7 ms·
For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm
by parpfish 8mo ago
For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something.
The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks.
You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this constant vigilance of waiting for background jobs to finish.
I dont feel more productive, I feel like a lazy babysitter that’s just doing enough to keep the kids from hurting themselves
- pylua 8mo agoWhat are you generating that the llm takes so long ? I usually prompt and review in small pieces.
- Forge36 8mo agoFor me: Will this task take 30 seconds or 3 minutes. With good planning I've been able to step away and come back. Sometimes it decides to prompt me within 5 seconds for permissions. Sometimes it runs for 15 minutes. The output is still small and I can review it. I can switch tasks, however if it's my primary effort for the day I don't like stepping away for an hour to do something else.
- Scene_Cast2 8mo agoNot the OP, but the new LLMs together with harnesses (OpenCode in my case) can handle larger scopes of work - so the workflow moves away from pair programming (single-file changes, small scope diffs) to full-feature PR reviewing.
- wouldbecouldbe 8mo agoThat’s why now it’s legitimate to work on multiple features or projects at the same time
- well_ackshually 8mo agoThis way you can do twice the terrible job twice as fast! (Also, this only applies if what you're working on happens to be easily parallelizable _and_ you're part of the extremely privileged subset of SV software engineers. Try getting two Android Studios/XCodes/Clang builds in parallel without 128GB of RAM, see what happens).
- wouldbecouldbe 8mo agoI appreciate sarcasm, but this is just snarky. But yeah improving build speed & parallel running I think are one of the biggest advances devs can do to speed up development time in the AI age. With native apps that can be a challenge. I restructured a react native project to make it faster to iterate, but I have a feeling you might not be fond of rn.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago>I appreciate sarcasm, but this is just snarky. With all due respect, the commment does carry the vibes of "it's okay I can totally multitask" that's nearly a cliche in programming. It just feels a bit insensitive to respond to an article talking about context switching being a big problem with LLMs and then suggest the biggest possible context switch of managing multiple workstations. And yes, your hardware expenditure will vary per industry. I can barely run one instance of Unreal Engine as is.
- Forge36 8mo agoContext switching like that is exhausting
- jdonaldson 8mo agoIt's a different kind of fatigue, but it's something a felt I got stronger at over time. Beats waiting IMHO, but be sure to give yourself a chance to rest.
- AlienRobot 8mo ago
- ericmcer 8mo agoSeriously and beyond productivity, flow state was what I liked most about the job. A cup of coffee and noise cancelling headphones and a 2 hour locked in session were when I felt most in love with programming.
- parpfish 8mo agoI love the flow state, and I’m pretty sure it’s fundamentally incompatible with prompting. For me, when the flow state kicks in, it’s completely nonverbal and my inner dialogue shuts up. I think that’s part of why it feels so cool and fun when it hits. But LLM prompting requires you to constantly engage with language processing to summarize and review the problem.
- jaapz 8mo agoThat's pretty funny because LLM's actually help me achieve flow state easier because they help me automate away the dumb shit that normally kind of blocks me. Flow state for me is not (just) churning out lines of code but having that flow of thought in my head that eventually flows to a solved problem without being interrupted. Interesting that for you the flow state actually means your mind shutting up lol. For me it means shutting up about random shit that doesn't matter to the task at hand and being focused only on solving the current problem. It helps that I don't outsource huge tasks to the LLM, because then I lose track of what's happening and what needs to be done. I just code the fun part, then ask the LLM to do the parts that I find boring (like updating all 2000 usages of a certain function I just changed).
- macNchz 8mo agoInteresting that for some people flow state is non-verbal. I personally have sort of a constant dialogue in my head (or sometimes muttered out loud under my breath) that I have to buffer or spool into various notes/diagrams/code. The process of prompting winds up being complementary to this—typing out that stream of consciousness into a prompt and editing it becomes a more effective form of reflection and ideation than my own process had been before. Sometimes I don’t even send the prompt—the act of structuring my thinking while writing it having made me rethink my approach altogether.
- WarmWash 8mo agoI hope Google has been improving their diffusion model in the background this whole time. Having an agentic system that can spin up diffusion agents for lite tasks would be awesome
- iterateoften 8mo agoFor me plan mode is consistently pretty fast. Then to implement I just walk away and wait for it to be done while working on new plan in new tab Probably more stress if I’m on battery and don’t want the laptop to sleep or WiFi to get interrupted.
- Davidzheng 8mo agomakes you wonder how automate-able this babysitter roles is...
- pfdietz 8mo agoThat was my reaction.
- alex_c 8mo agoI joke that I'm on the "Claude Code workout plan" now. Standing desk, while it's working I do a couple squats or pushups or just wander around the house to stretch my legs. Much more enjoyable than sitting at my desk, hands on keyboard, all day long. And taking my eyes off the screen also makes it easier to think about the next thing. Moving around does help, but even so, the mental fatigue is real!
- _aavaa_ 8mo agoCoffee shops got filled with the laptop crew, are gyms the next frontier?
- joebates 8mo agoI've seriously wondered about merging a home office and home gym into one, and doing sets in between claude working. My usual workout has about 22-30 sets of exercises total and I probably wait on Claude that often in a day. It would be wonderful to be able to spread my exercise throughout the entire day. I'd also include an adjustable height desk so that I could be standing up for much of the workout/workday. I could even have a whiteboard in there.
- jq-r 8mo agoI have a small gym next to my home office and I just cannot do it. When I train I need to be 100% focused on the exercises otherwise in the best case I'll stagnate, and in the worst I'll injure myself. So instead I do some mindless chores if time allows.
- jwarden 8mo agoIt’s like being a manager.
- parpfish 8mo agoNo, it’s like being a micro manager. I don’t just give somebody a bit’s ticket a let the go. I give them a ticket but have to hover over their shoulder and nitpick their design choices. Tell them “you should use a different name for that new class”, “that function should actually be a method on this other thing”, etc
- xnx 8mo agoNitpicking seems like a choice. It's also possible to be more relaxed/removed and only delve in when there is a problem.
- johnnyanmac 8mo agoWe're at the stage right now where there's always a problem. That's the issue with this type of programming right now.
- zozbot234 8mo agoYou're supposed to write a detailed spec first (ask the AI for help with that part of the job too!) so that it's less likely to go off track when writing the code. Then just ask it to write the code and switch to something else. Review the result when the work is done. The spec then becomes part of your documentation.
- z0ltan 8mo ago[dead]
- xnx 8mo agoInferring is the new compiling: https://3d.xkcd.com/303/ https://3d.xkcd.com/303/ Edit: Looks like plenty of people have observed this: https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/12dpnlk/compiling_updated_for_the_modern_era_xkcd_303/ https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/12dpnlk/compiling_upd...
- SomeHacker44 8mo ago"Compiling!" (C.f. xkcd)
- hackable_sand 8mo ago"Comptrialing"
- SecretDreams 8mo agoI wonder if this is how managers feel -_-'
- coffeefirst 8mo agoSomewhat. You have to set yourself up to manage your own attention because the context switching is rough. If you don’t you will burn out. But the cycle is longer. When you help a person they don’t come back to you 4-20 minutes later. I also only review PRs at specific times a day, because that’s more cognitively intensive and switching in and out pretty much ensures you’ll do it badly. Either way, I’m really starting to think agentic as designed is a deeply flawed workflow. The future could be small, fast models that finish pseudo code and look stuff up to aide focus. Anthropic’s own research seems to support this.
- mikkupikku 8mo agoI know this is a terribly irresponsible and immature suggestion, but what I've been doing is every time I give claude code a request of indeterminate length, I just hit a blunt and chill out. That and sometimes I'll tab into the kind of game that can be picked up and put down on very short notice, here's where I shameless plug for the free and open source game Endless Sky. For me personally, programming lost most of it's fun many years ago, but with claude code I'm having fun again. It's not the same, but for me personally, at this stage in my life, it's more enjoyable.
- Waterluvian 8mo agoNow that’s vibe coding.
- tartoran 8mo agoThat’s vibe coding while high. Probably terrible for assesing the results from Claude
- mikkupikku 8mo agoThe code works quite well, but I wouldn't inflict it on other humans. In my view, when you use a coding agent you're committing to forever maintaining that code with a coding agent. There are no human programmers participating in these projects.
- Waterluvian 8mo agoI think oftentimes in the absence of context, people will substitute their own, usually worst-case context. They imagine someone vibe coding safety critical software that flies airplanes. I think we much too often forget that the domain of software development has expanded its reach into literally everything and that we share a guild hall with all kinds: those who write deeply safety critical correct code, those who are hacking a blender, those who are just making their clerical task less repetitive, etc.
- the-grump 8mo agoWhat has worked for me is having multiple agents do different tasks (usually in different projects) and doing something myself that I haven't automated yet. e.g. managing systems, initiating backups, thinking about how I'll automate my backups, etc. The list of things I haven't automated is getting shorter, and having LLMs generate something I'm happy to hand the work to has been a big part of it.
- mavamaarten 8mo agoFor me it honestly matches pretty well. I give it an instruction and go reply to an email, and when I'm back in my IDE I have work (that was done while I was doing something else) to review. Going back from writing an email to working, versus going back from email to reviewing someone else's work feels harder.
- amelius 8mo agoAs a programmer I want to minimize my context switches, because they require a lot of energy. LLMs force me to context switch all the time.
- likeajr 8mo ago[dead]
- jeremyjacob 8mo agoI don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that in 1-2 years inference speed with have increased enough to allow for “real time” prompting where the agent finishes work in a few seconds instead of a couple minutes. That will certainly change our workflows. Seems like we are in the dial-up era currently.
- deaux 8mo agoIt's arguably already here, only cost is a concern. We now have an open weights model - =you can throw as much hardware at it as you want to speed it up - at Sonnet 4.5+ level. Today Anthropic started offering 3x(?) Opus speed at 5x cost as well.
- jmalicki 8mo agoBut then models will do more computation, to be slower. What will have to change are workflows. Why are you ever waiting for the prompt to return? When you send an email, do you stare at your screen until you get a reply?
- rcarmo 8mo agoThis. It’s the context switching and synchronicity, just like when you are managing a project and go round the table - every touch point risks having to go back and remember a bazillion things, plus in the meantime you lose the flow state.
- rubslopes 8mo agoI used to lose myself in focused work for hours. That's changed. Now I'm constantly pulled away, and I've noticed the pattern: I send a prompt, wait for the reply, and drift into browsing. Without SelfControl blocking me, I can't seem to resist. I am certainly more productive with LLMs, but I also feel much more tired (and guilty) after a day of work.
- thunfischtoast 8mo agoThis has been a common pattern for me before LLMs, when my work required constantly rebuilding models or doing small deployments where each task/try took more than ~20ish seconds and less than say 3 minutes. It's enough to pull you out of it but not enough to make a proper break or switch tasks. I suffered from the problems you describe, grabbing a browser window or my phone which would usually take my attention much longer than the task and it left me burned out at the end of the day. There are some helper tools, like blocking "interesting" pages (like HN, reddit) on the browser, putting the phone in the bag at the end of the room or using a pomodoro timer so sequence proper breaks. But at the end the only thing that really helped is getting into meditation: I try to use these little interruptions of flow as a opportunity to bore myself. Try to reframe boredom from being an annoyance that needs to be fought to a chance to relax your brain for a couple of seconds and refocus. The want to grab the phone is hard at the start, but it gets better very soon when you manage to push through the discomfort in the first days.
- rubslopes 8mo agoThank you for this comment. I meditated almost daily for years, but somewhere along the way life got hectic and the habit slipped. Time to revisit it. EDIT: I wanted to add that I think it's a great time to get back to it because this mental fatigue has been leading me to migrate to more analog tools, like pen and paper for journaling and ditching my smartwatch for analog ones.
- gengstrand 8mo agoThat's a type of fatigue that is not new but I hear you, context switching fatigue has increased ten fold with the introduction of agentic AI coding tools. Here are some more types of fatigue that have been increased with the adoption of LLMs in writing code. There are plenty of articles on review fatigue including https://www.exploravention.com/blogs/soft_arch_agentic_ai/ https://www.exploravention.com/blogs/soft_arch_agentic_ai/ which I published recently. The focus there is less about the impact on the developer and more about the impact on the organization as letting bugs go to production will trigger the returning to high ceremony releases and release anxiety. The OP article talks about AI fatigue of which review fatigue is a part. I guess that I would sum up the other parts like this. The agentic AI workflow is so focused on optimizing for productivity that it burns the human out. The remedy is also not new for office work, take frequent breaks. I would also argue that the human developer should still write some code every now and then, not because the AI cannot do it but because it would slow the process down and allow for the human to recover while still feeling invested.
- Forgeties79 8mo agoI think all of this is why I don’t really experiment with an LLM anymore. I just use it to ideatw/rewrite things in different styles so I can turn rough drafts into finished things. It’s just an editor to bounce ideas off of essentially. Using it that way is the only way I find myself being actually productive and not annoyed with it
- ghthor 8mo agoMaybe this is why I’m different. I love reviewing code, it’s a great way to learn about a system, get new ideas. Diffs are great, see how things are interconnected
- ReptileMan 8mo agoHave a three monitor setup. Have some game on one in alt tab.
- 9rx 8mo agoSame here. But, then again, I talk about it all the time, so who knows what the article is trying to get at.
- JeremyNT 8mo agoI have this problem too. I try to fix it by having multiple opencode instances running on multiple issues from different projects at the same time, but it feels like I'm just herding robots. Maybe I'm ready for gastown..
- agumonkey 8mo agoIsn't that similar to the FSD issues where people cannot engage deeply enough because it's "FSD" but they still have to switch back a little, and sometimes go into crisis to avoid a wreck ?
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 8mo agoSo far the only solution I found is doing multiple things in parallel. Apparently it's terrible for our brain, but it does work
- aixpert 8mo agoas long as it's new I tremendously enjoy binge watching Claude: I have three tabs open and if one of them is not doing something interesting I just switch to a different channel, and occasionally influenced the narrative