Niklas Gruhn’s short, sharp essay against relaying AI output verbatim in human communication. When someone asks a question in Slack, leaves PR feedback, or argues in a WhatsApp group, the worst response is “Claude said: [giant verbatim output]” — the other person can prompt Claude themselves, faster, with their own context; they don’t need a meat proxy in between. Reading AI output is extra effort: it’s verbose, full of all-too-plausible nonsense, and increasingly jargon-dense (his example: “NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn” — he had to look up nearly every word). The rule: prompt AI freely, but read it, understand it, validate it, then write the response in your own words — your own-words version is a “decent certificate” you actually did those steps. The sharpest edge is code review: you can ship code with near-zero effort by copy/pasting tickets into Claude Code and never reading what it wrote — but then who did the implementation? The reviewers did, using Claude Code, and you were the meat proxy.
Don't Be a Meat Proxy — Niklas Gruhn
Stop relaying AI output verbatim in Slack, PR threads, and group chats — read it, validate it, write your own words.