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#own#llm#more#end#disputes#never#irs#issues#agent#don

Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

hankbond5 minutes ago
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.

uniq7about 1 hour ago
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.

brandonpaiz33 minutes ago
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
dimitri-vs25 minutes ago
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.

IceDane39 minutes ago
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.
annoyingnoob29 minutes ago
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.

apercu12 minutes ago
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 :)
ocd22 minutes ago
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.

paweladamczuk13 minutes ago
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.
lordgrenville29 minutes ago
For some reason, Firefox thinks this article is in Portuguese.
progval16 minutes ago
The page begins with <html lang="pt">
almostdeadguy24 minutes ago
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.
paweladamczuk5 minutes ago
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.

dimitri-vs10 minutes ago
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.

almostdeadguy5 minutes ago
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 be.
dimitri-vsabout 2 hours ago
[flagged]
dangabout 1 hour ago
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.

dimitri-vs39 minutes ago
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.

r_lee28 minutes ago
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?

BigTTYGothGF9 minutes ago
> 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).

pavel_lishin11 minutes ago
> 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.

suburban_strikeabout 1 hour ago
> 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.

mikestew39 minutes ago
It's flagged and dead but good advice.

Flagged, dead, moderator dang weighed in, and you felt the need to repost it verbatim?