Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
No one should redirect a question to an AI after the asker has already tried that.
The author scheduled a call with a senior expert for a hard question without industry consensus and got the answer "Ask Claude." She had already spent hours with an LLM before reaching out. She compares it to asking a friend for a personal food recommendation and getting a top-10 list. She interprets the redirect as a polite version of "I don't know" or "I don't have time." The cost of being the person others call is real, and not everyone can bear it, but withholding the thoughtful answer that decades of experience could give is frustrating when the model was already tried.
What commenters are saying
Commenters mostly agree that the redirect is frustrating but split on its cause. Some argue the asker likely didn't communicate their effort clearly; leading with proof of work (options A, B, C, and why you think what you do) typically changes the response. Others say "Ask Claude" in a professional context is never acceptable from a senior to a junior, as part of the job is educating less experienced colleagues. A third camp sees it as a polite brush-off, equivalent to "I don't care" or "I don't have time." One commenter notes the similarity to LMGTFY links, but says search results have enshittified while LLMs haven't achieved comparable certainty.