I feel so triggered right now… /begin rant/ VendorPay doesn’t summarize the total payment is a bug? Nope, working as intended. Put a vendor “on hold” still permits all new invoices to go into the payment queue a bug? Nope, working as intended. Want to test/prove an integration with your new ERP? Nope, got to buy and sign contracts. I could go on and on about all the annoyances of small business SaaS in the accounting space. Don’t even get me started about not responding to the actual question of an email—like if you went into a restaurant and asked for a steak medium-rare and the server said, ok. One steak well-done /rant
I get the topic—-abusing customer service. I’m just not feeling SaaS right now. There are conflicting incentives that I just don’t understand. I feel some SaaS are taking plays from the enshitification experts.
Granted, the total is a bit of a reach as "disputes". The bulk of it was IRS + insurance claims. The rest were companies not giving me what I very clearly paid for.
A year with only a $3 problem in it sounds nice, honestly.
I mean…did you read it? Half was pre-exiting debt owed to the IRS from before the seven month period, auto repair, and medical bills for their wife are the big ones, all of which are within normal for an average Joe
If you leave off the IRS one, I run into little issues all the time. I tend to take the time to fill out the form on principal.
I recently switched car insurance carriers. My old carrier required a phone call to my agent, which I made, but then they never stopped billing me. It took more phone calls to sort it out, I was right in the end. I ended up with a check rather than a bill.
Maybe I'm old and jaded, no corporation is going to take advantage of me without a fight.
I despise this sort of tax on our time as consumers. It’s getting to the point that someone should run on the “if you wanna do business in the US and you’re not going to employee citizens as customer service reps you pay a 1% dividend on your revenue to all US residing citizens annually” platform
- and then we use this to help fund single payer healthcare :)
This happens too often these days. Company fucks up some little thing and now it's all of a sudden your problem and you need to spend an hour on the phone here, an hour writing a letter there, and so on. Our institutions have been obliterated and there's no longer any regulatory agency or framework to come down on the practices.
I've not had disputes worth that much in nearly 40 years on this earth. Makes me wonder whether this is just some exaggerated nonsense. The article is certainly written by an LLM.
Neither had I, until the last few years when everybody decided to abandon all obligation to uphold their end of every contract because they thought they could get away with it.
In the last year alone I've sued my HOA, employer, and fired off a litany of demands for a cumulative total of 10x that amount.
This is the truth! I've had to do more credit card chargebacks and chase down more companies that owed me money or otherwise failed to live up to their side of a transaction, in the past 24 months than the total of the past 24 years. I think companies have realized that the current regulatory environment allows them to simply do whatever they want, commit fraud, take people's money and disappear, fail to provide service, and they know the onus is on the already tired and busy Average Joe to hold them all accountable. There is no more government willingness to go after companies anymore.
This also tracks with my recent experiences. It's possible it's a coincidence but I'm currently trying to get big, dumb, expensive errors made by Ikea and Costco sorted. I've been dealing with both of these companies for decades and never had issues with either.
As the post mentioned, I suspect it's going to get worse and harder to recoup losses as these companies remove more humans from the loop on all sides of their operations.
My own abstract is: there's been a collective understanding that the only terms a dominant party needs to adhere to are the ones that can be enforced by the little guy. If a rule can't be enforced by the little guy, the big guy can and will violate it with impunity.
It defies all fiduciary sense as well. Rather than let me go and pay the severance I'm owed, I've caught (with hard evidence, lawfully obtained) three different managers pretexting or executing steps toward my constructive dismissal. The most insulting part is that they think I'm too stupid to notice, or too weak to fight back. Now they're inviting EEOC investigations, DoD audits and worse as I complain and share a decade's worth of unrelated dirt to everyone with a public reporting hotline.
They could just settle and make me go away, but I'd sooner expect they'd send a hitman after me than concede a single dollar. It feels almost personal.
An American who interacts with health insurance can easily do that. Insurers will literally try not to pay just because some percentage of people give up.
I went to the dentist recently. They wanted to do a "deep cleaning". cost: somewhere between $0 (covered) and $5k (fully out of pocket). I asked the obvious: that's one hell of a range. "Depends on how much the insurer will pay." They weren't happy when I demanded to know that number before committing, as it takes them hours on the phone.
I saved about $65k this way, having Claude guide me through the process of assuming the (very low interest) mortgage on my house instead of having to refinance it under current rates. When I first contacted the mortgage servicer they said my loan wasn't eligible. I used Claude to do the research citing why my loan did qualify, drafting the letters and request packages with all the supporting evidence, directing me to the proper government complaint portals when the lender still tried to stymie the process. Cost me about 5-6 hours of time over all and will save me >$60k over the course of the loan.
I had a dispute with Canada Revenue Agency and won. A good part of a decade ago now, I got into contracting for a couple of years. The accounting lackeys at S_____ W_____ in Richmond, BC, Canada paid me using cash method accounting. They marked down payments to the date they actually paid. That was often late, so for instance December money would end up in January, and since that's when the money changed hands, it was now next year's income. They reported it this way to the CRA (unbeknownst to me, who would not suspect such a practice at this level of business). In one year, November and December payments were paid in January, and accrued to that year's income from their side.
In my self-made accounting system, written in a self-made Lisp, I used accrual accounting, associating all transactions with their correct dates, and remitted taxes accordingly.
This resulted in some amount owing (looking like underreporting).
I used reports from my accounting system to document my case, and they agreed with me: I did my accounting and reporting the right way, and that company should not be using cash-based day-money-changes-hands accounting.
I got 900 euros refunded for a delayed flight with the help of Gemini. It was a two step process first to raise to Turkish airlines who refused, and then fill in a form in Turkish to some ombudsman with a bunch of screenshots/proof and citing the rules. I would not have the cognitive space to deal with it alone.
Mostly this leaves me concerned about an escalating war between companies intentionally introducing friction into their customer service pipelines to discourage expensive customer behavior, and customers increasingly relying on more and more AI automation to deal with that friction.
In a perfect world this would cause the intentional friction to be less and less effective, while laws and regulations stop the companies from implementing more and more aggressive policies/systems, leading them to go back to the fastest possible pipeline to capture those savings if nothing else.
But I am worried that is not the world we live in and I am going to try to return some shoes I bought in the wrong size and be asked to do some integrals before I am allowed to.
Agreed. The problem is we are already there. This is a similar theme to the front page story today about malicious code and Google’s automated response
As you look at everyone’s healthcare, we have every provider adopting an agentic billing solution and every payor adopting an agentic dispute solution. Two AIs fighting over their $200 payment while my deductible is $5k
Mostly they'll just add to their prices to cover the cost. Ultimately even if AI armchair lawyering is very bad companies are going to find it easier to eat the cost of more $12 refunds than dealing with inbox spam from AIs even more relentless than the vexatious humans they generally pay to go away
(yes, they can and do use AI to handle some of that themselves, but they need some humans in the loop at some point to ensure they don't get prompt hacked into offering much more significant compensation or to confirm that the legal threats issued by Claude are indeed not applicable, or to get mobs of angry agents to leave their executives alone on LinkedIn)
Laws would not fix the root cause, which is: world became too globalized, and that brought an onslaught of bad actors. Unless some sort of social score system is introduced, it will be very hard to make a quick decision whether someone makes a claim in good faith. But then everybody loses their privacy and ultimately their agency, which arguably many of us already lost to google and facebook. I don't think there is a simple soilution.
I applaud you. Over the past year, more than a few companies have become impossible to deal with over issues of their own causing, and issues that never would have come up in previous years, now do. They just don't seem to care at all anymore, and seem completely checked out.
In the past year, I've had to spend quite a few hours just finding replacement parts and solutions for issues manufacturers were responsible for and would have handled previously. I may have to reevaluate and have AI handle more of these matters.
LLMs are a great equalizer. I had no idea how much of the world runs on ignorance of one's own rights and how much administrative burden is used adversarially. Now my learning is greatly accelerated. I hope it's the same for more people than not and we will end up with a more just society.
Great content! Inspires me to do the same thing since I am constantly dealing with things falling apart like this. I recently did one manually after putting it of for too long. Get Delta (airline) to go from "here is a 200 dollar bag to replace your 400 dollar bag we damaged" -> "Here is a 450 dollar eCredit".
I would try focusing on building a more unique style of writing, this feels like it went through heavy alignment to Claudes distribution. For the general audience maybe they aren't that sensitive to it yet, but for those that have to use LLMs at work, having to read more of it is grating.
Appreciate the feedback on my writing. I never let Claude add its own opinions or interpretations to what I write, but I do use it for improving the clarity of what I want to say. Problem is that I enjoy the way Claude (Opus 4.6, Fable) writes and I'm unintentionally starting to adopt its style so the line is starting to blur.
I get it, it's easy to ask it to just touch up the language and split run ons. At this point in time, I'm of the opinion that "improving the clarity" at the cost of creating "a discernible style" is not a good trade off.
In most formal publications of The Before Times like newspapers and magazines, you did not want much of a writer's specific tone to come thru bc the organization had its own writing style. We used to value "correctness" because too much variance (without intent) made things hard to read—it was like context switching and came with a cost.
Nowadays though, so many people are already reading Claude writing day in and day out. I would venture to say that the opposite cost is being incurred now, where as soon as I start to see the same language patterns, some attention mechanism in my brain just starts to drift off. I literally cannot mentally focus on reading when the prose is 1:1 the same distribution as Claude. Some kind of fatigue happened by reading its output over and over day after day at work.
Anyway, just think about changing it up if you're interested in writing (even if it means your output is "sloppier").
A smart but wrong path to solve the problem. We need competitive markets that would force corporations be responsible instead of an extra layer of complexity in the already complex consumer world.
I applaud to the author for creativity and I'd be tempted to try (elements of) it in practice next time, but I don't see anything good coming out of it at scale.
Im sure I saved a few thousands of dollars when one of my 3 solar inverters failed, chatgpt read through the documentation, my power configuration and pointed out that i could safely reroute the connections from the failed inverter to one of the two inverters. Seeing they are high voltage lines, I opted to work with the original installers, who were reluctant to do so, and was pushing to just get a brand new model, after a few back and forth with chatgpt providing the exact documentation that it was safe and within the limits of each inverter, they agreed to do so, for a few hundred bucks. (which only took less than an hour)
Yeah. My first real use of LLMs was a couple years back when we had a legal fight. We never would have won without it. Even got the high school principal to apologize. That was delicious.
I like you blog and tried to add it to my feed, but it doesn't appear to have an RSS or Atom feed. I know beehiiv supports feeds - any chance you could switch it on?
Thanks for flagging this. From what I can tell, it's Beehiiv's locale detection overriding my publication settings, nothing I can change but will file a support ticket with them.
Reminds me of an executive at my company who has sent extremely inflammatory, needlessly escalating, LLM-generated messages to one of our vendors in support threads (for problems she simply does not understand, any prompting she does I'm sure is just to have her AI agent coerce a concession/credit). I recognize that there are companies with scummy billing practices, but people like this don't seem to care that there are human beings on the other end of these things who are scrutinized as though they are interacting with another human being.
I remember one of the disputes an LLM helped me with. The human beings on the other end threatened me with mall security and I had to record them (legal where I live), write to the company's HQ and to the consumer ombudsman to get a refund honored. In the end they had to concede. I would have given up before LLMs: finding all the relevant case law and statutes cost 10 times as much effort back then.
I have a feeling that some people were sheltered by the system in their belief that they don't have to take responsibility for what they sign with their own name. I had zero issues with LLM writing so far, I think it's because I always pay lots of attention to what I sign with my own name, no matter how exactly it was written. People like the person you describe, ones willing to apply the tech mindlessly, get found out. Maybe it's ultimately for the better.
So I understand that the title is a bit inflammatory, but there's a whole section on exactly this, "Am I the Karen Now?". I'm never rude to a rep - they're just following a script to get paid. However, I don't extend any courtesy to the company's AI support bots optimized for stalling and maximizing profits.
Having being on the receiving end of many walls of AI-generated slop. I stand by every message I send, read it thoroughly, and keep it short and precise as to not add to the slop pile.
That's fair. I respect that you scrutinize everything you send and aren't needlessly hostile. I'm less optimistic that most other people who realize they can do this will do the same, and I worry that we'll soon be incentivizing companies to abandon customer service entirely.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
Got it. For transparency, all of my writing is my own but I do use LLM editing to improve the clarity of it and read every output carefully (and fully) before publishing.
On my own it often takes me 5-10 minutes just to figure out how to phrase something simple clearly. Like for example I don't how how to say that the amount of my own words I put into the LLM exceed (sometimes double or triple) the output that I end up posting online.
I'm afraid you're getting a bit piled on in the replies because readers feel strongly about this. But I want to add one thing re this:
> I do use LLM editing
What we're seeing is that LLM editing leaves nearly as many imprints on a text as outright generation, leading to two things: (1) it ends up sounding like AI, which most readers (at least on HN) don't want read, and (2) it ends up getting classified by the classifiers as genai anyhow.
What we're telling people (especially non-native English speakers) is to do their own writing and editing in their own voice and not to worry too much about minor mistakes - they are rapidly becoming signs of authenticity anyhow! Just worry about major mistakes, i.e. whether your main points are true.
While I appreciate your enthusiasm (truly), after two decades of writing I think I need to consider diminishing returns. I'd rather spend the time on thinking about what to say rather than how to phrase it.
how do I know which part is made up by the LLM or it's own interpretation or it's own opinion etc?
how can there be any value if I have to scrutinize every single word and decide whether it's truly what you intended to write or if it's mangling things, or if it's all just made up for engagement?
I've made this exact argument to other people, so I fully understand what you're saying here and agree with it.
I use the model in the same way a non-native writer would, for clarity. So it's critically important to me that there is no model interpretation or opinion added to my own.
I agree that whether it still counts as "my own" is up for debate. Made more complicated by the fact that I'm mostly using voice-to-text these days, so I'm dictating more than writing.
I'm not going to pile on by posting a moderation warning in this context, but I do want to respond to one point you made:
> this hive of nobodies is allowed to run rampant here, with no moderation
You're quite right that there are many bad comments that don't get moderated on HN. The simple reason is that we don't see everything that gets posted here, or even 10%. There's far too much! It is humanly impossible to read it all (and would be, even if we didn't have many other time-consuming responsibilities, which we do).
Moderation is inconsistent, not primarily because we apply the principles badly (though perhaps we do—we're certainly imperfect), but because you're looking at a rather random sample of comments that have had moderator attention, and a whole lot more that haven't. Cnsistency is impossible (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), for much the same reason that not everyone who is speeding on a highway gets pulled over.
Therefore, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Unfortunately, this all boils down is a bad look. Anyone who reads HN a lot will see a lot of bad posts, including many that break the site guidelines and get away with it. That is going to create annoyance and irritation, and a lot of that is going to get directed at the moderators for being a bunch of... well, I'll let you fill in your own pejoratives. Too bad for us, but it does go with the job.
Well your team never fails to flag my comments when I am espousing a viewpoint that goes against an established community view, such as manic, unhinged hatred of America’s current leadership, or if I’m critical of Europe’s ability to ship a meaningful volume software products.
I have no idea if you’re an ideologue or not, but my perception of the moderation team here is that political ideology and general SV narratives dominate your moderation strategy.
While we’re on the topic — it would not be very costly for you to employ a local LLM cluster and work queue to auto-moderate geopolitical topics that aren’t “tech enough” from ever seeing the light of day. Because the way it’s working now is the “I hate Trump” people spew the most insane flamebait imaginable, but they ensure ALL replies that disagree are flagged.
Clear thinking and rationality is not being prioritized here like it used to be. If your team is trying to do that, then whatever methodology you’re using is not working.
> Author here. For seven months I've been handing every consumer dispute to a Claude agent instead of eating the cost like I normally would. It builds the case file, pulls the warranty or policy text and the terms of service, works out who actually regulates the company, and plans a "campaign" with fallbacks. Ten unrelated fights (IRS penalties, a car warranty, two insurance denials, a robot mop, grocery stuff), yielded just over $12k back! The biggest single one was an IRS first-time penalty abatement I'd never heard of, $6.8k, eight years into an installment plan.
> To be honest, the agent's first-pass advice is usually bad ("file an FTC complaint"); what works is multi-prong approach until something moves. For the robo-mop it ended up all the way at their own arbitration clause, whose consumer fee rules cost them several times the refund. For the pet insurer it was the state regulator plus two exec emails, and they relented in hours after two months of stonewalling.
> Companies rely on a drop-off funnel, and an agent with infinite patience breaks it - thats the story.
It's flagged and dead but good advice. I've used it a lot for legal disputes (basic contracts).
It helps to make your argument, then have AI steelman a rebuttal, then modify your argument to smash their steelman. Then your initial outreach is your stage 2 argument that bypasses all plausible initial denials.
He hadn't weighed in when I quoted it. I thought it was just the community being petty. The OP being the first comment on their own post always gets flagged to oblivion.
I wonder what kind of life the author has in order to start 9 disputes worth $12k in just 7 months.
The only dispute I had in the last year is some $3 tweezers I ordered on Amazon that never shipped, and Amazon automatically reimbursed the money.
Start a SaaS and you'll discover there are a lot of them leading this life.
Haha. And they’re your customers.
I feel so triggered right now… /begin rant/ VendorPay doesn’t summarize the total payment is a bug? Nope, working as intended. Put a vendor “on hold” still permits all new invoices to go into the payment queue a bug? Nope, working as intended. Want to test/prove an integration with your new ERP? Nope, got to buy and sign contracts. I could go on and on about all the annoyances of small business SaaS in the accounting space. Don’t even get me started about not responding to the actual question of an email—like if you went into a restaurant and asked for a steak medium-rare and the server said, ok. One steak well-done /rant
I get the topic—-abusing customer service. I’m just not feeling SaaS right now. There are conflicting incentives that I just don’t understand. I feel some SaaS are taking plays from the enshitification experts.
Granted, the total is a bit of a reach as "disputes". The bulk of it was IRS + insurance claims. The rest were companies not giving me what I very clearly paid for.
A year with only a $3 problem in it sounds nice, honestly.
I mean…did you read it? Half was pre-exiting debt owed to the IRS from before the seven month period, auto repair, and medical bills for their wife are the big ones, all of which are within normal for an average Joe
If you leave off the IRS one, I run into little issues all the time. I tend to take the time to fill out the form on principal.
I recently switched car insurance carriers. My old carrier required a phone call to my agent, which I made, but then they never stopped billing me. It took more phone calls to sort it out, I was right in the end. I ended up with a check rather than a bill.
Maybe I'm old and jaded, no corporation is going to take advantage of me without a fight.
I despise this sort of tax on our time as consumers. It’s getting to the point that someone should run on the “if you wanna do business in the US and you’re not going to employee citizens as customer service reps you pay a 1% dividend on your revenue to all US residing citizens annually” platform - and then we use this to help fund single payer healthcare :)
This happens too often these days. Company fucks up some little thing and now it's all of a sudden your problem and you need to spend an hour on the phone here, an hour writing a letter there, and so on. Our institutions have been obliterated and there's no longer any regulatory agency or framework to come down on the practices.
I've not had disputes worth that much in nearly 40 years on this earth. Makes me wonder whether this is just some exaggerated nonsense. The article is certainly written by an LLM.
Neither had I, until the last few years when everybody decided to abandon all obligation to uphold their end of every contract because they thought they could get away with it.
In the last year alone I've sued my HOA, employer, and fired off a litany of demands for a cumulative total of 10x that amount.
This is the truth! I've had to do more credit card chargebacks and chase down more companies that owed me money or otherwise failed to live up to their side of a transaction, in the past 24 months than the total of the past 24 years. I think companies have realized that the current regulatory environment allows them to simply do whatever they want, commit fraud, take people's money and disappear, fail to provide service, and they know the onus is on the already tired and busy Average Joe to hold them all accountable. There is no more government willingness to go after companies anymore.
This also tracks with my recent experiences. It's possible it's a coincidence but I'm currently trying to get big, dumb, expensive errors made by Ikea and Costco sorted. I've been dealing with both of these companies for decades and never had issues with either.
As the post mentioned, I suspect it's going to get worse and harder to recoup losses as these companies remove more humans from the loop on all sides of their operations.
That's an apt description of it.
My own abstract is: there's been a collective understanding that the only terms a dominant party needs to adhere to are the ones that can be enforced by the little guy. If a rule can't be enforced by the little guy, the big guy can and will violate it with impunity.
It defies all fiduciary sense as well. Rather than let me go and pay the severance I'm owed, I've caught (with hard evidence, lawfully obtained) three different managers pretexting or executing steps toward my constructive dismissal. The most insulting part is that they think I'm too stupid to notice, or too weak to fight back. Now they're inviting EEOC investigations, DoD audits and worse as I complain and share a decade's worth of unrelated dirt to everyone with a public reporting hotline.
They could just settle and make me go away, but I'd sooner expect they'd send a hitman after me than concede a single dollar. It feels almost personal.
They're out there trying to make "laissez-faire" "caveat emptor" be the overriding principles of commerce in the USA.
An American who interacts with health insurance can easily do that. Insurers will literally try not to pay just because some percentage of people give up.
I went to the dentist recently. They wanted to do a "deep cleaning". cost: somewhere between $0 (covered) and $5k (fully out of pocket). I asked the obvious: that's one hell of a range. "Depends on how much the insurer will pay." They weren't happy when I demanded to know that number before committing, as it takes them hours on the phone.
Think of how bad the average big company is, and realize half of them are worse than that
I saved about $65k this way, having Claude guide me through the process of assuming the (very low interest) mortgage on my house instead of having to refinance it under current rates. When I first contacted the mortgage servicer they said my loan wasn't eligible. I used Claude to do the research citing why my loan did qualify, drafting the letters and request packages with all the supporting evidence, directing me to the proper government complaint portals when the lender still tried to stymie the process. Cost me about 5-6 hours of time over all and will save me >$60k over the course of the loan.
[dead]
I had a dispute with Canada Revenue Agency and won. A good part of a decade ago now, I got into contracting for a couple of years. The accounting lackeys at S_____ W_____ in Richmond, BC, Canada paid me using cash method accounting. They marked down payments to the date they actually paid. That was often late, so for instance December money would end up in January, and since that's when the money changed hands, it was now next year's income. They reported it this way to the CRA (unbeknownst to me, who would not suspect such a practice at this level of business). In one year, November and December payments were paid in January, and accrued to that year's income from their side.
In my self-made accounting system, written in a self-made Lisp, I used accrual accounting, associating all transactions with their correct dates, and remitted taxes accordingly.
This resulted in some amount owing (looking like underreporting).
I used reports from my accounting system to document my case, and they agreed with me: I did my accounting and reporting the right way, and that company should not be using cash-based day-money-changes-hands accounting.
I got 900 euros refunded for a delayed flight with the help of Gemini. It was a two step process first to raise to Turkish airlines who refused, and then fill in a form in Turkish to some ombudsman with a bunch of screenshots/proof and citing the rules. I would not have the cognitive space to deal with it alone.
Mostly this leaves me concerned about an escalating war between companies intentionally introducing friction into their customer service pipelines to discourage expensive customer behavior, and customers increasingly relying on more and more AI automation to deal with that friction.
In a perfect world this would cause the intentional friction to be less and less effective, while laws and regulations stop the companies from implementing more and more aggressive policies/systems, leading them to go back to the fastest possible pipeline to capture those savings if nothing else.
But I am worried that is not the world we live in and I am going to try to return some shoes I bought in the wrong size and be asked to do some integrals before I am allowed to.
Agreed. The problem is we are already there. This is a similar theme to the front page story today about malicious code and Google’s automated response
As you look at everyone’s healthcare, we have every provider adopting an agentic billing solution and every payor adopting an agentic dispute solution. Two AIs fighting over their $200 payment while my deductible is $5k
Mostly they'll just add to their prices to cover the cost. Ultimately even if AI armchair lawyering is very bad companies are going to find it easier to eat the cost of more $12 refunds than dealing with inbox spam from AIs even more relentless than the vexatious humans they generally pay to go away
(yes, they can and do use AI to handle some of that themselves, but they need some humans in the loop at some point to ensure they don't get prompt hacked into offering much more significant compensation or to confirm that the legal threats issued by Claude are indeed not applicable, or to get mobs of angry agents to leave their executives alone on LinkedIn)
Laws would not fix the root cause, which is: world became too globalized, and that brought an onslaught of bad actors. Unless some sort of social score system is introduced, it will be very hard to make a quick decision whether someone makes a claim in good faith. But then everybody loses their privacy and ultimately their agency, which arguably many of us already lost to google and facebook. I don't think there is a simple soilution.
I applaud you. Over the past year, more than a few companies have become impossible to deal with over issues of their own causing, and issues that never would have come up in previous years, now do. They just don't seem to care at all anymore, and seem completely checked out.
In the past year, I've had to spend quite a few hours just finding replacement parts and solutions for issues manufacturers were responsible for and would have handled previously. I may have to reevaluate and have AI handle more of these matters.
LLMs are a great equalizer. I had no idea how much of the world runs on ignorance of one's own rights and how much administrative burden is used adversarially. Now my learning is greatly accelerated. I hope it's the same for more people than not and we will end up with a more just society.
Great content! Inspires me to do the same thing since I am constantly dealing with things falling apart like this. I recently did one manually after putting it of for too long. Get Delta (airline) to go from "here is a 200 dollar bag to replace your 400 dollar bag we damaged" -> "Here is a 450 dollar eCredit".
I would try focusing on building a more unique style of writing, this feels like it went through heavy alignment to Claudes distribution. For the general audience maybe they aren't that sensitive to it yet, but for those that have to use LLMs at work, having to read more of it is grating.
Appreciate the feedback on my writing. I never let Claude add its own opinions or interpretations to what I write, but I do use it for improving the clarity of what I want to say. Problem is that I enjoy the way Claude (Opus 4.6, Fable) writes and I'm unintentionally starting to adopt its style so the line is starting to blur.
I get it, it's easy to ask it to just touch up the language and split run ons. At this point in time, I'm of the opinion that "improving the clarity" at the cost of creating "a discernible style" is not a good trade off.
In most formal publications of The Before Times like newspapers and magazines, you did not want much of a writer's specific tone to come thru bc the organization had its own writing style. We used to value "correctness" because too much variance (without intent) made things hard to read—it was like context switching and came with a cost.
Nowadays though, so many people are already reading Claude writing day in and day out. I would venture to say that the opposite cost is being incurred now, where as soon as I start to see the same language patterns, some attention mechanism in my brain just starts to drift off. I literally cannot mentally focus on reading when the prose is 1:1 the same distribution as Claude. Some kind of fatigue happened by reading its output over and over day after day at work.
Anyway, just think about changing it up if you're interested in writing (even if it means your output is "sloppier").
A smart but wrong path to solve the problem. We need competitive markets that would force corporations be responsible instead of an extra layer of complexity in the already complex consumer world.
I applaud to the author for creativity and I'd be tempted to try (elements of) it in practice next time, but I don't see anything good coming out of it at scale.
Im sure I saved a few thousands of dollars when one of my 3 solar inverters failed, chatgpt read through the documentation, my power configuration and pointed out that i could safely reroute the connections from the failed inverter to one of the two inverters. Seeing they are high voltage lines, I opted to work with the original installers, who were reluctant to do so, and was pushing to just get a brand new model, after a few back and forth with chatgpt providing the exact documentation that it was safe and within the limits of each inverter, they agreed to do so, for a few hundred bucks. (which only took less than an hour)
Yeah. My first real use of LLMs was a couple years back when we had a legal fight. We never would have won without it. Even got the high school principal to apologize. That was delicious.
I like you blog and tried to add it to my feed, but it doesn't appear to have an RSS or Atom feed. I know beehiiv supports feeds - any chance you could switch it on?
For some reason, Firefox thinks this article is in Portuguese.
The page begins with <html lang="pt">
Thanks for flagging this. From what I can tell, it's Beehiiv's locale detection overriding my publication settings, nothing I can change but will file a support ticket with them.
A task for Claude
Maybe he's trying to poison scraped data a little?
Crazy having to fight with insurance providers to get basic health care.
Reminds me of an executive at my company who has sent extremely inflammatory, needlessly escalating, LLM-generated messages to one of our vendors in support threads (for problems she simply does not understand, any prompting she does I'm sure is just to have her AI agent coerce a concession/credit). I recognize that there are companies with scummy billing practices, but people like this don't seem to care that there are human beings on the other end of these things who are scrutinized as though they are interacting with another human being.
I remember one of the disputes an LLM helped me with. The human beings on the other end threatened me with mall security and I had to record them (legal where I live), write to the company's HQ and to the consumer ombudsman to get a refund honored. In the end they had to concede. I would have given up before LLMs: finding all the relevant case law and statutes cost 10 times as much effort back then.
I have a feeling that some people were sheltered by the system in their belief that they don't have to take responsibility for what they sign with their own name. I had zero issues with LLM writing so far, I think it's because I always pay lots of attention to what I sign with my own name, no matter how exactly it was written. People like the person you describe, ones willing to apply the tech mindlessly, get found out. Maybe it's ultimately for the better.
So I understand that the title is a bit inflammatory, but there's a whole section on exactly this, "Am I the Karen Now?". I'm never rude to a rep - they're just following a script to get paid. However, I don't extend any courtesy to the company's AI support bots optimized for stalling and maximizing profits.
Having being on the receiving end of many walls of AI-generated slop. I stand by every message I send, read it thoroughly, and keep it short and precise as to not add to the slop pile.
That's fair. I respect that you scrutinize everything you send and aren't needlessly hostile. I'm less optimistic that most other people who realize they can do this will do the same, and I worry that we'll soon be incentivizing companies to abandon customer service entirely.
I think that ship has already sailed.
Customer Experience Quality In The US Falls To An(other) All-Time Low | https://www.forrester.com/blogs/cx-index-2025-results/
The part that worries me the most is our regulators and arbitration queues getting saturated with slop by people just letting AI agents run wild.
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Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
Got it. For transparency, all of my writing is my own but I do use LLM editing to improve the clarity of it and read every output carefully (and fully) before publishing.
On my own it often takes me 5-10 minutes just to figure out how to phrase something simple clearly. Like for example I don't how how to say that the amount of my own words I put into the LLM exceed (sometimes double or triple) the output that I end up posting online.
I'm afraid you're getting a bit piled on in the replies because readers feel strongly about this. But I want to add one thing re this:
> I do use LLM editing
What we're seeing is that LLM editing leaves nearly as many imprints on a text as outright generation, leading to two things: (1) it ends up sounding like AI, which most readers (at least on HN) don't want read, and (2) it ends up getting classified by the classifiers as genai anyhow.
What we're telling people (especially non-native English speakers) is to do their own writing and editing in their own voice and not to worry too much about minor mistakes - they are rapidly becoming signs of authenticity anyhow! Just worry about major mistakes, i.e. whether your main points are true.
> On my own it often takes me 5-10 minutes just to figure out how to phrase something simple clearly.
That's part of writing, and it gets faster and easier the more you do it.
While I appreciate your enthusiasm (truly), after two decades of writing I think I need to consider diminishing returns. I'd rather spend the time on thinking about what to say rather than how to phrase it.
it's not your own if you pass it onto an LLM
then it's just LLM writings prompted by you
how do I know which part is made up by the LLM or it's own interpretation or it's own opinion etc?
how can there be any value if I have to scrutinize every single word and decide whether it's truly what you intended to write or if it's mangling things, or if it's all just made up for engagement?
I've made this exact argument to other people, so I fully understand what you're saying here and agree with it.
I use the model in the same way a non-native writer would, for clarity. So it's critically important to me that there is no model interpretation or opinion added to my own.
I agree that whether it still counts as "my own" is up for debate. Made more complicated by the fact that I'm mostly using voice-to-text these days, so I'm dictating more than writing.
> On my own it often takes me 5-10 minutes just to figure out how to phrase something simple clearly
You need more practice doing it (with your brain, not the model).
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I'm not going to pile on by posting a moderation warning in this context, but I do want to respond to one point you made:
> this hive of nobodies is allowed to run rampant here, with no moderation
You're quite right that there are many bad comments that don't get moderated on HN. The simple reason is that we don't see everything that gets posted here, or even 10%. There's far too much! It is humanly impossible to read it all (and would be, even if we didn't have many other time-consuming responsibilities, which we do).
Moderation is inconsistent, not primarily because we apply the principles badly (though perhaps we do—we're certainly imperfect), but because you're looking at a rather random sample of comments that have had moderator attention, and a whole lot more that haven't. Cnsistency is impossible (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), for much the same reason that not everyone who is speeding on a highway gets pulled over.
Therefore, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Unfortunately, this all boils down is a bad look. Anyone who reads HN a lot will see a lot of bad posts, including many that break the site guidelines and get away with it. That is going to create annoyance and irritation, and a lot of that is going to get directed at the moderators for being a bunch of... well, I'll let you fill in your own pejoratives. Too bad for us, but it does go with the job.
Well your team never fails to flag my comments when I am espousing a viewpoint that goes against an established community view, such as manic, unhinged hatred of America’s current leadership, or if I’m critical of Europe’s ability to ship a meaningful volume software products.
I have no idea if you’re an ideologue or not, but my perception of the moderation team here is that political ideology and general SV narratives dominate your moderation strategy.
While we’re on the topic — it would not be very costly for you to employ a local LLM cluster and work queue to auto-moderate geopolitical topics that aren’t “tech enough” from ever seeing the light of day. Because the way it’s working now is the “I hate Trump” people spew the most insane flamebait imaginable, but they ensure ALL replies that disagree are flagged.
Clear thinking and rationality is not being prioritized here like it used to be. If your team is trying to do that, then whatever methodology you’re using is not working.
We can’t lose HN. But it feels like we are.
> Author here. For seven months I've been handing every consumer dispute to a Claude agent instead of eating the cost like I normally would. It builds the case file, pulls the warranty or policy text and the terms of service, works out who actually regulates the company, and plans a "campaign" with fallbacks. Ten unrelated fights (IRS penalties, a car warranty, two insurance denials, a robot mop, grocery stuff), yielded just over $12k back! The biggest single one was an IRS first-time penalty abatement I'd never heard of, $6.8k, eight years into an installment plan.
> To be honest, the agent's first-pass advice is usually bad ("file an FTC complaint"); what works is multi-prong approach until something moves. For the robo-mop it ended up all the way at their own arbitration clause, whose consumer fee rules cost them several times the refund. For the pet insurer it was the state regulator plus two exec emails, and they relented in hours after two months of stonewalling.
> Companies rely on a drop-off funnel, and an agent with infinite patience breaks it - thats the story.
It's flagged and dead but good advice. I've used it a lot for legal disputes (basic contracts).
It helps to make your argument, then have AI steelman a rebuttal, then modify your argument to smash their steelman. Then your initial outreach is your stage 2 argument that bypasses all plausible initial denials.
It's flagged and dead but good advice.
Flagged, dead, moderator dang weighed in, and you felt the need to repost it verbatim?
He hadn't weighed in when I quoted it. I thought it was just the community being petty. The OP being the first comment on their own post always gets flagged to oblivion.
Yes, many HN etiquette lessons were learned by me in this thread.