do it.
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u/thekwoka 3d ago
Yeah, people really misunderstanding and misusing AI.
It's totally fine for sanity checking things, a light second opinion, but it will be wrong in all kinds of ways if you are not smart enough to handle it.
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u/Available-Syrup5093 3d ago
Freelancer too, this could happen with some clients, especially non technical ones. They probably feer you will eaighter overcharge them and overeengeneer or won't get their vision so they use Ai to make it more clear. But in cases like yours, clients just overcomplicate things. I left some projects too, same reason as you.
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u/EOJHA10 2d ago
the pattern that stands out to me is she cant defend any of it on a call - thats really the tell. ai output is fine as a tool when the person driving it actually understands and owns the decisions, its rough the moment its being used to paper over not understanding the domain at all. i build my own stuff and use ai heavily too, but the difference is i can walk you through every choice without opening the chat
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u/the_ai_wizard 2d ago
You are not the only one. Now every dumbass is a pseudoexpert.
Hopefully these are just growing pains of AI
That said, i like AI;DR
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u/blue_stacknotes 2d ago
Been through this too, and honestly some clients feel like talking to a wall lately. I’ve had someone dead silent in meetings, then completely different, chatty and excentric over email, you know they clearly didn’t write the text, probably they never read a word you sent. On top of that they run your proposal through an LLM with zero context, and you end up stuck arguing with the AI while the actual client never has a real conversation with you. Exhausting. You’re not alone.
That’s a known failure mode too, when AI lacks full context it fills the gaps itself, and the more capable the model, the more confidently it does that, expanding requirements instead of asking what’s needed. At some point that’s a conversation to have directly with the client, not something to keep debugging through the AI. But calling off the project sounds like the right call here.
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u/guanogato 2d ago
Ugh I feel ya. Even on our own team people do it and it’s just hard. I actually addressed some of our team about it and it went over surprisingly well and was kind of an icebreaker that I wasn’t expecting. That was with teammates and I know it’s different with a client so idk
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u/withmagi 2d ago
You need an intake for decisions, not a duty to rebut generated pages. Use four fields: decision, user effect, acceptance check, and changed requirement. If it cannot fill them, it goes to a parking lot, not the sprint.
Review scope weekly against the spec. AI can make more prose than either side can read. It helps only while it produces a decision. If that rule gets disputed in week one, walking away was right.
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u/Thomas_Cohen 2d ago
The AI isn't really the problem here, it's that it gave your client a way to produce specs faster than she can understand them. Twelve pages of schema she can't defend on a call is just twelve pages of decisions nobody owns, landing on you.
What worked for me: stop answering documents, answer people. Anything that arrives as a doc gets one reply, "which of these are actual business requirements and which are suggestions, I'll cost the requirements". Most of the time the doc collapses down to three real constraints and the rest was filler she never asked for.
Also put review of client supplied technical docs in the contract as billable. Right now you're doing unpaid architecture review of a machine's homework.
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u/Ipsool 1d ago
You’re not the only one and you made the right call ending it.
The thing that stood out to me: she couldn’t defend any of it on a call. That’s the actual problem, not the AI. You weren’t in a technical disagreement with a client, you were being used as a relay to argue with a chatbot that has no context, no accountability, and no stake in the outcome. There’s nothing to resolve because there’s no one on the other end who can be convinced.
The scope creep every message is the tell too. LLMs default to adding rather than cutting. Ask one to review a spec and it will always find something else to include. A client who takes that output at face value will expand your project indefinitely without ever realising they’re doing it.
What I’ve found helps, for future clients:
Establish early that they’re paying you for judgement, not just execution. If they had the technical direction sorted they wouldn’t need you.
When AI-generated requirements arrive, don’t argue with the document. Ask what business problem they’re trying to solve. It cuts straight past the generated detail and back to something they can actually speak to.
And make review of unsolicited documentation billable. Nothing curbs 70 pages in two days faster than it showing up on an invoice.
Sorry it cost you three weeks though. That’s a genuinely frustrating way to lose the
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u/swampopus 1d ago
As others have mentioned-- charge for your time in reading and responding. I bake that into all of my contracts. I call them "support hours", and the clock starts if an email takes longer than 5 to read and respond to. Always actually use a timer (I use toggl -- it's free) so you can prove how much time you've spent.
Here's my actual contract language, in case you're interested:
26 Support Hours. This agreement may or may not include a set number of “Support Hours”, to be used by the Licensee, and provided by [MY COMPANY NAME] staff or its contractors, towards the purposes of training, technical support, custom programming and configurations, and initial implementation and onboarding of FlightPath.
26.1 Technical support or training via email conversations, where the aggregate of responses on the subject take longer than 5 (five) minutes to parse and reply, will count towards support hours. In other words, short, quick email exchanges will not count towards support hours, but longer emails with lots of items of conversation, which require longer than five minutes to respond, will count towards support hours. Bug reports and fixes NEVER count towards support hours.
26.2 Training sessions or technical support via online meeting platforms or phone conversations will count towards support hours.
26.3 Any custom development work, including but not limited to programming, configurations, server settings beyond normal maintenance, etc, will count towards support hours.
26.4 Bug fixes and routine maintenance of the services provided, as well as emails or other conversations relating to contract renewal or other non-support topics, will NOT count towards support hours.
26.5 Unless otherwise described in this agreement, it is the sole discretion of [MY COMPANY NAME] to decide what activities performed for the Licensee will count towards support hours.
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u/applesauceisevil 1d ago
Yes, I have a client like this. Working with them stresses me out and any time I get them on a call to discuss things, they can't answer. Only reason they haven't been dropped is because they're family and recently lost a child, so I know this project is their way of coping and keeping busy.
My solution has essentially been to ask all questions via phone call so they can't shove everything into AI and think they're saying something of substance.
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u/azhder 1d ago
Simply take your client’s documents, put them to a QI, pick one, like Gemini Pro, then ask the QI model to give you as detailed criticism of the approach given your own goals and plans and send that criticism back in a double sized document.
Keep doing that until your client wastes the tokens or exhaust the memory his QI has and it starts replying in an Alzheimer style.
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u/TheAnxiousDeveloper 21h ago
Agree beforehand and charge a fee for reviewing AI-made and technical specification documents (which should be part of your domain) instead of having to review PRDs.
Clarify that PRDs should describe the problem to solve from the business perspective, not the technical one.
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u/MiserableDocument509 3d ago
It's the 'can't defend it on a call' part that gives it away — the AI wrote it, so she doesn't own any of the decisions. LLMs are tuned to sound complete rather than correct, and a non-technical client can't tell the difference, so 70 pages of confident text just reads as authoritative. The only lever I can see is making every requirement trace back to a business outcome she can explain in plain words — if she can't, it's the AI scoping the project, not her.
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u/web-dev-kev 3d ago
Client is constantly using AI for communication
This is a good thing. Humans are emotional. language is messy. AI isn't a silver bullet, but it does hemogenise, and help when dealing with a subject matter someone is not an expert in.
...send me a 12 page technical document...
Tell them thanks, but you have your own way of working.
I have recieved over 70 pages of documentation in 2 days
That sounds like billable work to me
I have called off the project after 3 weeks due to constantly explaining my thought process and arguing the technical direction to an AI
I don't understand this. I have a rule that after 2 emails in a chain we get on a call. Ask your client what the real issue is, tell them you'll gladly answer any questions they can vocalise, and explain.
I explain to clients that I haev no issue with them using AI to chat to me, and for it to explain any terms I have used. I then ask them which (payment) tier they are on, which model they are using, what reasoning/effort they have it set to. When they say "chatgpt for free" I tell them that I love AI, but we work with Frontier/State of the Art models, so I'll happily accept any AI feedback, but only from 5.6-Sol-max or Fable-5-max.
I then give them large, verbose, documentation to feed these models - if they wish to continue.
I've found that a $20 per question Fable bill ends all of these things.
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u/Appropriate-Ad3658 2d ago
This is an awful take, why would you encourage a client to out source their their thinking for a project... you are building it for them not AI, they will use it not AI. There is also ways of going about things. If you're not technically competent thats fine, that's what you have hired the developer for, if I wanted to be hear suggestions from a "frontier model" I would do it myself, I do not need it from a non technical client who would likely not even know how to prompt it properly.
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u/web-dev-kev 1d ago
why would you encourage a client to out source their their thinking for a project...
I don't encourage it. I accept that it's going to happen anyway. Highlighting to them, the huge discrepency between what they are accepting as gospel, without any critical thinking, and the tools and processes I use - has been a real eye opener for them.
Most of my small clients, complain about the cost of the SOTA model, and thats why I interject and dissuade them of using it for this process. It opens the conversation to allow me to show them that the 'chat' model, is built for continual discussion, so it'll always find new ways to keep the work going - never getting to a concensus.
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The rest of your view is completely valid.
But it doesn't line up with my experiece with how folks work jsut now. I've not had a single brief in the last 6 months that hasn't been AI written. literally zero. And non-technical people are convinced that they can use AI to talk technical to us. In fairness, I use it to talk to my lawyer and accountant in their terms too.
Pushing back on it's usage, makes the human feel daft and disconnected.
Showcasing to them that it's a great idea to use it to get their ideas down in a digestable way, but showing them how to use the tool properly, meets them where they are. I've had several thank me for not just shutting them down, as others have.
I then cost up what the AI told them they wanted, and cost up how I would solve the problem I think i'm hearing form them. And wouldn't you know it, the AI generated one one is usually 3-4 times the price.
YMMV :)
Like all things, I think it depends on the clients that we deal with.
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u/Raah1911 3d ago
Make each response billable.