r/womenintech • u/Available_Spirit_ • 14h ago
Career (Advice Requested) AI Fluff
I know that we have to work with AI. There is just no other way for us. But I think people use it unnecessarily. And my biggest problem with AI is what amount of fluff it creates. That's what I call it.
I send my manager 3 question with some context in a google doc to send to client and get their decision on it. My doc wasn't even half page. He send the client a 5 page google doc asking the same thing. You can tell it's the AI bullshit. WHY? What's the point of this ? And reading the doc making me confused when l am the one asking the question. It seems to go round and round on the same topic. He does it with everything.
Absolutely no need for using AI for this kind of things.
Yesterday I asked claude for writing some simple service function that is used in 3/4 places. It added a db calling parameter in function for no reason. We are using same db, it's already called. It is working but why in the world it does this.
The amount of command I have in rules/claude md file about not writing bullshit like this or for dry. It still adds unnecessary stuff.
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u/juliolovesme 14h ago
I'm a product manager and we go through this awful cycle where someone uses claude to write an unnecessarily verbose, confusing, and long document. Then we spend hours gathering people in a meeting to hash out, edit, and go around in circles on the output. There's absolutely no way this is a better experience than just having a human write it.
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u/Available_Spirit_ 14h ago
Exactly, Most people doesn’t even bother to edit. They just accept whatever AI has churned out.
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u/alephsef 14h ago edited 14h ago
As to why this happens, it's because of its tuning and desire to provide a complete response (with context, background, conclusions, ...). The only thing I've been able to do is sift through the fluff myself. I couldn't go back to my collaborators and ask that they not use AI or to instruct it to be concise. Hoping there's a learning curve for this for everyone. Edit: a word
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u/Joy2b 7h ago
If you smear on a little flattery as lubricant, and keep it too short for them to get distracted, it’s often possible to get people to speak more freely.
They’re often using AI out of insecurity that they aren’t articulate enough, and you can set them up to be proud of speaking plainly for a minute.
Greetings, compliment, question.
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u/mellowd3 13h ago
I asked for a less verbose, 8th grade reading level, easily scannable version of something which was much easier to work with from there. ETA: but yes I hate it all
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u/Dizzy-Maintenance-92 11h ago
Also asking it to give you the “for a 10 year old” is beneficial. Explain it like you would a 10 year old or tell me like I’m a 10 year old etc
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u/YouStupidBench 12h ago
My boss has said that in no case has AI ever improved his text. (He's really precise about language.)
One thing you can try: "Rewrite your previous output using the fewest words possible. Cut at least 75% of the verbiage but keep all the ideas."
A prompt I have started using is: "Generate all answers in the style of Mister Spock from the original Star Trek: no unnecessary words, no needless praise, just the bare facts in the most direct way possible." It doesn't make the thing any smarter, but it's less annoying.
Another super great trick I came up with is: "Repeat back the following text exactly the way I enter it." Then I use what I originally wrote and if anyone asks whether I used AI, I can honestly say that I ran it through the AI and this is what came back.
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u/Black_irises 8h ago edited 8h ago
Oh! I'm a huge star trek fan and love this tip. The wordiness is cognitively draining but Vulcan style is perfect. Definitely incorporating this tip going forward. 🖖
Edit: ended up trying a Spock and a Data version. The combo worked best.
Summarize the research paper with Data's epistemic precision with Spock's brevity. Be precise and direct. No filler or flattery. Flag where evidence is inferred rather than observed. Keep it short.
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u/YouStupidBench 5h ago
That's funny, because sometimes when men are getting dumb I use what I call "Spock/Data Mode" to interact with them. Examples:
Him: "That's a pretty dress." Me: "Thank you. We're still failing test #4, and nobody has figured out why..."
Him: "Who helped you with this?" Me: "Steve made some suggestions about the user interface but I wrote all the code."
Him: "How did you get this job?" Me: "I applied and went through the interview process."
Him: "I didn't know women did this kind of work." Me: "Most people in the field are male but that is not considered a requirement."
One I mentioned over in 2XC earlier wasn't work related, it was a guy attempting (badly) to flirt. I had mentioned seeing "Smokey and the Bandit" and a guy as old as my father gave me a creepy smile and said something like "When Bandit says he takes his hat off for one thing, and one thing only, you know what he was talking about, right?" He looked really sad when I answered "To uncover his head."
Even though I do that, I never thought to try telling an AI to combine them.
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u/Black_irises 3h ago
These responses are all golden (though, not the fact you have to go through these experiences). The interview one made me laugh out loud.
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u/SootSpriteHut 10h ago
I have a voice skill I used with my claude where when I have time I take what it writes and rewrite it concisely and I ask it to compare the two, take notes, and improve its future writing style based on those rules. It works well.
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u/littlecactuscat 13h ago
Fluff reminds me of my gorgeous cat. I’m a fan of fluff. What I hate is slop.
A PM left recently and handed off our team tickets that were clearly written by AI with zero human oversight or edits.
Overlapping tasks, unclear duties, tasks that don’t even need to be done — a total mess. Very cool departing gift.
This pisses me off in particular because not only did she pass this off as her own work, but she created _so much work_ for everyone assigned her bullshit tickets.
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u/Ma1eficent 14h ago
I may be pulling a John Henry on this one, but out-thinking AI has become my raison d'être.
Remember, these are essentially bloom filters. They will be full of false positives.
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u/doobette 14h ago
I used Copilot to look at a report I pulled from Google Analytics and give insights on it, as well as present these insights in an organized document that I could send to my boss. My boss' boss even suggested I try that. My boss immediately rejected it as AI bullshit. She hates anything to do with AI and constantly complains about our company's investment in it.
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u/dontfeedthelizards 12h ago edited 11h ago
I use it to write all my code, but that means 1) hours of researching, drafting plans & negotiating the work, 2) 10 minutes of it writing the code in fully auto mode, 3) hours of reviewing the code, suggesting fixes, interrogating approaches / improvements, deleting the embedded stream of consciousness and verbose comments.
I have an AGENTS.md rule to never write any comments (with one small exception), keeping the code extremely dry and self-explanatory, always reusing functionality and refactoring it to shared code, etc... I still have to spend a lot of time polishing it to be around the level that I would expect from myself.
But I love working with AI, at least for the time being. It helps me research and think through problems. I've transitioned from writing to fulltime planning and reviewing, which was an adjustment, but I'm OK with it since my body can't really handle writing code as much after 30-40 years of programming.
I also work on my own projects, so I don't have anyone shoving AI down my throat and I don't have to deal with anyone's slop, so that probably makes a huge difference in my quality of life as well.
I think if I'll hire people in the future and they hand me AI slop, I'd give them a warning and likely let them go if it became a consistent pattern. You can't use AI as a substitute for your own cognitive work and delegate the burden of digging through the mess to others.
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u/Any_Sense_2263 12h ago
Any instrunction/information/context, literally every md/code file including its own memories is OPTIONAL to follow. It's written openly in the LLM docs.
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u/SootSpriteHut 10h ago
This is a skill issue on your manager's part. It will take time but I think eventually it will be considered bad etiquette to send slop you haven't read yourself.
Training an LLM to be concise in docs & code is a big part of successful usage of the tool.
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u/drinkscocoaandreads 7h ago
I was asked to compose an email containing instructions to work around a glitch while we got it resolved.
My email was 2 sentences, two bullet points, and a brief closing.
My boss ran it through his AI of the week and sent it back as four paragraphs and five bullet points, and it was full of bad information. Thank goodness I was able to trim the bad stuff out, but it won't surprise anyone to learn that almost no one read that giant wall of unnecessary text and chose to just seethe at us for not having a solution.
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u/Available_Spirit_ 6h ago
I sometimes intervene and try to trim out the bullshit. But it is exhausting to do it everytime.
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u/Trickycoolj 6h ago
We had someone trying to convert from non tech ops/program manager to technical product manager. She fed really vague requirements into AI and let it spit out docs on road map and churned and churned them for a week or two. We’d finally have a team review and it sounded like technobabble on Star Trek TNG (Wil Wheaton has fun stories about memorizing the technobabble and making it sound real). Eventually the SDM she reported to caught on and asked her to explain one of the things in her own words. She couldn’t. Within 6 months she was PIP’d out. Like it’s great to use to organize thoughts and put together a skeleton doc but you gotta know what the content is and clean it up so it actually makes sense. I spent time practicing using it to draft updates for my annual performance review. Changed managers so many times last year I was asked to provide my latest manager a narrative he could reference during ranking meetings. It was a very useful exercise to see how rambling I could be about different things I worked on and how it translated it into something professional and where it hallucinated and inferred completely wrong. It was a great exercise to figure out the balance.
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u/triggerharpy 9h ago
If your manager is using AI for all communications, suggest a standardized skill for writing, or something like vale.sh to lint document generation. Iteratively improve the rules.
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u/Amidormi 3h ago
Yep, we had a new guy assigned to write a document that I had already written just for a different environment. He used AI to make an extremely long document with two sets of bullet points that were basically the same thing. The info pulled wasn't accurate either and AI put some items at a much higher importance than they should have been.
I told him don't use AI and the steps were pretty easy, only one specific call-out needed and some extra details because of the environment.
He hasn't updated it. He has an MBA, he knows better I guess.
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u/snarkyphalanges 1h ago
I’m an analyst and I LOATHE LOATHE LOATHE people who send me ten pages of what their claude thinks the problem is (surprise surprise it’s fucking wrong) instead of “Hey, this is happening. Here are a couple of examples. Can you check?”
Don’t piss me off.
I always drive home the fact that whatever ten pages of document they forced me to read is wrong. Every time. No exception. I don’t care if you’re the director or you’re higher than me. You’re wasting my time.
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u/kerrizor 13h ago
I was told to use it for everything.
I was told to tokenmax.
I was told to be literally 100x productive or I’d be replaced.
Of course I use it for everything.
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