{"slug": "don-t-be-a-meat-proxy", "title": "Don't Be a Meat Proxy", "summary": "Software engineer and blogger Simon Willison warns against relaying AI-generated responses verbatim in communication, calling it 'meat proxy' behavior that adds no value. He advises reading, understanding, and validating AI output before responding in one's own words, especially in code review contexts where relying on tools like Claude Code without personal engagement shifts the implementation burden to reviewers.", "body_md": "# Don't be a meat proxy\n\nToo often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back:\n\nClaude said: [giant response verbatim]\n\nPlease don't do this. I mean, I've done this. But I've been on the receiving end too many times now. This is not adding value. I can talk to Claude myself. It's going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don't need a meat proxy in between.\n\nReading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. I recently got this sentence from Claude:\n\nNATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.\n\nJesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.\n\nBy all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.\n\nTake code review in particular.\nShipping *some* code can be done with close to zero effort now:\nCopy/paste the ticket description into Claude Code.\nDon't look at the code or read what Claude has written.\nIf there's any feedback from reviewers,\ncopy/paste that into Claude Code as well.\nIf necessary, iterate.\n\nThat works. But who has done the implementation? The reviewers did, using Claude Code, and you as a meat proxy.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/don-t-be-a-meat-proxy", "canonical_source": "https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/", "published_at": "2026-08-03 06:28:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-03 06:35:46.114954+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Simon Willison", "Claude", "Claude Code", "Slack", "WhatsApp"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/don-t-be-a-meat-proxy", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/don-t-be-a-meat-proxy.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/don-t-be-a-meat-proxy.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/don-t-be-a-meat-proxy.jsonld"}}