Don't Be a Proxy Between Me and Your AI

I've had this conversation more times than I'd like to admit.

I raise a technical question in a thread, a meeting, or a design review and someone responds with a long, well-structured, suspiciously balanced answer. It has headers in spirit if not in format, it covers 3 tradeoffs and ends with a neat recommendation.

I push back on one point. Silence for a minute, the kind where you can practically hear a browser tab switching. Then another equally polished paragraph appears, answering my pushback.

At some point it kinda gives: I'm not talking to a colleague. I'm talking to a chat window with a human-shaped copy-paste button attached.

please stop doing that, I'm practically begging you.

I Can Open a Browser Too

Let me say the obvious thing first. If I wanted to debate an AI, I'd debate an AI. I can type a question into ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever else is in vogue this week. It takes me 10 seconds, and I'd get to skip the middleman. Right now you're less a colleague and more a loading spinner with a LinkedIn profile.

When I bring a technical question to you, I’m asking for your judgment. What you’ve seen work, what you’ve watched fail, and what taught you the difference. I want to know which tradeoffs you’d accept, which assumptions you’d challenge, and why. That’s the experience I’m interested in hearing.

The moment you become a pass-through, I lose all of that. I'm getting generic output with your name on it, and you've added latency to the conversation without adding anything else. Congratulations, you've invented the world's slowest API wrapper.

"But I'm the Decision-Maker"

This is the one that really gets me.

The pitch goes like this: in the AI era, the developer's job is to be the "architect". The AI generates the options, the human decides. You're like the guardrail, the one with taste.

Fine model. I think it's genuinely where a lot of the job is heading.

But a decision-maker who agrees with the AI's recommendation 99% of the time isn't deciding anything. That's a rubber stamp with a job title. If your "decisions" are indistinguishable from the model's default output, then you haven't added a layer of judgment, you've just added a layer of delay.

So here's a simple test: can you name a recent time you disagreed with the AI, and why? Not "I tweaked the formatting." A real disagreement, grounded in something the model couldn't know, like a constraint, a past incident, or a team preference.

If you can't, you're not the guardrail. You're the passenger and you didn't even pick the playlist.

I have a good, real example of this:

Someone messaged me on LinkedIn, saying they were interested in learning how I approach problems in distributed systems. I'll be honest: that's the kind of message that makes my day. A person wants to talk shop, and wants my thinking.

So I engaged. I walked through how I reason about failure modes and where I start when things go inconsistent and we went back and forth for a while.

Then I found out they'd been using an AI to debate me the whole time. They hadn't come to learn from me at all. They'd come to argue with me through a proxy.

And here's the thing: I debate AI every day. By choice, on my own terms, whenever I feel like it. That part is easy to get. What's rare is another human being who's actually willing to sit in the conversation, think out loud, be wrong in front of me, and push back with their own head.

If they'd just asked me their own half-formed questions, I'd have answered them all day.

"Whatever the AI Said Is What I Agree With"

This is the response I get when I ask the follow-up: "What's the point of discussing this if your brain isn't the one engaging?"

"Oh, well, it's what I agree with anyway."

Bold of you to agree so passionately with a position you didn't form.

Agreement without understanding is not the same as agreement. If I ask why you agree and the honest answer is "because it said so and it sounded right," then you don't hold a position but a borrowed one.

And borrowed positions collapse under the first real question, like a Jenga tower in a minor earthquake. I wrote about this before: reading something and nodding is not the same skill as being able to produce or defend it. A discussion is exactly the situation that exposes the gap, which is why it matters.

And about the "I'm verifying the output" defense: verification is real work. It means checking claims against reality, testing assumptions, and spotting what's subtly wrong. If your verification consists of reading the answer and thinking "yep, sounds right," that's not a guardrail, that's reading. A guardrail that never catches anything is just a decorative pool noodle.

"I Don't Have Time, I'm Busy"

classic. "I just don't have time to dig into this, so I asked the AI."

Yah yah, you're busy but so is everyone. I am busy. The person you're talking to is busy. The barista making your oat flat white is busy. Busy is not a personality. Being busy isn't a special condition you hold exclusively and it doesn't excuse you from engaging with the thing you chose to join a discussion about.

But notice the quiet logic buried in that excuse: if you don't have time to engage, you also don't have time to be in the conversation. There's a clean, honorable option here, and it's just saying so:

"I don't have the bandwidth to think this through properly. I'd rather not give you a half-answer. Can we circle back later today?"

It's respectable, It's honest, it respects my time and it doesn't pretend. What's not respectable is dumping unvetted output into the thread and presenting it as your contribution.

The Fair Counterargument

Before this turns into pure ranting, let me steelman the other side and because there are legitimate reasons someone leans on AI in discussions:

• Language. If English isn’t your first language, using AI to polish your phrasing is a perfectly good use. What matters is that the ideas are yours. And honestly, I don’t care if your spelling or grammar is rough. I’m a software engineer, not an English literature professor. The point of language is to communicate ideas. If I understand what you’re trying to say—and 99% of the time, I do—we’re good.
• Preparation. Using AI to explore a topic beforehand, surface counterarguments, or sanity-check your thinking is great. That's research.
• Juniors learning. Someone new may reach for AI because they don't yet have the experience to form an opinion. That's understandable, and the fix is mentoring, not shaming.

I don't have a problem with AI being in the process. I have a problem with AI replacing the person in the process.

The line, I think, is this: did you take the model's output and make it yours? Did you push on it, disagree with parts of it, and rewrite it in terms of your actual situation? Or did you relay it?

Try these

Here's how I think AI belongs in a technical discussion:

1. Use it before the conversation, not during it. Ask it to stress-test your idea. Ask it for the strongest objection. Then think about the answer.
2. Form a position you can defend without it. If someone challenges you and you'd need to go back to the chat window to answer, you're not ready to answer.
3. Be upfront about what's yours and what isn't. "I asked an AI for options and I'm leaning toward B because of X" is excellent. The "because of X" is the part that proves a human was involved.
4. Disagree with it sometimes, on purpose. If you never override the model, ask yourself whether you're evaluating it or just following it.
5. When you don't know, say so. "I don't know, let me find out" has never made anyone look incompetent. Faking it with someone else's words eventually does.

Why This Matters Beyond Politeness

It's tempting to file all of this under "annoying etiquette," but I think it's bigger than that.

Technical discussion is how teams build a shared mental model. It's where assumptions get surfaced, where one person's experience corrects another's blind spot, and where the real reasoning behind decisions gets created and recorded. If one side of the conversation is hollow, the team walks away with a decision that nobody actually reasoned about.

That's the same cognitive-debt problem I keep writing about, just moved from code into conversation. And like all debt, it comes due at a bad moment, usually when the decision turns out to be wrong and someone asks, "Why did we choose this?" and the honest answer is "the AI said so, and we all kind of nodded."

Conclusion

Use AI. Use it constantly, if it makes you better. But when you sit down to talk to another human about a hard problem, show up.

Bring your own opinions, even imperfect ones, bring your own doubts, bring the thing you know that the model doesn't. That's the only thing I came to the conversation for.

Because if I wanted the average of the internet's opinion, I'd have asked the internet. Human engagement is the rare thing now so please don't be the reason it gets rarer.