The sighting
A colleague asks a question in Slack. Three minutes later a 300-line reply arrives, formatted with headers and bullet points, opening with “Great question!”. Asked a follow-up, the sender says they will check — and pastes the follow-up into the same chat window. The reply was never read on its way through.
In normal English
A meat proxy is a person who forwards a question to an AI, then forwards the AI's answer back to whoever asked, without reading it, checking it, or adding anything of their own. The name borrows from networking: a proxy server sits between two machines and passes requests through, and the meat proxy does the same job with a body, sitting between a colleague and a chatbot. The term applies to Slack threads, pull-request reviews, email and group chats alike, wherever someone pastes model output verbatim and presents it as their contribution. The test is simple: if the message could have gone straight from the AI to the recipient with the same result, the human in the middle was a meat proxy. The opposite of a meat proxy is not someone who avoids AI. It is someone who reads the output, verifies it, and answers in their own words.
“Meat” is old internet slang for the physical human, as in “meatspace”, the offline world. Put it in front of “proxy” and you get a person doing a server's job, badly, because the server at least does not claim credit.
Where the term comes from
Developer Niklas Gruhn named the pattern in his essay “Don't be a meat proxy”, published at gruhn.me on 3 August 2026 and written about unread Claude output landing in Slack, pull requests and group chats. Simon Willison shared it the same day, the Hacker News thread passed 1,800 points and 700 comments, and the phrase stuck because everyone had a coworker in mind.
It landed because it names a cost, not a tool. Using AI is fine. Relaying it unread moves the work of reading, verifying and deciding onto the recipient, which is the work the sender was supposed to do. The relay adds latency and subtracts accountability. meatproxy.me was built three weeks later as the site you send to that coworker: the definition, the signs, a 30-second test and a referral link.
The evolution
1990s
“Meatspace” enters hacker slang for the physical world, as opposed to cyberspace.
3 Aug 2026
Niklas Gruhn publishes “Don't be a meat proxy” at gruhn.me, coining the term.
Same day
Simon Willison amplifies it; the Hacker News thread passes 1,800 points and 700 comments.
Late Aug 2026
meatproxy.me launches with the definition, the signs, the Meat Scan test and referral links.
Now
Slack emoji packs, tech-press explainers and dictionary entries. The term settles into workplace vocabulary.
If you hear it in the wild
Don't argue with the paste. Ask one question about it that the AI's answer did not cover. If the sender can answer, they read it. If they paste your question into the chatbot, send them this page.
