Meat proxy

The coiner is Frank Allenby, whose March 31, 2026 essay "Meat-based LLM proxies" on the Not-an-LLM blog described coworkers who feed every message to an LLM and copy back the response, so that "you end up talking to the LLM via a meat proxy." The essay's sharpest observation: you cannot reason with the human, because the human is not doing the reasoning, and the LLM will always reassure its operator that they are correct. It landed on Hacker News the same day to a score of two, which is how coinage usually goes.

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 initially credited Gruhn with the coinage, then appended a correction restoring Allenby's March priority. Gruhn's post reached the Hacker News front page with more than 1,800 points, and the phrase spread across X, including a post by Josh tried coding at roughly 4,000 likes. Allenby got the citation back, which is more than the coiner of slop grenade can say.