[Ads-l] WOTY watch: "meat proxy"

[Ben Zimmer]

Via "sf-isms: the lexicon of San Francisco tech slang":

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https://sfisms.org/meat-proxy

Meat proxy

A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without
reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay
between the AI system and the intended recipient.

"Please summarize what Claude found instead of making me review a wall of
text from a meat proxy."

Origin
The earliest matching use located was an anonymous March 31, 2026 blog post
titled "meat-based llm proxies." It described people who feed messages to
an LLM and copy its responses back to others, saying that the recipient was
effectively communicating with the model "via a meat proxy."

Niklas Gruhn popularized the shorter label with his August 3, 2026 essay
"Don't be a meat proxy," focused on unread Claude output in Slack, pull
requests, and group chats. Simon Willison amplified it the same day, and
Gruhn's post subsequently reached the Hacker News front page with more than
1,800 points and 700 comments. The phrase then spread widely on X,
including a viral post by Josh tried coding that received roughly 4,000
likes and 490,000 views.
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--bgz

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