Slang & Culture
Meat Proxy
A person who takes a question they were asked, pastes it into an AI chatbot, and pastes the answer back without reading, checking, or adding anything — so the only thing they contribute to the exchange is delay.
Origin
Coined by developer Niklas Gruhn in his post “Don’t be a meat proxy” on 3 August 2026, after repeatedly receiving “Claude said: …” replies to his own questions and code reviews. Simon Willison linked it the same day and credited Gruhn with the coining, while noting that Frank Allenby had used the similar phrase “meat-based LLM proxies” earlier, in March 2026. The word joins “meatspace” — older internet slang for the physical world — with a proxy server, the machine that forwards requests without changing them. A satirical site, meatproxy.me, later turned it into a self-test and a set of freely licensed explainer graphics.