Niklas Gruhn calls forwarding Claude's answers a 'meat proxy'

Niklas Gruhn named a specific failure mode on August 3: forwarding Claude's output verbatim into Slack threads, code reviews and group chats. The recipient could ask Claude the same question and get the same answer, faster, so the relay adds nothing but delay. Gruhn's post, titled "Don't Be a Meat Proxy," pulled 806 points and 353 comments on Hacker News.

His sharpest example is code review. A developer pastes a ticket into an LLM, iterates on the suggestions without reading the code, then hands the reviewer the job of understanding what got built.

The test

Rephrase the output in your own words before you send it anywhere, Gruhn says. If you can't, you piped it instead of processing it, and whoever's on the other end could have asked Claude directly and skipped you entirely.

The rephrasing test catches prose, not accuracy. A better version for agent output: can you say what would have to be true for the answer to be wrong? If you can't, you haven't read it, you've just reworded it.