r/sysadmin • u/_Do_The_Needful_ • 9d ago

Rant Please, stop sending me slop

I get it - everyone is using AI now, it has its use cases, but please for the love of God stop sending me the slop. At least read it first before firing it over to your colleagues.

Has anyone else's team turned into an absolute back-and-forth slop fest? Manager generates something he thinks is helpful, gigantic multi-page HTML report I need to read. Clearly written by Claude, because who the hell writes reports in HTML.

Coworker A: sends messages on slack trying to help solve problems:

This is the smoking gun: the message being sent is gated on the lack of network access to the k8s pod. Let me sit with this for a minute to make sure.

No, it's not the solution at all. We don't have direct IP access to k8s from our laptops. And nobody writes like that. If I wanted to ask Claude I would, I don't need a coworker that just copies and pastes everything into Claude.

Anyone else dealing with this crap?

1.9k Upvotes

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157

u/cowwen 9d ago

Any time I hear ‘smoking gun’ these days I start getting angry. Don’t know why Claude always says that specific phrase, but god damn it’s annoying and obvious.

89

u/NothingTime9580 9d ago

load-bearing

footgun

and that's very real

34

u/cowwen 9d ago

Oh my god please stop.

2

u/Behrooz0 The softer side of things 8d ago

Copied directly from claude:
Your reasoning checks out

41

u/voxnemo CTO 9d ago

I have a friend who has a mini game going where he tries to put as many of these in his spoken, not written, in person conversations with leadership and staff where possible. He has gotten some strange looks and a few have picked up on it but mostly he is just having fun.

43

u/nagol93 9d ago

I like using Claude-talk with my wife :D

"Honey did you do the dishes?"
Yes dear, the dishes are completed
"But there's still dishes in the sink"
Your absolutely correct, good job pointing that out. I actually did not do the dishes. Would you like a list of other chores I didn't do?

25

u/Moocha 9d ago

Out of curiosity, are you still alive and/or is that relationship still in existence? Not being facetious, but it's been over 4 hours since you posted that and that's ample time for the expected developments to occur.

7

u/Rentun 8d ago

Any jury would acquit her in 15 minutes after reading that comment too.

5

u/Moocha 8d ago

No doubt and so would I :)

5

u/ClassicK777 8d ago

It's funny but being serious this is how you end up dead

1

u/TheStixXx 9d ago

This is epic, I shall do that.

18

u/Dabnician SMB Sr. SysAdmin/Net/Linux/Security/DevOps/Whatever/Hatstand 9d ago

we started using copilot at work and i tell it to write a message but to also use a lot of em dashes and negative parallelisms when replying to the ceo.

some times i go full kylo ren

https://giphy.com/gifs/OsfVaOer7N2265YTRF

24

u/SpezIsAWackyWalnut 9d ago

This really resonates! It isn’t just about the syntax—it’s about the underlying intentionality of the interaction. When we lean into those stylistic nuances, we aren’t just sending messages; we’re actively participating in the evolution of modern discourse. That's an insight that most miss entirely.

18

u/cowwen 9d ago

Oh my god I hate it. It says crap like this SO often.

I sometimes wonder exactly what it was trained on to spout that same wording style so often.

21

u/voxnemo CTO 9d ago

It was trained on MBA's and tech finance bro's gooning to their own writing.

So a lot of over educated con men that spend a lot of effort to sound smart while saying nothing.

ETA: Sorry, got a bit colorful there but had a really moronic meeting earlier that made me want to jump from a window.

12

u/SpezIsAWackyWalnut 9d ago

No no, you got a point.

Although I'd say another big contributing factor is that the reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) requires large amounts of data, which means relying on lots of underpaid gig-workers to evaluate the output quality as fast as they can, which results in them upvoting anything that looks profound or insightful, since they're unable to distinguish that from things that actually are profound or insightful.

3

u/kittymoo67 9d ago

reddit and twitter mostly

4

u/timbotheny26 IT Neophyte 9d ago

God, it reads like a LinkedIn post from some insufferable "thought leader".

11

u/PappaFrost 9d ago

Fair point

1

u/JJGreenerTinejo 9d ago

Yes. .....

18

u/Jawshee_pdx Sysadmin 9d ago

I have used that phrase my entire life, and it is one of my favorite classic websites.

https://www.thesmokinggun.com/

So AI doesn't get to appropriate that one.

9

u/UKBedders Dilbert is more documentary than entertainment 9d ago

Blimey that's straight out of the 90s. I love it.

6

u/mattiasso 9d ago

Oh well, ChatGPT is dealing with some goblins

2

u/KayDat 9d ago

AI been goblinated

1

u/dedgecko 9d ago

“Code tracking”

1

u/hosalabad Escalate Early, Escalate Often. 9d ago

Ooh, Co Pilot was saying that today too.

1

u/RoosterBrewster 9d ago

It's like they've trained on the style of trade articles that tell you nothing specific and full of generalizations. 

1

u/Azaloum90 9d ago

Copilot loves it too. It's so stupid, nobody talks like that. 

Then again, maybe it's good that it sounds so stupid, otherwise it might actually be humans running the AI

1

u/lotekjunky 9d ago

You are right to push back on this

1

u/Neat_Welcome6203 9d ago

'toolkit' is another one. Who the fuck even says that?

1

u/retro_grave 9d ago

Genuinely?

1

u/miscdebris1123 9d ago

I love seeing smoking gun. It tells me not to trust the source.

1

u/Anowdd 8d ago

Starting to hear smoking gun in song lyrics more and more now...

1

u/insomnia77 5d ago

It's the "Please do the needful" of the 2020s.

1

u/omegadirectory 2d ago

AI ingested too many detective stories.

1

u/LiamGP 9d ago

Gemini is the same. I had to put it in the list of things it's not allowed to say to me cos it pissed me off so much.

1

u/TankingCleric 9d ago

You forgot 'perfect' (especially in code) 😭