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Meat Proxy

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. A person who forwards AI-generated text, code or output without reading, understanding or validating it.

Technical Definition

A person who forwards AI-generated text, code or output without reading, understanding or validating it.

How it works

Coined in an October 2026 GeekWire glossary by Oren Etzioni and Dan Weld, 'meat proxy' names the human shaped like a teammate but functioning as a conduit: the reply-all summary nobody read, the pull request merged untouched, the report pasted straight from a chatbot into the pipeline. The term lands because it captures a real 2026 failure mode — workflows that kept the human approval step but lost the human judgment step — and it spawned its own vocabulary: sending such output blindly is an 'AI slap', and calling it out is 'AI shaming'. The healthy response isn't rejecting AI assistance but redefining what review means when first drafts are free: validate the claims, own the send button, or decline to forward.

Related Concepts

• Vibe Coding — Building software by describing what you want to an AI and accepting its output with minimal review — steering by feel rather than reading the code.
• AI Slap — Forwarding AI-generated text without reading it — the sending action of a meat proxy.
• Human-in-the-loop — System designs where humans review, correct, or guide AI outputs as part of the workflow.
• AI slop — AI slop is low-quality, high-volume output generated by AI systems, prioritizing quantity over usefulness.