"I can talk to Claude myself."
Last year gave us "clanker," the insult for the AI bots colonizing our feeds — a word Google's AI Overview bizarrely branded a "derogatory slur." Now there's a term for the humans doing the bots' bidding: **meat proxy.**
A meat proxy is the coworker who pastes a chatbot's "giant response" into Slack verbatim — unedited, unverified, still warm from the prompt — and calls it work. Credit for the coinage goes to developer Niklas Gruhn, who's clearly been on the receiving end one too many times.
"Please don't do this," Gruhn pleaded in a blog post earlier this month. "I mean, I've done this. But I've been on the receiving end too many times now. This is not adding value."
"I can talk to Claude myself," he added. "It's going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don't need a meat proxy in between."
His fix is almost embarrassingly simple: read the output, understand it, validate it, and "write a response in your own words."
"Making that effort is value you can add."
The term has clearly struck a nerve — especially among developers, who've watched AI coding tools upend their industry in real time.
"I already use that term for middle management," one X user joked.
"I think everyone knows at least one Meat proxy in their company," wrote another.
"This is the biggest career risk of 2026," developer Cory House tweeted. "I'm seeing this problem first hand."
"There's a very fine line between using AI to be more productive and being a meat proxy," tech founder Nicholas Charriere added. "Don't be a meat proxy."
The joke has teeth. Researchers already have a name for outsourcing your thinking to a machine — "cognitive offloading," or if you're feeling blunt, "cognitive surrender" — and the damage is showing up early. Students are struggling to follow class discussions, finish homework, or make it through a long text at all.
Author and noted AI critic Cory Doctorow saw this coming. Months before Gruhn minted "meat proxy," he published *Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI*, which paints an even less flattering portrait of the same worker.
"In automation theory, a 'centaur' is a person who is assisted by a machine," he writes. "You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body."
The reverse version: "machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine."
But Doctorow isn't writing an obituary for human agency.
"The future is up for grabs," he argues. "It is not inevitable. AI isn't a genie that can't be put back into a bottle."
Translation: use the machine, or serve it. And if you can't tell which one you're doing — your coworkers already can.