7 ms·

Task Paralysis and AI

262 points by MrGilbert 5mo ago

Ozzie-D 5mo ago
[flagged]
- mkeeter 5mo ago
  Does one also get dopamine from using LLMs to write comments on Hacker News?
- firegodjr 5mo ago
  I really feel this. I find myself reaching for CC, typing half a prompt, and then realizing I could've done the task faster myself. But CC is exciting, and feels* fast, so I keep reaching for it. Somehow it feels worse to just do the work.
Weryj 5mo ago
I could have written this article myself. The addiction part, the ADHD part and the pending test part. The fear of becoming addicted to AI is real and I don't think I'll be capable to stop it, considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. My Pro went to Max(5) to Max(20) pretty quickly and I was burning through that weekly limit still, without large agentic workflows that burn tokens. Just me and 4-5 terminals. Sometimes I was happy to hit the limit because I was forced back to normal life. I've gone back to Pro to stop what was happening. Now I'm self-aware enough to notice the trend and put up safe guards, but that's because I've always had to adapt my environment to control my behaviour because I know direct behaviour control is abnormally challenging. I fear for those who won't see it coming, until they're in deep.
- willwade 5mo ago
  I find that the new "drug" is constantly hunting down new cheaper models.. z.ai/glm, mistral, deepseek.. if you need to get your fix - find the cheaper path..
  - 7777332215 5mo ago
    Average drug connesiuer activities
- MrGilbert 5mo ago
  > [...] considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. It's so wild that it never dawned on me, why some people around me were so quick with "Let AI do that!". I'm not saying that each and everyone has ADHD, but I think I underestimated a) the flow of dopamine a successful prompt can set free and b) the craving for it by folks that I deemed more stable than myself.
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    As someone with ADHD, it’s really a problem. I have so many random documents of random outputs from prompts I didn’t track. It’s honestly accelerated some of my worst habits because it feels like I actually completed a task. The reality is I just have folders of half finished projects, which anyone with ADHD can relate to. I’ll finish modding that Dreamcast one day…
    - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
      I feel kind of lucky in a way that I hate working with AI so much. I'd rather hammer nails through my fingers than spend my time prompting So my ADHD isn't being satisfied by those little dopamine hits from LLMs, Any time I'm forced to use them I'm mad about it, and can't wait to be done with it I still have that folder of half finished things just like you, though. It's just not AI generated
  - Weryj 5mo ago
    I thought about it a little deeper and I think software development has always had the addictive tendency. That hunt for the solution to the problem, has a rush when you complete it. It’s just that the rush is more frequent, addiction intensity scales with dose and frequency.
    - hyperadvanced 5mo ago
      I think I might be going through withdrawal because I feel like I rarely get that fun feeling anymore with coding :( It can be gratifying to get shit done but I love the feeling of coming up with a great reusable component and then making an entire app out of it
- rufasterisco 5mo ago
  Instead of jumping from project to project, I focus on one (maybe a few) and let myself free while agents spew out their output. Something physical is excellent for me: minor wood carving, origami, drawing exercises, also light physical exercises. My trick is to (try to) do something that requires high focus, on unrelated matters. To give a practical example, the simple gesture to connect 2 points on a sheet of paper via a direct, non trembling line, requires high focus: if you try to do it sloppily it is too long, too short, etc. I need to shadow the moment, gain focus, draw the line. It keeps my brain in focus, busy and engaged. Videos, podcasts, and in general enything digital seems to distract me away and/or overloads me. Also, I am back at using pomodoro technique more frequently. Just some pointers, in case you want to try out, or suggest some you find effective yourself.
- moron4hire 5mo ago
  Might call it the OnlyFans model of Software Development.
- ip26 5mo ago
  The counterweight has been, after using it for a bunch of projects, I have internalized that it will very, very quickly get me to maybe 60% and then I'll have to take it the rest of the way mostly by myself (or handholding it tightly for the remaining 40% at a much slower pace). In other words, the initial implementation is practically already there, already done. So there's no rush left in generating it - it's only worth bothering if I'm prepared to see it through to 100%. When it is worth pushing through to 100%, it's pretty great for getting the inertia going though.
  - mettamage 5mo ago
    I feel AI agents are an amazing replacement for many Figma screens. Just create a crude version of your app and have users test it immediately.
- tim-projects 5mo ago
  For the addiction part I'm trying to squeeze as much quality code out of the free tokens possible. I'm having a blast!
- iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
  You got me curious, mostly because I did not evolve past one terminal for whatever reason. Can anyone tell me how that happens? Can you realistically keep track of much? Or is it really a move to management as one of the other poster's noted?
  - Weryj 5mo ago
    My monolith is large enough to work on multiple systems in parallel without overlapping. One prompt with Opus might take 30-40 minutes once past the planning phase. So I plan the next work, while the current is still running and if that's a task that can't have parallel work, I have a bunch of time to keep planning the next steps for other systems. And then there's time for reading through the changes and applying corrective changes to the code or the meta-skills. I use CMUX and setup workspaces for each topic I'm working on, each workspace has number of tabs. That helps keeping track of everything I'm working on, but also means no topic gets left behind until I close the workspace. So they accumulate
- butlike 5mo ago
  Just follow the old drug using paradigm: "only get high on Friday." Only prompt on Friday
sourcecodeplz 5mo ago
It is really weird reading things but I guess normal? It seems many feel this, including me. AI just compounds this behavior even more! Darn.
pllbnk 5mo ago
So the end game for the current generation of AI companies won't be productivity improvements but gambling, just like everything else nowadays. That's why they want to get us all into these massive casinos they call data centers and don't want us to own the slot machines. So what that you have ideas - other people have them too. It's not ideas that build businesses but knowing right people or ability to sell products.
- stavros 5mo ago
  The gambling trope is so tired. AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree, certainly not more than hiring people to do a job can be considered "gambling" (you never know what you're going to get!). It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.
  - pllbnk 5mo ago
    For most people who are not doing their day to day jobs it's just a prompt of their idea roughly sketched out and a miracle happens - LLM fills in the blanks. Every time it's different but it works, sometimes even better than initially expected. That's why the addiction and gambling. Gambling is a lot of things, not only flashing lights or play sounds. Some people claim prediction markets isn't gambling either, though that doesn't change the fact.
    - stavros 5mo ago
      How is this different from hiring a designer, telling them "make me a website" and then waiting to see if they resolve the uncertainty into something you like or not? I tell LLMs what to do in pretty high detail, and they do it. With LLMs I have much less variance than with coworkers.
      - js8 5mo ago
        It is different because for humans, it takes time to produce some result, while AI does it instantly. So if you tell a programmer to do X, you have a week for your adrenaline to cool off. If you tell AI, it will do it in minutes.
p0w3n3d 5mo ago
> What is it good for? > For me, personally? It helps me overcome my task paralysis. As mentioned earlier: I have a plan. A strategy. An idea. I just need someone (or something), who has fun in churning through the implementation. I have the ideas. But boy is coding exhausting. I find the same. AI helps me overcome any paralysis. I just think "hey it's cheap to write the prompt" and go on.
cl0ckt0wer 5mo ago
AI has replaced video games for me. And there are plenty of cheaper models that "do it" for me, I don't have to spend $$$$ just for entertainment. I will step up to the frontier for serious work. But if I'm just playing, I'm going for the free stuff on openrouter. Also, ai art is fine. It looks better than me using paint. That said, there are plenty of foss art pieces and public domain that you can leverage if all you really need is placeholders, and that is much cheaper.
thrance 5mo ago
Don't know about ADHD and whatnot, but I do feel this "task paralysis" pretty often. One thing that I found works really well for me is to work on multiple projects at once. Go one to two weeks on one, then switch to another. I'm not lacking motivation anymore and it feels great.
aaron695 5mo ago
[dead]
dgellow 5mo ago
I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage fleets of agents. I do not want to rediscover for the hundredth time that in fact all this time an agent took shortcuts for acceptance tests I rely upon and didn’t catch. Or once again get the agent to understand why and what I want it to do after its context got bloated and it start to drift completely. While I got artifacts I can use (libraries, tools, docs), including some things that I’m pretty confident are SoA I do not feel satisfied anymore knowing that I used a model to generate them, even if I was the one designing every part of it. I do feel that I’m lying anytime I come to a colleague to share a new cool tool I have made. And I do not feel that relying on AI actually helped me improve with dealing with my executive function issues. YMMV but I’m personally feeling burnt out with AI coding agents and ready to go back to the old ways for my next personal project
- entrox 5mo ago
  Almost a decade ago, I moved my career into the management track. I am a director by now and have two more management levels between myself and individual contributors. I can strongly relate to what you‘re writing, because I share that same sentiment often in my daily (non-AI) work. In fact, coming from that background, the switch from coding to working with agents feels eerily similar to moving into management. You encounter the same challenges minus the „human people and emotions“ part: having to explain properly, the agents doing something different than what you intended, feeling detached from the actual work, only focusing on the bigger picture and so on To me it feels very natural, it is what I do every day. But then again, I made that choice and it wasn‘t forced on me. So I understand frustration.
  - rubslopes 5mo ago
    I feel lucky to have been promoted to a management position recently, just as I was starting to feel less excited about dev work because of AI. I still enjoy building systems, but I have to admit that the loss of challenge made the work much less enjoyable for me. Now I have a team of interns to mentor. They're sharp and use AI constantly, so my guidance is less about code and more about UI/UX, understanding what the client actually wants, good work practices, well-documented tickets, thorough reviews, and so on. Thankfully, I like this work, it has been very rewarding.
adamtaylor_13 5mo ago
Nitpick: Stop the throat clearing and get to the point. The final paragraph is the whole point of the article. It's a real turnoff when I have to scroll past a moral lecture on artistry and piracy when I just want to hear your thoughts on task paralysis. --- To the author's point though, AI is incredible at building some initial momentum on a task. The initialization energy is basically zero.
- kordlessagain 5mo ago
  IP law is incompatible with AI. It's an important point, but not here.
- renticulous 5mo ago
  When I don't have time, I just ask AI to summarize the main points and expand on the point I like. I do this with even HN discussions. I just copy the whole HN page and paste into Claude and ask it to summarize and deduplicate talking points.
- jplusequalt 5mo ago
  You didn't have to read the article.
  - pegasus 5mo ago
    And you don't have to read the critique.
  - pessimizer 5mo ago
    You can't know that it was a waste of time to read until after you've read it. Especially if the point is at the end, and is a good point.
  - furyofantares 5mo ago
    OP posted their article on the internet and then to HN presumably because they'd like people to read it.
- dinfinity 5mo ago
andai 5mo ago
Re: Claude usage limits There was a comment the other day that explained how to use the new DeepSeek V4 with Claude Code. I mention because it's roughly fifty times cheaper than Claude, and the quality gap is closing. Which is the difference between "I don't use it for anything serious because I constantly run into limits" and "I can actually use the thing..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002640 It seems "Sonnet-ish" in quality so far, but I haven't tested it much yet.
albert_e 5mo ago
Resonates with me. In a paradoxical way, the amount of stuff you can get done in an hour now is like a firehose -- which we rarely experienced in our earlier life -- which can be overwhelming to my brain. So I subconsciously resist starting a session because I never feel fully rested, calm, and focussed to take all that and process it well. There are also 10x more "active" projects now -- and prioritization and choosing between them at every moment is still a struggle. The tempation to do the fun and novel thing and avoid important but familar boring chores pops up every step of the way and can derail you for days. I am still trying to create a system that works -- now using the very tools. Long journey ahead. EDIT: My experience -- I was paying for both Claude Code as well as ChatGPT Pro ...but was heavily almost exlucively using CC for coding work because it was so good. After CC started hammering the session and weekly quotas lately -- I tentatively srated using Codex and find that it seems equally good and almost indistnguishable for my work, and ocassionally shines by one-shotting some tasks. This helped me stay afloat with just 2x$20 spend per month without feeling held-up for ransom. Also never hit codex limits till now. Leaving a 5 hour session quota unused towards the end, or worse not even starting a 5 hour session clock, was a source of constant anxiety -- that I am wasting precious quota getting nothing done. I think I am getting over that now.
- rsyring 5mo ago
  I've been using Augment's agents (VS code, CLI) for 8ish months. It let's me easily switch between GPT and Claude models. I've found the best results from letting GPT 5.4 code and then asking Opus to do code reviews to a file. I do the review in a different agent session so it's "fresh". Then I review the file, edit until I agree with everything, and let the existing GPT agent session address the items in the review file. I've found Clause agents don't perform as well for me in coding for whatever reason. They feel more sloppy. I've also been doing a very organic spec-driven development process where I have a md file for each non-trivial project update and use that to define the task and address questions or problems the agent has. I've also found I can give agents conditional instructions which they will usually use like skills. This gives me a way to easily distribute my instructions to any agent/model on any machine with a single AGENTS.md as the entry point: https://github.com/rsyring/agent-configs/blob/main/default.md https://github.com/rsyring/agent-configs/blob/main/default.m... This has all been very effective, more than I would have predicted a year ago.
keiferski 5mo ago
Another way to put this is that focus is ultimately what matters, when it comes to actually getting stuff done. Choosing what not to do is often more important than what you actually do. Since AI tools make it extremely easy to get started, it's really easy to begin half a dozen different projects, feel like you're being productive, but actually accomplish nothing. This accurately described how I used to utilize AI – and my ChatGPT history is filled with all sorts of grandiose project plans. But lately I've been more and more narrow with what I actually prompt. This leads me to think that a chatbox is not the best UI for using AI, as it's too open-ended and too prone to give you long, broad answers, rather than hyper-specific ones.
rufasterisco 5mo ago
Some traits I recognized in many excellent coders i worked with, their drive to optimization, intellectual thirst, critical and creative thinking are attributes i consistently correlated with them being in some sort of neurodivergence spectrum. Being able to remove the "first step" block is great, but what worries me is that this is coupled with LLMs sycophantic behaviours. My gut feeling is that coupling the feeling of unblocking ones capabilities with dopamine hits with the constant praising over someone abilities is an intro to psychosis and paranoia for them.
- Weebs 5mo ago
  I'm wrestling with this right now. I only use LLMs for design and exploration because I am not employed and can't pay for a subscription right now, and they make the design phase feel like less of a fever dream because checking my ideas doesn't involve hours of scanning search results online and trying to see how my ideas fit with what exists or trying to evaluate if my ideas even make sense, so I feel more encouraged to get started on working, but I often wonder if the prompts are being sycophants In one case recently I explained a garbage collector design I had been toying with a while ago, but couldn't find research related to my idea or really evaluate if my idea would work. After enough arguing with the prompt it finally "understood", started praising my "novelty", and when I later asked for research related to it I was given a paper that already implemented most of my idea It was a funny moment of seeing how it was clearly trained on too many online forum comments (simply mentioning reference counting got it on this whole awkward line of false folklore about memory management) before switching to sycophancy, to finally showing me a paper
sajithdilshan 5mo ago
I can relate to this. Last October, I had a real epiphany using Claude Code at work. Suddenly, that initial inertia of starting something whether it’s drafting a JIRA ticket, structuring a PR, or just brainstorming completely vanished. I started using Claude exclusively in plan mode, and within minutes, I’d have full clarity on exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. With the release of the Opus model, I felt 100% more productive because I stopped spending time on menial tasks like manual coding or documentation. Instead, I shifted my focus to architecting, problem solving, and reviewing code to make it perfect. I even wrote two PyCharm plugins to unify my workflow (one to manage Claude Code sessions as a first class citizen and another to render Markdown in a less eye straining way) so I don't have to leave the IDE. However, the novelty is starting to wear off. Six months ago, I would have truly admired how efficient and productive the current version of myself has become, but now I just take it for granted. It has become the new normal, and I’m finding myself bored and stuck in a vicious cycle of constantly needing to reach the next level.
- bah9 5mo ago
  "shifted my focus to architecting, problem solving, and reviewing code to make it perfect" aka write couple more prompts and combine results. Pretty exciting
- canardadry 5mo ago
  Ah, the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
_ink_ 5mo ago
For me it's different. I am not diagnosed, but I think my executive function doesn't work right. It's really hard for me to start a new task, but when it is interesting enough I can hyper focus until it's done. In the past that often happened when I needed to implement something not too trivial. But now that AI does the implementation in minutes I need to switch tasks constantly and it is honestly super exhausting for me.
- ncr100 5mo ago
  Sounds to me like what people are identifying as dopamine, generating it and enjoying it. I am not educated though about brain function. Noticing novelty is beneficial in nature as it surfaces opportunities to conscious level. "Squirrel!" famously, from the movie "Up". It feels good to experience. Then, creating ones own dopamine supply can drive behavior, and increasing the number of behavior can exhaust energy supply on different human dimensions. So now, managing this process and limiting the dopamine cycle becomes also worthwhile -- avoiding fatigue potentially perhaps -- while still not negating the attractiveness of dopamine derivable from the endless opportunities of the world. <3
hyperific 5mo ago
Addressing the end of the article, I think that we are all very much still learning how to use AI responsibly. It's like we just discovered alcohol and we're going on a rager every night because we don't know any better yet. It's too easy to buy €100 of Claude tokens and burn through them to make those dream projects appear as if by magic. There's a middle ground where, for example, instead of building a whole project it could produce a project template and provide guidance as you build. That should take the edge off the task paralysis and hopefully disrupt the addiction loop.
- hirvi74 5mo ago
  That's how I use LLMs for programming. I predominately use the chatbots instead of the CLI tools. Every so often, I'll ask for a one-shot of some MVP, but then I take that MVP and make all the changes myself. However, I must say that I rarely do the one-shot-and-edit style of development. I find that such a process can save time, but not always.
ravila4 5mo ago
As someone with ADHD, it’s a lot more nuanced than that. Coding agents can remove task paralysis, but they also introduce many other distractions. Being one prompt away from zero to one is a double edged sword, because it means any random thought, idea and side project is also a prompt away.
- tim-projects 5mo ago
  This becomes less of a problem once you get into running agents on autopilot. Then it becomes about project and task management
josephyeo_dev 5mo ago
[flagged]
ncr100 5mo ago
I've a thought that AI could drive humanity to appreciate humans, as a side effect of its rise. Nowadays we're bumping up against alternative nonhuman intelligences, nowadays as we go about our lives. New neighbors, kind of. And AI has its idea of 'living' in this world .. as a servant to us mainly. So human life is changing: we now have the opportunity to relate to life (existential) while we're being influenced by the valuable accompaniment of these new docile servants. We're able to "see our plantation and peacocks" if you will. We experience our life-challenges differently ... now being alive to see our daily labors accomplished by others, and we're able to reap the benefits: more dopamine, resources, whatever. Our role is changing somewhat, being 'wealthy' or 'elevated'. I think this poses new questions implicitly, like: Q: Do we like our new wealthy-in-productive-results selves? Is this a life worth living?
dakiol 5mo ago
I've come to the conclusion that using AI is: - good for me in the short term (e.g., I can fulfill what my company asks from me) - good for the company in the short term (see above) - bad for me in the long-term. E.g, I'm starting to become more and more replaceable at my job; I don't have the same depth of understanding of the systems we're building as I used to; my peers and I collaborate way less now (instead of talking to each other, we just ask claude directly); and there's not much to be proud of in my day-to-day work (we're not building CRUDs, but we're not building netflix either, it's something in between). The compounding effect worries me too: every shortcut I take today is a piece of context I'm not internalizing, a debugging instinct I'm not sharpening, a tradeoff I;m not learning to weigh. The skills that used to differentiate me are slowly atrophying. We're all individually more "productive" on paper, but collectively i think we're gonna end up with a codebase nobody fully understands and a team that barely knows each other - good for the company in the long-term: they can fire me easily, they don't need 80% of us anymore. They can just pay anthropic for the agents instead. They don't need people to maintain or read the codebase either: agents do that now. And executives never really cared about us in the first place, so that part hasn't changed I guess. The math is simple from their side: headcount is the biggest line item, and agents don't ask for raises, don't burn out, don't go on leave, and dont push back when leadership makes a dumb call. We're the worst part of the business on a spreadsheet, and the tools to replace us are finally cheap enough that someone is gonna pull the trigger I'm not a superstar engineer. I know that. I'm probably in the 80% bag of engineers out there. Some of you may be in the top 20%, and you probably gonna keep your job somehow (or not, who knows). But for the rest of us, I think we simply cannot compete anymore. I regret every single time I've used AI so far. Nothing good has come from it for me; the feeling is so different from any other technology I've used in the past (frameworks, languages, libraries, whatever): it used to be fun, it improved my career prospects, it expanded my knowledge. AI/LLMs are precisely the opposite: it's not fun, it's making my career worse, and it's not expanding my knowledge. I CANNOT UNDERSTAND HOW MOST OF US, ENGINEERS, ARE OUT HERE VOUCHING FOR AI. WE ARE LITERALLY CHEERING ON THE THING THAT IS COMING FOR OUR JOBS, AND WE'RE DOING IT FOR FREE, POSTING BENCHMARKS AND EVANGELIZING IT TO OUR MANAGERS LIKE WE'RE GETTING A COMMISSION. WE ARE NOT. THE LABS AND THE EXECS GET PAID. WE're HANDING THEM THE ROPE
- aktau 5mo ago
rglover 5mo ago
Best way I've found around this: I design and code the UI for a given feature by hand and then let AI do the more tedious backend work (HITL/human-in-the-loop) I don't wish to do by hand. It's wonderful if you do the things you enjoy by hand and delegate the "buhhh" stuff to AI. This approach also circumvents the need to review massive PRs (you're only ever concerned with the individual feature, not the whole farm).
gglitch 5mo ago
I’ve been using CC as my GTD-buddy. All the usual plaintext files in a git repo, all the usual processes and workflows and constraints; but I’ve written two skills that have taken the activation energy out of what used to be the hard parts for me: /process-inbox and /weekly-review. Process-inbox interviews me item by item, making suggestions which I accept or amend, and it does the bookkeeping. I tell it when I want to do something and what calendar I want it on and it makes the calendar event. Weekly-review walks through an overview of everything done that week, all my open tasks and projects, makes sure everything has a scheduled next action. Sometimes I make a note, cancel something, reschedule something, whatever. This is nothing I couldn’t do on my own, and in fact, it’s a lot slower than just manually editing files myself. But: this way it’s actually getting done :) There’s too much hyperbole on this subject, so I won’t add to it; but it has solved a lot of very-long-running problems of mine.
Kuyawa 5mo ago
AI is a multiplier of both our expertise and our defects. I have learned how to hide my stupidity from AI's all-seeing eye and the result is the best I can expect from a tool that helped me become 100X more productive, I can't be happier.
redlewel 5mo ago
Why is this on the front page? Probably the least interesting thing I've read all week
- phainopepla2 5mo ago
  Probably because it resonates with the experience many people have when coding with LLMs
- vga1 5mo ago
  Probably because it has +219 votes.
pelasaco 5mo ago
One side note: it's funny how everyone suddenly "hates AI" while happily using it and profiting from it every day. We all want AI like Gyges wanted and used the ring in Plato's Republic.
- voxelghost 5mo ago
  Kind of like printers, I guess
patcon 5mo ago
In case anyone else is wondering if others feel this: yes, i can feel the risk of dopamine overshoot while using AI. As context, I've historically had ADHD that is crippling to a certain normal lifestyle. and I def feel the risk of mania or manic episodes when using these tools, in ways that I used to associate with the drug state of certain ADHD drugs. Now I am recontextualizing the past experiences as the feeling of moving toward my goals at a speed I am not accustomed to, rather than being exclusively a drug effect
bah9 5mo ago
AI basically killed my joy for programming. I've been working as swe in bigtech for 8 years. I like learning stuff, actually coding stuff with my hands, gather information and understanding before implementing, polish my code. Thats all gone Now I am just a monkey thats: 1) add enough context, description and harness to an agent 2) review ouput and repeat 1) if context is lacking It was bottom to top: from understanding to implementation. You were the owner. Now it is top to bottom: get implementation first, try to get understanding later. Thinking is also delegated. "Think" nowadays is "reformulate,answer questions, add context, try again". This doest feels like I am doing the work, this feels like I am a limiting factor here Another side effect is that any code now have 0 value. No one evaluating how you guided an agent, what decisions you took. People seeing your work and think "ye, I could vibe code that too with enough time" even if this is not true And my work isn't css and html (with all respect). It is mostly high performance clusters, parallel computing, OS, low level, SOTA online llm inference etc Now I am seriously considering blue collar job, as I have more joy building stuff with my hands than to be a passenger/context generator to an ai. I am not a business driven person, I don't really care how much money my company earns (sorry). I just like to solve technical puzzles and think hard P.S. yes, there are corner cases ai can't do well: non trivial, highly specific algorithms and implementations; complex patches to gigantic multi domain proprietary code bases, but that's like 5% of my work
- iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
  << No one evaluating how you guided an agent, what decisions you took. Oh, don't worry. That part is coming. It might be a cynical read, but the matured version of the field will have a ton of after the fact reviews ( especially in more regulated parts ) and you will hate it.
- simgt 5mo ago
  I'm in the same boat, weirdly I can't find colleagues or friends who share my point of view. It's always the same "I can do higher level thinking now" or "no it can't do X". You nailed it with the output having no value anymore. I find some solace in electronics repair, sadly there isn't much money to make in that.
haltonlabsops 5mo ago
[flagged]
protocolture 5mo ago
I am in a similar position but I have worked things out so that the AI enhances me and not the other way around. Depending on the project its about clearing my blockers, and giving me training, rather than being a slot machine that successful results fall out of. One of the big issues I had to overcome was realising that theres nearly zero value in a solution I dont understand. And my understanding is woefully incomplete. For instance, I have started doing a lot of personal electronics work. Its easy enough to request a circuit diagram and a BOM. but, the work still has to be done with my hands and crucially, the parts are purchased with my money. So I see a circuit diagram and I go "Hey why does this work" or "Uh shouldnt the added resistance between these components send the charge straight to ground" and by the time I have asked 100 questions, I have either established dominance (proven that the original diagram was incorrect) or learned some valuable information. And the questions I ask I can be generally assured are not worthy of being answered by skilled electrical people, and they definitely arent awake/wanting to answer my annoying questions at 2am or whatever. I have done this for years, when I started I approached it as "Hey ChatGPT, teach me python" and its been really good.
davmar7878 5mo ago
[flagged]

262 points by MrGilbert 5mo ago

Ozzie-D 5mo ago

[flagged]

mkeeter 5mo ago
Does one also get dopamine from using LLMs to write comments on Hacker News?
firegodjr 5mo ago
I really feel this. I find myself reaching for CC, typing half a prompt, and then realizing I could've done the task faster myself. But CC is exciting, and feels* fast, so I keep reaching for it. Somehow it feels worse to just do the work.

Weryj 5mo ago

I could have written this article myself. The addiction part, the ADHD part and the pending test part. The fear of becoming addicted to AI is real and I don't think I'll be capable to stop it, considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. My Pro went to Max(5) to Max(20) pretty quickly and I was burning through that weekly limit still, without large agentic workflows that burn tokens. Just me and 4-5 terminals. Sometimes I was happy to hit the limit because I was forced back to normal life. I've gone back to Pro to stop what was happening. Now I'm self-aware enough to notice the trend and put up safe guards, but that's because I've always had to adapt my environment to control my behaviour because I know direct behaviour control is abnormally challenging. I fear for those who won't see it coming, until they're in deep.

willwade 5mo ago
I find that the new "drug" is constantly hunting down new cheaper models.. z.ai/glm, mistral, deepseek.. if you need to get your fix - find the cheaper path..
- 7777332215 5mo ago
  Average drug connesiuer activities
MrGilbert 5mo ago
> [...] considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. It's so wild that it never dawned on me, why some people around me were so quick with "Let AI do that!". I'm not saying that each and everyone has ADHD, but I think I underestimated a) the flow of dopamine a successful prompt can set free and b) the craving for it by folks that I deemed more stable than myself.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  As someone with ADHD, it’s really a problem. I have so many random documents of random outputs from prompts I didn’t track. It’s honestly accelerated some of my worst habits because it feels like I actually completed a task. The reality is I just have folders of half finished projects, which anyone with ADHD can relate to. I’ll finish modding that Dreamcast one day…
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    I feel kind of lucky in a way that I hate working with AI so much. I'd rather hammer nails through my fingers than spend my time prompting So my ADHD isn't being satisfied by those little dopamine hits from LLMs, Any time I'm forced to use them I'm mad about it, and can't wait to be done with it I still have that folder of half finished things just like you, though. It's just not AI generated
- Weryj 5mo ago
  I thought about it a little deeper and I think software development has always had the addictive tendency. That hunt for the solution to the problem, has a rush when you complete it. It’s just that the rush is more frequent, addiction intensity scales with dose and frequency.
  - hyperadvanced 5mo ago
    I think I might be going through withdrawal because I feel like I rarely get that fun feeling anymore with coding :( It can be gratifying to get shit done but I love the feeling of coming up with a great reusable component and then making an entire app out of it
rufasterisco 5mo ago
Instead of jumping from project to project, I focus on one (maybe a few) and let myself free while agents spew out their output. Something physical is excellent for me: minor wood carving, origami, drawing exercises, also light physical exercises. My trick is to (try to) do something that requires high focus, on unrelated matters. To give a practical example, the simple gesture to connect 2 points on a sheet of paper via a direct, non trembling line, requires high focus: if you try to do it sloppily it is too long, too short, etc. I need to shadow the moment, gain focus, draw the line. It keeps my brain in focus, busy and engaged. Videos, podcasts, and in general enything digital seems to distract me away and/or overloads me. Also, I am back at using pomodoro technique more frequently. Just some pointers, in case you want to try out, or suggest some you find effective yourself.
moron4hire 5mo ago
Might call it the OnlyFans model of Software Development.
ip26 5mo ago
The counterweight has been, after using it for a bunch of projects, I have internalized that it will very, very quickly get me to maybe 60% and then I'll have to take it the rest of the way mostly by myself (or handholding it tightly for the remaining 40% at a much slower pace). In other words, the initial implementation is practically already there, already done. So there's no rush left in generating it - it's only worth bothering if I'm prepared to see it through to 100%. When it is worth pushing through to 100%, it's pretty great for getting the inertia going though.
- mettamage 5mo ago
  I feel AI agents are an amazing replacement for many Figma screens. Just create a crude version of your app and have users test it immediately.
tim-projects 5mo ago
For the addiction part I'm trying to squeeze as much quality code out of the free tokens possible. I'm having a blast!
iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
You got me curious, mostly because I did not evolve past one terminal for whatever reason. Can anyone tell me how that happens? Can you realistically keep track of much? Or is it really a move to management as one of the other poster's noted?
- Weryj 5mo ago
  My monolith is large enough to work on multiple systems in parallel without overlapping. One prompt with Opus might take 30-40 minutes once past the planning phase. So I plan the next work, while the current is still running and if that's a task that can't have parallel work, I have a bunch of time to keep planning the next steps for other systems. And then there's time for reading through the changes and applying corrective changes to the code or the meta-skills. I use CMUX and setup workspaces for each topic I'm working on, each workspace has number of tabs. That helps keeping track of everything I'm working on, but also means no topic gets left behind until I close the workspace. So they accumulate
butlike 5mo ago
Just follow the old drug using paradigm: "only get high on Friday." Only prompt on Friday

sourcecodeplz 5mo ago

It is really weird reading things but I guess normal? It seems many feel this, including me. AI just compounds this behavior even more! Darn.

pllbnk 5mo ago

So the end game for the current generation of AI companies won't be productivity improvements but gambling, just like everything else nowadays. That's why they want to get us all into these massive casinos they call data centers and don't want us to own the slot machines. So what that you have ideas - other people have them too. It's not ideas that build businesses but knowing right people or ability to sell products.

stavros 5mo ago
The gambling trope is so tired. AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree, certainly not more than hiring people to do a job can be considered "gambling" (you never know what you're going to get!). It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.
- pllbnk 5mo ago
  For most people who are not doing their day to day jobs it's just a prompt of their idea roughly sketched out and a miracle happens - LLM fills in the blanks. Every time it's different but it works, sometimes even better than initially expected. That's why the addiction and gambling. Gambling is a lot of things, not only flashing lights or play sounds. Some people claim prediction markets isn't gambling either, though that doesn't change the fact.
  - stavros 5mo ago
    How is this different from hiring a designer, telling them "make me a website" and then waiting to see if they resolve the uncertainty into something you like or not? I tell LLMs what to do in pretty high detail, and they do it. With LLMs I have much less variance than with coworkers.
    - js8 5mo ago
      It is different because for humans, it takes time to produce some result, while AI does it instantly. So if you tell a programmer to do X, you have a week for your adrenaline to cool off. If you tell AI, it will do it in minutes.

p0w3n3d 5mo ago

> What is it good for? > For me, personally? It helps me overcome my task paralysis. As mentioned earlier: I have a plan. A strategy. An idea. I just need someone (or something), who has fun in churning through the implementation. I have the ideas. But boy is coding exhausting. I find the same. AI helps me overcome any paralysis. I just think "hey it's cheap to write the prompt" and go on.

cl0ckt0wer 5mo ago

AI has replaced video games for me. And there are plenty of cheaper models that "do it" for me, I don't have to spend $$$$ just for entertainment. I will step up to the frontier for serious work. But if I'm just playing, I'm going for the free stuff on openrouter. Also, ai art is fine. It looks better than me using paint. That said, there are plenty of foss art pieces and public domain that you can leverage if all you really need is placeholders, and that is much cheaper.

thrance 5mo ago

Don't know about ADHD and whatnot, but I do feel this "task paralysis" pretty often. One thing that I found works really well for me is to work on multiple projects at once. Go one to two weeks on one, then switch to another. I'm not lacking motivation anymore and it feels great.

aaron695 5mo ago

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dgellow 5mo ago

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage fleets of agents. I do not want to rediscover for the hundredth time that in fact all this time an agent took shortcuts for acceptance tests I rely upon and didn’t catch. Or once again get the agent to understand why and what I want it to do after its context got bloated and it start to drift completely. While I got artifacts I can use (libraries, tools, docs), including some things that I’m pretty confident are SoA I do not feel satisfied anymore knowing that I used a model to generate them, even if I was the one designing every part of it. I do feel that I’m lying anytime I come to a colleague to share a new cool tool I have made. And I do not feel that relying on AI actually helped me improve with dealing with my executive function issues. YMMV but I’m personally feeling burnt out with AI coding agents and ready to go back to the old ways for my next personal project

entrox 5mo ago
Almost a decade ago, I moved my career into the management track. I am a director by now and have two more management levels between myself and individual contributors. I can strongly relate to what you‘re writing, because I share that same sentiment often in my daily (non-AI) work. In fact, coming from that background, the switch from coding to working with agents feels eerily similar to moving into management. You encounter the same challenges minus the „human people and emotions“ part: having to explain properly, the agents doing something different than what you intended, feeling detached from the actual work, only focusing on the bigger picture and so on To me it feels very natural, it is what I do every day. But then again, I made that choice and it wasn‘t forced on me. So I understand frustration.
- rubslopes 5mo ago
  I feel lucky to have been promoted to a management position recently, just as I was starting to feel less excited about dev work because of AI. I still enjoy building systems, but I have to admit that the loss of challenge made the work much less enjoyable for me. Now I have a team of interns to mentor. They're sharp and use AI constantly, so my guidance is less about code and more about UI/UX, understanding what the client actually wants, good work practices, well-documented tickets, thorough reviews, and so on. Thankfully, I like this work, it has been very rewarding.

adamtaylor_13 5mo ago

Nitpick: Stop the throat clearing and get to the point. The final paragraph is the whole point of the article. It's a real turnoff when I have to scroll past a moral lecture on artistry and piracy when I just want to hear your thoughts on task paralysis. --- To the author's point though, AI is incredible at building some initial momentum on a task. The initialization energy is basically zero.

kordlessagain 5mo ago
IP law is incompatible with AI. It's an important point, but not here.
renticulous 5mo ago
When I don't have time, I just ask AI to summarize the main points and expand on the point I like. I do this with even HN discussions. I just copy the whole HN page and paste into Claude and ask it to summarize and deduplicate talking points.
jplusequalt 5mo ago
You didn't have to read the article.
- pegasus 5mo ago
  And you don't have to read the critique.
- pessimizer 5mo ago
  You can't know that it was a waste of time to read until after you've read it. Especially if the point is at the end, and is a good point.
- furyofantares 5mo ago
  OP posted their article on the internet and then to HN presumably because they'd like people to read it.
dinfinity 5mo ago

andai 5mo ago

Re: Claude usage limits There was a comment the other day that explained how to use the new DeepSeek V4 with Claude Code. I mention because it's roughly fifty times cheaper than Claude, and the quality gap is closing. Which is the difference between "I don't use it for anything serious because I constantly run into limits" and "I can actually use the thing..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002640 It seems "Sonnet-ish" in quality so far, but I haven't tested it much yet.

albert_e 5mo ago

Resonates with me. In a paradoxical way, the amount of stuff you can get done in an hour now is like a firehose -- which we rarely experienced in our earlier life -- which can be overwhelming to my brain. So I subconsciously resist starting a session because I never feel fully rested, calm, and focussed to take all that and process it well. There are also 10x more "active" projects now -- and prioritization and choosing between them at every moment is still a struggle. The tempation to do the fun and novel thing and avoid important but familar boring chores pops up every step of the way and can derail you for days. I am still trying to create a system that works -- now using the very tools. Long journey ahead. EDIT: My experience -- I was paying for both Claude Code as well as ChatGPT Pro ...but was heavily almost exlucively using CC for coding work because it was so good. After CC started hammering the session and weekly quotas lately -- I tentatively srated using Codex and find that it seems equally good and almost indistnguishable for my work, and ocassionally shines by one-shotting some tasks. This helped me stay afloat with just 2x$20 spend per month without feeling held-up for ransom. Also never hit codex limits till now. Leaving a 5 hour session quota unused towards the end, or worse not even starting a 5 hour session clock, was a source of constant anxiety -- that I am wasting precious quota getting nothing done. I think I am getting over that now.

rsyring 5mo ago
I've been using Augment's agents (VS code, CLI) for 8ish months. It let's me easily switch between GPT and Claude models. I've found the best results from letting GPT 5.4 code and then asking Opus to do code reviews to a file. I do the review in a different agent session so it's "fresh". Then I review the file, edit until I agree with everything, and let the existing GPT agent session address the items in the review file. I've found Clause agents don't perform as well for me in coding for whatever reason. They feel more sloppy. I've also been doing a very organic spec-driven development process where I have a md file for each non-trivial project update and use that to define the task and address questions or problems the agent has. I've also found I can give agents conditional instructions which they will usually use like skills. This gives me a way to easily distribute my instructions to any agent/model on any machine with a single AGENTS.md as the entry point: https://github.com/rsyring/agent-configs/blob/main/default.md https://github.com/rsyring/agent-configs/blob/main/default.m... This has all been very effective, more than I would have predicted a year ago.

keiferski 5mo ago

Another way to put this is that focus is ultimately what matters, when it comes to actually getting stuff done. Choosing what not to do is often more important than what you actually do. Since AI tools make it extremely easy to get started, it's really easy to begin half a dozen different projects, feel like you're being productive, but actually accomplish nothing. This accurately described how I used to utilize AI – and my ChatGPT history is filled with all sorts of grandiose project plans. But lately I've been more and more narrow with what I actually prompt. This leads me to think that a chatbox is not the best UI for using AI, as it's too open-ended and too prone to give you long, broad answers, rather than hyper-specific ones.

rufasterisco 5mo ago

Some traits I recognized in many excellent coders i worked with, their drive to optimization, intellectual thirst, critical and creative thinking are attributes i consistently correlated with them being in some sort of neurodivergence spectrum. Being able to remove the "first step" block is great, but what worries me is that this is coupled with LLMs sycophantic behaviours. My gut feeling is that coupling the feeling of unblocking ones capabilities with dopamine hits with the constant praising over someone abilities is an intro to psychosis and paranoia for them.

Weebs 5mo ago
I'm wrestling with this right now. I only use LLMs for design and exploration because I am not employed and can't pay for a subscription right now, and they make the design phase feel like less of a fever dream because checking my ideas doesn't involve hours of scanning search results online and trying to see how my ideas fit with what exists or trying to evaluate if my ideas even make sense, so I feel more encouraged to get started on working, but I often wonder if the prompts are being sycophants In one case recently I explained a garbage collector design I had been toying with a while ago, but couldn't find research related to my idea or really evaluate if my idea would work. After enough arguing with the prompt it finally "understood", started praising my "novelty", and when I later asked for research related to it I was given a paper that already implemented most of my idea It was a funny moment of seeing how it was clearly trained on too many online forum comments (simply mentioning reference counting got it on this whole awkward line of false folklore about memory management) before switching to sycophancy, to finally showing me a paper

sajithdilshan 5mo ago

I can relate to this. Last October, I had a real epiphany using Claude Code at work. Suddenly, that initial inertia of starting something whether it’s drafting a JIRA ticket, structuring a PR, or just brainstorming completely vanished. I started using Claude exclusively in plan mode, and within minutes, I’d have full clarity on exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. With the release of the Opus model, I felt 100% more productive because I stopped spending time on menial tasks like manual coding or documentation. Instead, I shifted my focus to architecting, problem solving, and reviewing code to make it perfect. I even wrote two PyCharm plugins to unify my workflow (one to manage Claude Code sessions as a first class citizen and another to render Markdown in a less eye straining way) so I don't have to leave the IDE. However, the novelty is starting to wear off. Six months ago, I would have truly admired how efficient and productive the current version of myself has become, but now I just take it for granted. It has become the new normal, and I’m finding myself bored and stuck in a vicious cycle of constantly needing to reach the next level.

bah9 5mo ago
"shifted my focus to architecting, problem solving, and reviewing code to make it perfect" aka write couple more prompts and combine results. Pretty exciting
canardadry 5mo ago
Ah, the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

_ink_ 5mo ago

For me it's different. I am not diagnosed, but I think my executive function doesn't work right. It's really hard for me to start a new task, but when it is interesting enough I can hyper focus until it's done. In the past that often happened when I needed to implement something not too trivial. But now that AI does the implementation in minutes I need to switch tasks constantly and it is honestly super exhausting for me.

ncr100 5mo ago
Sounds to me like what people are identifying as dopamine, generating it and enjoying it. I am not educated though about brain function. Noticing novelty is beneficial in nature as it surfaces opportunities to conscious level. "Squirrel!" famously, from the movie "Up". It feels good to experience. Then, creating ones own dopamine supply can drive behavior, and increasing the number of behavior can exhaust energy supply on different human dimensions. So now, managing this process and limiting the dopamine cycle becomes also worthwhile -- avoiding fatigue potentially perhaps -- while still not negating the attractiveness of dopamine derivable from the endless opportunities of the world. <3

hyperific 5mo ago

Addressing the end of the article, I think that we are all very much still learning how to use AI responsibly. It's like we just discovered alcohol and we're going on a rager every night because we don't know any better yet. It's too easy to buy €100 of Claude tokens and burn through them to make those dream projects appear as if by magic. There's a middle ground where, for example, instead of building a whole project it could produce a project template and provide guidance as you build. That should take the edge off the task paralysis and hopefully disrupt the addiction loop.

hirvi74 5mo ago
That's how I use LLMs for programming. I predominately use the chatbots instead of the CLI tools. Every so often, I'll ask for a one-shot of some MVP, but then I take that MVP and make all the changes myself. However, I must say that I rarely do the one-shot-and-edit style of development. I find that such a process can save time, but not always.

ravila4 5mo ago

As someone with ADHD, it’s a lot more nuanced than that. Coding agents can remove task paralysis, but they also introduce many other distractions. Being one prompt away from zero to one is a double edged sword, because it means any random thought, idea and side project is also a prompt away.

tim-projects 5mo ago
This becomes less of a problem once you get into running agents on autopilot. Then it becomes about project and task management

josephyeo_dev 5mo ago

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ncr100 5mo ago

I've a thought that AI could drive humanity to appreciate humans, as a side effect of its rise. Nowadays we're bumping up against alternative nonhuman intelligences, nowadays as we go about our lives. New neighbors, kind of. And AI has its idea of 'living' in this world .. as a servant to us mainly. So human life is changing: we now have the opportunity to relate to life (existential) while we're being influenced by the valuable accompaniment of these new docile servants. We're able to "see our plantation and peacocks" if you will. We experience our life-challenges differently ... now being alive to see our daily labors accomplished by others, and we're able to reap the benefits: more dopamine, resources, whatever. Our role is changing somewhat, being 'wealthy' or 'elevated'. I think this poses new questions implicitly, like: Q: Do we like our new wealthy-in-productive-results selves? Is this a life worth living?

dakiol 5mo ago

I've come to the conclusion that using AI is: - good for me in the short term (e.g., I can fulfill what my company asks from me) - good for the company in the short term (see above) - bad for me in the long-term. E.g, I'm starting to become more and more replaceable at my job; I don't have the same depth of understanding of the systems we're building as I used to; my peers and I collaborate way less now (instead of talking to each other, we just ask claude directly); and there's not much to be proud of in my day-to-day work (we're not building CRUDs, but we're not building netflix either, it's something in between). The compounding effect worries me too: every shortcut I take today is a piece of context I'm not internalizing, a debugging instinct I'm not sharpening, a tradeoff I;m not learning to weigh. The skills that used to differentiate me are slowly atrophying. We're all individually more "productive" on paper, but collectively i think we're gonna end up with a codebase nobody fully understands and a team that barely knows each other - good for the company in the long-term: they can fire me easily, they don't need 80% of us anymore. They can just pay anthropic for the agents instead. They don't need people to maintain or read the codebase either: agents do that now. And executives never really cared about us in the first place, so that part hasn't changed I guess. The math is simple from their side: headcount is the biggest line item, and agents don't ask for raises, don't burn out, don't go on leave, and dont push back when leadership makes a dumb call. We're the worst part of the business on a spreadsheet, and the tools to replace us are finally cheap enough that someone is gonna pull the trigger I'm not a superstar engineer. I know that. I'm probably in the 80% bag of engineers out there. Some of you may be in the top 20%, and you probably gonna keep your job somehow (or not, who knows). But for the rest of us, I think we simply cannot compete anymore. I regret every single time I've used AI so far. Nothing good has come from it for me; the feeling is so different from any other technology I've used in the past (frameworks, languages, libraries, whatever): it used to be fun, it improved my career prospects, it expanded my knowledge. AI/LLMs are precisely the opposite: it's not fun, it's making my career worse, and it's not expanding my knowledge. I CANNOT UNDERSTAND HOW MOST OF US, ENGINEERS, ARE OUT HERE VOUCHING FOR AI. WE ARE LITERALLY CHEERING ON THE THING THAT IS COMING FOR OUR JOBS, AND WE'RE DOING IT FOR FREE, POSTING BENCHMARKS AND EVANGELIZING IT TO OUR MANAGERS LIKE WE'RE GETTING A COMMISSION. WE ARE NOT. THE LABS AND THE EXECS GET PAID. WE're HANDING THEM THE ROPE

aktau 5mo ago

rglover 5mo ago

Best way I've found around this: I design and code the UI for a given feature by hand and then let AI do the more tedious backend work (HITL/human-in-the-loop) I don't wish to do by hand. It's wonderful if you do the things you enjoy by hand and delegate the "buhhh" stuff to AI. This approach also circumvents the need to review massive PRs (you're only ever concerned with the individual feature, not the whole farm).

gglitch 5mo ago

I’ve been using CC as my GTD-buddy. All the usual plaintext files in a git repo, all the usual processes and workflows and constraints; but I’ve written two skills that have taken the activation energy out of what used to be the hard parts for me: /process-inbox and /weekly-review. Process-inbox interviews me item by item, making suggestions which I accept or amend, and it does the bookkeeping. I tell it when I want to do something and what calendar I want it on and it makes the calendar event. Weekly-review walks through an overview of everything done that week, all my open tasks and projects, makes sure everything has a scheduled next action. Sometimes I make a note, cancel something, reschedule something, whatever. This is nothing I couldn’t do on my own, and in fact, it’s a lot slower than just manually editing files myself. But: this way it’s actually getting done :) There’s too much hyperbole on this subject, so I won’t add to it; but it has solved a lot of very-long-running problems of mine.

Kuyawa 5mo ago

AI is a multiplier of both our expertise and our defects. I have learned how to hide my stupidity from AI's all-seeing eye and the result is the best I can expect from a tool that helped me become 100X more productive, I can't be happier.

redlewel 5mo ago

Why is this on the front page? Probably the least interesting thing I've read all week

phainopepla2 5mo ago
Probably because it resonates with the experience many people have when coding with LLMs
vga1 5mo ago
Probably because it has +219 votes.

pelasaco 5mo ago

One side note: it's funny how everyone suddenly "hates AI" while happily using it and profiting from it every day. We all want AI like Gyges wanted and used the ring in Plato's Republic.

voxelghost 5mo ago
Kind of like printers, I guess

patcon 5mo ago

In case anyone else is wondering if others feel this: yes, i can feel the risk of dopamine overshoot while using AI. As context, I've historically had ADHD that is crippling to a certain normal lifestyle. and I def feel the risk of mania or manic episodes when using these tools, in ways that I used to associate with the drug state of certain ADHD drugs. Now I am recontextualizing the past experiences as the feeling of moving toward my goals at a speed I am not accustomed to, rather than being exclusively a drug effect

bah9 5mo ago

AI basically killed my joy for programming. I've been working as swe in bigtech for 8 years. I like learning stuff, actually coding stuff with my hands, gather information and understanding before implementing, polish my code. Thats all gone Now I am just a monkey thats: 1) add enough context, description and harness to an agent 2) review ouput and repeat 1) if context is lacking It was bottom to top: from understanding to implementation. You were the owner. Now it is top to bottom: get implementation first, try to get understanding later. Thinking is also delegated. "Think" nowadays is "reformulate,answer questions, add context, try again". This doest feels like I am doing the work, this feels like I am a limiting factor here Another side effect is that any code now have 0 value. No one evaluating how you guided an agent, what decisions you took. People seeing your work and think "ye, I could vibe code that too with enough time" even if this is not true And my work isn't css and html (with all respect). It is mostly high performance clusters, parallel computing, OS, low level, SOTA online llm inference etc Now I am seriously considering blue collar job, as I have more joy building stuff with my hands than to be a passenger/context generator to an ai. I am not a business driven person, I don't really care how much money my company earns (sorry). I just like to solve technical puzzles and think hard P.S. yes, there are corner cases ai can't do well: non trivial, highly specific algorithms and implementations; complex patches to gigantic multi domain proprietary code bases, but that's like 5% of my work

iugtmkbdfil834 5mo ago
<< No one evaluating how you guided an agent, what decisions you took. Oh, don't worry. That part is coming. It might be a cynical read, but the matured version of the field will have a ton of after the fact reviews ( especially in more regulated parts ) and you will hate it.
simgt 5mo ago
I'm in the same boat, weirdly I can't find colleagues or friends who share my point of view. It's always the same "I can do higher level thinking now" or "no it can't do X". You nailed it with the output having no value anymore. I find some solace in electronics repair, sadly there isn't much money to make in that.

haltonlabsops 5mo ago

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protocolture 5mo ago

I am in a similar position but I have worked things out so that the AI enhances me and not the other way around. Depending on the project its about clearing my blockers, and giving me training, rather than being a slot machine that successful results fall out of. One of the big issues I had to overcome was realising that theres nearly zero value in a solution I dont understand. And my understanding is woefully incomplete. For instance, I have started doing a lot of personal electronics work. Its easy enough to request a circuit diagram and a BOM. but, the work still has to be done with my hands and crucially, the parts are purchased with my money. So I see a circuit diagram and I go "Hey why does this work" or "Uh shouldnt the added resistance between these components send the charge straight to ground" and by the time I have asked 100 questions, I have either established dominance (proven that the original diagram was incorrect) or learned some valuable information. And the questions I ask I can be generally assured are not worthy of being answered by skilled electrical people, and they definitely arent awake/wanting to answer my annoying questions at 2am or whatever. I have done this for years, when I started I approached it as "Hey ChatGPT, teach me python" and its been really good.

davmar7878 5mo ago

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