Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Is there a tactful way to ask your boss to lay off something? My boss, a smart guy whom I respect, has become obsessed with LLMs. Literally every conversation with him about work topics has become one where he says "I asked (insert model) and it said..." which adds no value to the conversation. Worse, he responds to questions with "have you tried asking AI?". For example the other day I asked him if he knows why multiple TCP streams are faster than one (when you would naively think they would be slower due to TCP overhead), and he asked if I asked AI. Which of course I didn't, because I actually wanted to know the answer, not get something plausible which may or may not be correct. And he's like that with every question posed lately, even when we had legal documents we had questions on he was like "did you try feeding it to Gemini and asking?"
It's frankly gotten incredibly annoying and I wish he would stop. Like I said, I actually have a lot of respect for the man but it's like he's chosen to outsource his brain to Grok et al lately. I suspect that my options are to live with it or get a new job, but figured I'd ask if people think there's a way I can tactfully address the situation.
Bluntly, I think your boss is right in this case. The correct answer to "why are multiple TCP streams faster than one" is "it depends, what concrete thing are you observing?" There are a bunch of reasons a developer could be reporting "multiple TCP streams are faster than one", and where you should look depends on which parts of the network you can observe and control, how lossy the links are, which congestion control algo is in use in this particular case, etc.
If you say to an LLM "here is the thing I am observing, here is the thing I expected to observe, what are the most important additional pieces of information I can use to narrow down the root cause and what are the specific commands I can use to gather that information", the LLM will be able to answer that question. If you say "I have output from this common cli tool and I am too lazy to read the man page, explain it to me", the LLM can do that too.
Senior developer time is expensive. LLM tokens are cheap. Don't ask senior developers to spend their time answering questions you have if you haven't tried an LLM first.
With all due respect, I wasn't asking for an opinion on whether he's correct. I was asking if there is a way to tactfully ask him to lay off.
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