11 ms·

I think I have LLM burnout

• hoppp 3mo ago
  Tell the llm to answer like a cavemen, if llm talk like cavemen, the answers become shorter and more compressed. https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman It's for getting it to output shorter answers, but also could help with your burnout.
  • ysavir 3mo ago
    I surprisingly had good results when I told the LLM to only communicate in ASCII memes. It did a fantastic job of summarizing the situation using relevant memes, and the humor was enough to keep things fresh. As silly as it sounds, it's worth trying when you're in that LLM burnout corner.
  • chairmansteve 3mo ago
    Works for me.
  • sachamorard 3mo ago
    What does that have to do with the topic? Someone is sharing something serious on this thread, I don't see how your message helps.
    • hoppp 3mo ago
      The other guys commenting seems to understand. Not keeping the output in the default could make it more easy reading it, hence less burnout. It's ok if you don't get it, but other people do, so can't generalize with your lack of comprehension.
• Bratmon 3mo ago
  This is legitimately the reason I'm looking to leave programming. I got into programming because the problems of programming were interesting to me. But if the problems go from "figure out why this calculator is off by one in France" to "Get this LLM to stop spamming cutsey emojis", then maybe it's time for a career change.
  • Bratmon 3mo ago
    (And I admit I'm salty that the "I don't give a shit about why the calculator doesn't work in France, I'm just here because they pay me to fix it" people were the ones vindicated by technological progress)
    • teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      • slopinthebag 3mo ago
        In every industry, and we wonder why everything is being enshittified. I'm not looking forward to using computers or technology over the next decade. There is a non-zero chance myself or a loved one is killed because of vibe coding.
        • fragmede 3mo ago
          There's also a non zero chance that someone in your life is going to have fun and whimsy and their life improved by vibe coding. Why focus on the negative?
          • QwenGlazer9000 3mo ago
            Are you fr?
          • slopinthebag 3mo ago
            Yes who cares if they die as long as they had some fun and whimsy first! :P Edit: fr though I have plenty of fun and whimsy without needing vibe coded apps and I'd prefer a 911 call didn't get routed to Burger King because someone vibe coded the comm stack...
            • esseph 3mo ago
              We're all going to die. Have your fun and whimsy.
• nzeid 3mo ago
  I do not have the burnout but I certainly operate similarly to the author. I continue to be unable to establish a workflow where allowing the LLM to generate code that I review is faster than writing the code myself. Literally the only two ways out of this dilemma is to blindly trust what was generated or to generate an uncharacteristically exhaustive suite of unit tests to validate every possible scenario. I just write the business logic myself and have the LLM do a lot of the rest. Boilerplate falls into the latter as well.
  • jaggederest 3mo ago
    > generate an uncharacteristically exhaustive suite of unit tests to validate every possible scenario. This is what you want. You want comprehensive tests at every level, far more than is reasonable for a human to build or maintain, from unit, functional, to full end to end and beyond. Adversarial testing (both TDD-style "write tests to demonstrate this bug", and posthoc "prove this patch wrong with a new test") is the best way to keep AI on track and make those diffs you have to read clean and easy. An even better way is to use a more strongly typed language and really lock it down, but you can use testing in any language. I feel like my background in TDD and "TATFT" has been secret sauce when working with AI
    • dprkh 3mo ago
      I used an LLM to build this https://github.com/dprkh/eventfs https://github.com/dprkh/eventfs It has good test coverage, mostly unit tests but also a number of end-to-end tests. I also made the LLM build a benchmark, which you can find at the bottom of the readme. It is obviously slow, but I thought that it is good enough to work. When I tried to write a 1 GiB file, I found that it broke down, and after writing half the file, the speed went to under one megabyte per second. Implementation is 10k+ LoC, and I have no idea what is going on there.
      • nzeid 3mo ago
        Yep.
      • 3mo ago
• hyperhello 3mo ago
  I don’t understand what could possibly need to be made so fast that isn’t totally made up billable hours. Running at top speed long enough to be burned out is either ineffective, or valuable enough that someone else can take over while you sleep.
  • razster 3mo ago
    Even with Fabel and all that I constantly keep having to babysit it and correct it like it’s an adolescent and it gets really old and the amount of code. It produces not all of its great at all. I’m burnt out looking at. It’s poor coating that somehow magically works.
• Terr_ 3mo ago
  It sounds kind of like being stuck working with coworkers who--while not overtly hostile--need constant hand-holding and repeat the same kinds of mistakes every day and can't even be genuinely sorry about it. Just because we work with computers doesn't mean we don't take, er, social-damage. Or perhaps parasocial damage, in this case.
  • cognitiveinline 3mo ago
    These agents follow instructions to never make a specific mistake, if you simply record it on context (like AGENTs.md). You'll frustrate yourself by not using this tool without above. You'll definintely frustrate yourself expecting the tool to be "genuinely sorry"!
    • xboxnolifes 3mo ago
      Hahahahaha
• dirtbag__dad 3mo ago
  > My main project right now is to establish a framework for large-scale, unsupervised code generation in our codebase Anyone else working on something like this or know of any projects attempting it?
  • jaggederest 3mo ago
    https://github.com/gastownhall/gascity https://github.com/gastownhall/gascity is certainly a choice. I enjoyed playing with gas town but it was a little too nondeterministic for production code, I think. Directionally if what you're doing is straightforward it's an amazing experience to be able to slap in an epic planning document and wake up the next day to it being "done", with a big asterisk that done-ness is directly proportional to how good of a spec and how good of a model you were using. That being said, these days if you use Fable, slap in an epic planning document, and ask it to run a workflow (be sure to specify that subagents should use, say, Sonnet, or wave goodbye to your wallet), it's almost as good as gastown/gascity but far more predictable.
  • Exoristos 3mo ago
    An almost infinite supply of such modern-day alchemists.
  • alasano 3mo ago
    I'm building something for that. I've taken a bit longer than I wanted but it will be open sourced soon. It's a durable orchestration engine that takes in specs/requirements and coordinates agents externally (meaning the engine drives the loop, not an agent) until the work is fully implemented/verified and reviewed. It's meant to be used with any harness as basically the last step. You plan your work with whatever LLM you use and then hand off implementation to the engine (through an MCP server or other surfaces) It can use your OpenAI/Anthropic subscriptions or any other provider and you can mix and match models across implementation and review in any way you want with fan out for parallel reviewers and more. The goal is to produce high quality unsupervised code that matches your requirements and is reviewed throughout the implementation rather than at the end only, so that mistakes don't compound. https://engine.build https://engine.build if you want to get notified when it releases.
• jaggederest 3mo ago
  I think having style guidance in your context is valuable for avoiding this kind of thing. Having to read awful, cliched text all day is even worse than having to read reams of useless code. I have some simple humanizing content in there that specifically calls out the rhetorical devices that AI loves, and it drastically improves the diffs and comments. It also makes the coding performance generally slightly worse, but ergonomics uber alles.
• internet2000 3mo ago
  Avoid Gemini and the lesser ChatGPT models and your emoji problem goes away.
• dpc_01234 3mo ago
  I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, and there could be 10x more if everyone just "optimized" and streamlined processes fed the AI even more tasks in parallel faster. It just being a bottleneck of everything, all the time is tiring... I am happy about all the little side-projects, and ideas it help my realize, and I enjoy exploring this new world, but I've noticed LLMs feed my unhealthy "don't want to take a break and waste time being idle" mindset, and I need to correct it. W.r.t. article's main complain - I think the similar thing happened due to factory manufacturing automation. What used to be a varied skillful craft in a shop became standing in a single place of an assembly line doing the exact same thing whole day. LLM took away the more creative and variable part of the work, and left the repetitive QA rubber-stamping. Probably some of the mitigations used back then could be rediscovered today.
  • walrus01 3mo ago
    > No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by wankers I confess that the above variant on the quotation is how I originally read it. And that's just about how I feel now with trying to sort through vibe-coded slop projects that are put forth by (well-meaning, probably good intentioned, not evil) people who represent them as if they're the handcrafted result of one dedicated developer.
  • wisty 3mo ago
    Individual gains from llm seem much larger than net productivity increases. I think a major source of this discrepency is people creating more work for their coworkers at the speed of slop. Especially the people with no idea. "I did a Chat output, please fix and review it " is the kind of thing that empowers the people who used to have a minimal productivity, and now lets them to wreck things on an industrial scale.
    • 3mo ago
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• readme 3mo ago
  I don't have much success with using the LLM to make changes to a big legacy codebase. Instead, I use the LLM to gripe about things I don't like in the code. Usually, it is a brilliant commiserator.
• block_dagger 3mo ago
  I've started feeling slightly physically ill when I read Opus output for hours straight. This article rings very true for me. I've started complaining about it with my team; at least have a personal style guide in your agent rules that eliminates emdashes, the "it's not X, it's Y"s, the long lists of modifiers before the noun, using the word "land" to mean finish, etc. I hope this is just a phase of adolescent LLMs.
  • strken 3mo ago
    `arc land` is burnt into my brain by Phabricator, so I'm aware that the term predates LLMs, but it still drives me nuts. It's impossible to undo some of these linguistic wobbles. Even if you could filter out 100% of LLM input, the humans themselves are learning to say "land" at a higher frequency now.
  • helloplanets 3mo ago
    It's kind of offputting how much Anthropic models these days keep repeating "real", "genuine" and "honest". They've RL'd that way over the top.
    • block_dagger 3mo ago
      "You're right for pointing this out. Honestly, your comment raises a real concern — they genuinely RL'd that over the top." - Claude
    • dpkirchner 3mo ago
      I had Claude make a world cloud from its responses because I was curious to see how big "honest" would be. It barely showed up, so I asked it to just give me the counts and it responded telling me it was trained not to use the word "honest" much because it makes people distrust responses (in addition to showing me the counts).
      • helloplanets 3mo ago
        I just did this on one .claude directory and >20% of the answers there included some variation of "real", "actual", "exact", "honest", "genuine", "valid", "true". ~15% in that directory contain some variation of "real", "genuine" or "honest". This is excluding thinking tokens, sub-agent output, etc.
• wxre 3mo ago
  I don't mind interacting with LLMs myself and find they increase my productivity a decent amount. I just can't stand dealing with other people's slop. Getting sent IM responses that are copy pasted LLM nonsense. Getting a massive PR to review that was generated overnight and the author didn't read it first.
  • hattmall 3mo ago
    So annoying, I'm dealing with a client that just constantly feeds my responses to their question into AI. Which of course just asks more questions and tells me how clever I am. I also know the client isn't reading because in many spots I put "[Client Name] you need to answer this directly as we need to know the actual real business detail" and its ignored or the AI provides a detail I know is made up.
• deeprack4sure 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Cider9986 3mo ago
    How?
    • yard2010 3mo ago
      Ask random questions until you get enough sense of things to ask "the right" questions. Never stop asking questions. Use everything you can to get the answers and never settle for any answer no matter how good it sounds, doubt it and go back to step 1.
• kyzcdev 3mo ago
  What to do to achieve this kind of burn out, I feel like I am a stubborn old developer, I'm coding since 2013 and I am 25 years old. My mind still can't function well without having knowledge about everything.
• anonu 3mo ago
  It's burnt me out too. I'm generating 10x more features and multitasking across 4 disparate projects. My greatest concern is I don't really have a strong connection to the underlying fundamentals anymore. I need to see how the things works to internalize it. Now I just trust that the agent wrote this piece correctly. The productivity drive and the sheer feature set you can generate in record time makes it easy to forget proper sdlc hygiene.
  • topgrain2 3mo ago
    Knowing how things work, knowing what should be possible and where “there be dragons”, and having a pretty well-developed “sixth sense” for all kinds of things is proving just as valuable with LLM-heavy programming as it did before. … but I am almost certain I’d never have developed those in the first place if I hadn’t spent 25ish years programming on a bunch of different platforms and setting up servers and networks and all that, without LLMs. I dunno how you make another “me”, now, while before lots and lots of programmers naturally ended up as someone with skills and knowledge like mine, and those skills seem super useful when writing code with LLMs.
• slopinthebag 3mo ago
  I don't really understand how this isn't a self-inflicted problem? Perhaps it's because I'm not really mandated to use LLMs in a particular way, but I've had great success doing a combination of writing code myself and using smaller but faster models as a sort of "flood fill". The larger models can also be useful when you're implementing something which already exists in similar form in the codebase, because you can just put that code in the context and you'll get something very similar outputted. So the more code you write, the better the LLM can be later on. Codebases should get easier to add to the bigger they get, not harder. Of course if you're supposed to achieve so much output that it's not possible to do anything but vibe it, fair enough.
• anigbrowl 3mo ago
  started to dread reading LLM output because I know what I’m going to find. False assumptions and hallucinations. Emphatic, staccato fragments. Excessive emojis . I do not understand these complaints. Yes, those are the defaults and they're annoying, although the general public seems to like them. But you are not stuck with these. You can just tell the LLM how it should interact with you. If you're using any sort of harness beyond the chat window in a web browser, you can codify these instructions in a rules.md file or similar and have it automatically included in any new chat. It's not any harder than changing the default wallpaper or color scheme on your desktop operating system. In reverse order, you can just tell the LLM to never use emojis. I don't like emphatic staccato fragments either, so I tell it to eschew the language of marketing and hype and stick to a factual and plain language, or to employ an academic tone. I explicitly instruct mine to ask clarifying questions whenever context is ambiguous and to push back on false assumptions or common misconceptions (by me). Hallucinationsa re the biggest problem of those you mention; it's not easy to totally eliminate them (for the same reason it's not easy to instruct people to not fall for scams or disinformation), but you can considerably reduce them by setting standards for citations. I have ideas about reducing hallucinations over work material (ie a codebase) but am omitting them here as they are not fully thought out or tested.
• jamesjhare 3mo ago
  i think we're interacting with a character not a person.
• jamesjhare 3mo ago
  is there any evidence that Alec Scollon, the first time blog author responsible for this post, even exists? look up the name. boo this post and the premise behind it.
  • charlesfries 3mo ago
    The domain "alecscollon.com" was also registered today, according to WHOIS
  • human305893 3mo ago
    I don't even know what percentage of people here are even real. I don't like any of this any more.
  • derdi 3mo ago
    Define "exists". Are you questioning whether a human typed those characters with human fingers on a keyboard? Or are you questioning whether Alec Scollon is the name on that human's government-issued ID? It's not exactly new or unusual for people to use pseudonyms.
• dthedavid 3mo ago
  If you can afford it, I highly recommend quitting and going independent at least for a while. It’s so much fun building right now.
  • hjhart 3mo ago
    Can you elaborate on what you're doing to make a living?
    • dthedavid 3mo ago
      I'm a SWE and still a SWE. Just moved from HCOL to LCOL and am working for myself.
• treefry 3mo ago
  From my experience, there are mainly 3 burnout reasons. 1. Multi-tasking is the top one. I usually have to frequently switch between 3 to 5 agent windows which are on different things. It's extremely exhausting when each round takes a few minutes. Before coding agent era, I believe most developers had chance to spend 2+ hours focusing on one thing. Now coding agents have increased my spectrum on the tech stack, but the bandwidth to do deep work isn't increased. 2. Agents are good at getting things running without crash, but do not guarantee to produce correct code. This is quite different from human experts with fundamental knowledge. 3. I also get frustrated when reviewing piles of AI generated low quality PRs. My attention is a limited resource. I don't waste too much energy on other people's work, but if I don't spend more effort, the entire project is corrupted quickly by reckless AI generated code without human author's careful thoughts and designs. Working with people who have less due diligence in mind is painful, working with them in coding agent era is 10x painful because they produce 10x shit. It's a team culture challenge that cannot be easily enforced.
  • j_bum 3mo ago
    Agreed. I am working hard to restrict myself to only 1-2 agent workflows at a time. More is untenable, though it’s so easy to fall into the trap of deploying an agent “just for this minor fix.”
    • imhoguy 3mo ago
      The worst is that every agent session is generating so many "btw fix this" side-quests that it is really hard to stay in the task focus. I throw some into todo list manually but still it is exploding by the day. Perfect is enemy of good.
• canada_dry 3mo ago
  The reason I'm getting LLM burnout is from dealing with the obvious neutering and opaque downgrading of all the top models. Prior to the last 12mos AI companies were hell bent on squeezing out the best results from mediocre models. But... now that the top models have progressed, those same AI companies have switched their efforts into reducing the computation (cost of a producing a result) as much as possible without being too obvious. What was an exponential slope in the quality of results over the last 36 months has now nearly flat lined. Addendum: IMHO results have 'flat lined' not because the models aren't much more capable than a year ago, but because conserving the enormous processing cost (of an over subscribed user base) supersedes the goal of following the user's explicit instructions (e.g. especially if that means more processing cost) to generate the best results.
  • LastTrain 3mo ago
    You sure about that? Maybe it is reality hitting expectations after the initial “holy shit” wears off
    • doawoo 3mo ago
      I'd bet more on this personally.
    • osener 3mo ago
      Smart people have been falling into this trap as long as LLMs have hit production. Supposedly early internal versions of GPT-4 had "sparks of AGI" but the public version was "dumbed down for safety" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c
  • Yiin 3mo ago
    Cannot relate, my expectations might just gone up, because when I compare what I was producing with agents a year ago vs now, it's night and day.
  • jampa 3mo ago
    I feel the same way about consumer AI tools now. Gemini and ChatGPT have been abysmal lately. They can no longer be relied on to do multi-turn searching and thinking. Before, they could stay in thinking mode for more than 7 minutes. For example, "find a source for this claim" would search, analyze, and self-adjust the query. Nowadays, even if I push for it, I cannot make these tools work for more than 30 seconds before they give generic answers, even in "Pro" mode.
• mannanj 3mo ago
  I had this too. Started after lay off in October. What helped was a sleep and work system, oriented around being offline that was inspired by nature and from my earlier days in working in tech while car camping across the national parks. Basically: the sun wins in terms of how all energy on the earth is structured, and expressed. All manners of cycles of organisms and living systems are in relation to its rise and fall, and even its particular color spectrum phases (whether thats night oriented or day). I call this our real circadian rhythm; it's used to being signaled by the light of the sun and maybe fire for millions of years and it isn't until recent centuries when we started tricking our biology with LEDs and lights. So the solution is simple. Orient yourself around the light of the sun and make sure it's the first and last major light source you see; blue limiting is the most important part BEFORE sunrise and AFTER CUT OFF ALL BLUE LIGHT. On my Mac I use a red light filter (using it now, it's 11:07pm ET and the sun went down about 2.5 hours ago). It's really hard to stay alert and chatting with an LLM when the only light sources are red and you keep them dim at that. Our ancestors would rest when the sun's at its peak (~1:05 pm today) and that's a good time to divide my own day productively as well. With intentional breaks diving the middle of the day with sunlight anchoring it, my nervous system is more relaxed, and by the evening time, it's also ready to transition out of anything blue-light assisted and most intellectual work and problem solving falls into this bucket. It's really hard to explain but it really works so simply. To enjoy the process a little more I made this fun sun clock, check it out at https://sunsignal.app https://sunsignal.app
  • topgrain2 3mo ago
    I once experimented with beeswax candles as my only after-dark light source. This meant no hyper-stimulating screen activities whatsoever, too. TV, phone, video games, browsing the web? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. Just dim, warm light from actual flames. Cured my lifelong “night owl” “trait” in a couple days. Shockingly effective. Turned out to be hard to keep up and still, like, exist with other people, and you’d probably need to relax it a little in Winter unless your job lets you work reduced hours to kinda “hibernate” (otherwise when would you do anything that’s not work but requires light or electronics?) but it sure worked.
    • 3mo ago
• legacy-coder 3mo ago
  Also known as clanker fatigue
• mrandish 3mo ago
  > My job has changed from designing and writing code to designing code, describing the design to an LLM, reviewing code the LLM produces As a long-time engineering manager, PM and, eventually, product owner my response is, "Congrats! You've just been promoted to management." :-) As a new manager, your first challenge will be successfully delivering commercial results using only a team of 'differently abled' new grad interns. Don't complain, new managers don't get to pick their first team! To be honest, these guys are more like alien brains raised in a vat with no direct senses. They've only ever experienced a data feed of the internet and, oh yeah, they get near-total amnesia a few times a day (but maybe you can teach them to write notes for themselves). They also have ADHD and are somewhere on the spectrum. But don't worry because what they lack in common sense, experience and intuition is offset by having a sort-of photographic memory and a willingness to grind on a problem 24/7. You should be fine. Good luck, we're all counting you...
  • soonnow 3mo ago
    As a former manager, I am sorry, but the last paragraph just sounds like normal rookie team members. Including myself as well. It's how you grow into the role.
• kinderjaje 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• lilerjee 3mo ago
  Current AI is like the film company producing TV series or movies Review AI code line by line is like watch movies frame by frame, and is impossible, very difficult, terribly boring, or abandoned sooner or later.
• akomtu 3mo ago
  LLMs poison your mind. The more AI slop you read, the more your mind turns into something like slop. This isn't very different from the idea that the food you eat is what your body is made of.
  • copperx 3mo ago
    It sounds far fetched at first, but I think it could be true. There was a time in my life when I read literature constantly and started using those patterns in my writing. The habit fell off quickly after I stopped reading for a while, so there might be hope.
• chonghaoju 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• woutr_be 3mo ago
  I’m currently doing a project with someone who only uses LLMs, and it’s exhausting and mentally draining. Whenever I give feedback on something, the answer is just “let me tell Claude”. The person has no understanding of how everything works, and most of the code reflects that. The other day he hardcoded in a demo mode, simply because he didn’t even know how to set up a local environment and set environment variables. I’m confused as to why Claude didn’t even knew this, but it might just be the prompting. I limit LLM usage myself, and if I do use it, I try to use it on extremely specific tasks. It’s the only way it works for me. I honestly don’t understand how all these companies are getting away with generating AI code. Even in a small project I quickly fall behind on my understanding of the project.
  • thewhitetulip 3mo ago
    LLM generated code is obtuse and dense, unnecessarily so
  • jordanb 3mo ago
    I remember working with people like this before AI and it was annoying but they struggled with productivity because they didn't understand what they were working on enough to produce good code efficiently, so the problem usually took care of itself. Now these people can thrive because LLM coding encourages the incurious and punishes the deep thinker.
    • woutr_be 3mo ago
      At least to me, before LLMs, those people could somewhat be trained. You could give them feedback, and they would improve and learn the code. Now your feedback is just another prompt for them, the code might be slightly better, but the person learned nothing from it.
    • antonvs 3mo ago
      It punishes the inflexible deep thinker, perhaps. If you can’t figure out how to use an incredibly powerful tool to your advantage, how deeply are you thinking, really?
• ____tom____ 3mo ago
  I get burnout from frustration when the LLM just can't follow instructions. Like when I'm trying to get it to create an image, and the first pass is beautiful, but ten different request to modify it, with different phrasing and even example images, produce the same image ten times. Or when you tell it not to use a cheap hack in AGENTS.md about six different ways and in your prompt, and it still does it again, and again. It's like arguing with an idiot. And THAT gives me burnout. Also: I've never once seen an emoji in LLM output. What are people talking about?
  • romanows 3mo ago
    Excessive amounts of emojis in generated README.md and sometimes in printed/logging outputs. I don't whether this is still an issue because I have a "Never use emojis" instruction in the context.
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    > Also: I've never once seen an emoji in LLM output. What are people talking about? It seems to be heavily dependent on the task.
• chief_kegwin 3mo ago
  I feel you. 'But we need to adapt or quickly become invaluable'. It is a tough reality to swallow - me included.
• KasianFranks 3mo ago
  It's amazing how many do not have experience with the full pre and post SDLC.
• KasianFranks 3mo ago
  Burn out? This guy is weakling with zero experience in full QA and validation.
  • r0b05 3mo ago
    Come on, Claude is not that bad.
• femto 3mo ago
  If an LLM was a person, it would be known as a "bullshit artist". I've worked with bullshit artists (people) before, and its exhausting trying to separate fact from fiction. It's a reason to avoid working with such people. A good coworker will admit not knowing something, or if unsure give their best guess but discuss its limitations and why they might be wrong. Question: Has anyone experimented with using voice to directly prompt an LLM, without doing speech-to-text? If an LLM can pick up on the skeptical nuances in a person's response, it might be prompted not to be overconfident in its subsequent output.
• antonyragleap 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• luciana1u 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• est 3mo ago
  split jobs and managing people is hard. Do does managnig agents.
• intended 3mo ago
  We are all going to discover the Ironies of Automation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...
• 7xmohamed 3mo ago
  I saw myself throughout this blog post. It's a bit difficult to come to terms with because I chose this field because I genuinely enjoy coding and building things. Even projects that used to be challenging enough to impress people with your skills can now be built in 10 minutes with AI just by describing what you want. It's an incredible shift, but it also changes how I think about the craft and what it means to be a good engineer.
• cobbzilla 3mo ago
  The cost of code production is trending to zero. Therefore, the things that come before it and after it become much more crucial. On the “pre” side, the specification of the problem becomes much more important. On the “post” side: QA and verification that the change has its desired effect, and no ill effects, also becomes much more important. Sure, these are the next things to be automated, and people will try, but it’s easier on the backend (testing/verification can be automated) than the front end (the spec will be human-written as long as someone cares = forever for brands that matter), there will always be a need for humans on the specification side.
• mdemare 3mo ago
  I’m experimenting with the following in my settings: “Look at the first letter of the prompt, and use the style of the matching literary stylist enumerated here: For English: A — W. H. Auden B — Bill Bryson C — Italo Calvino D — Joan Didion E — T. S. Eliot F — William Faulkner G — Gabriel García Márquez …” I certainly don’t see emojis any more.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
• springtimesun 3mo ago
  I am feeling very tired. Since I’ve started working with LLMs my output as a solo dev has easily gone up 20x. I’m closing client projects including ones that previously would have been far too ambitious to take on alone. Long running codebases are getting features that have dragged out for months or been sitting in the planning stages for even longer. And overall quality is way up now with more complete (and honestly better) test coverage. I’m building personal projects at a prodigious pace. In a role reversal I treat the agents like I’m one of my clients (albeit a more technical one who gives them architectural direction) and they are me. I’m using the apps and tooling they make every day. I’ve cancelled SaaS subs for tools I’ve built myself. I watch the tool calls and realize I should be better at core command line tools so I have a study plan to catch up (just a little bit a day). I’m revisiting long standing config that I dropped in to vim and tmux way back when I started and didn’t know anything. I guess in theory I could hold my productivity to previous levels and read more. But it doesn’t feel like that’s possible. It feels like we are in one of those sea changes where the promise is less work, but the reality is increased productivity and expectations (the Industrial Revolution feels like the right parallel to reach for). Increased expectations happen in small ways and large. The agents are so good at polishing data presentations that I always send cleaned up visually impactful reports that would have taken significant time in the past just as a matter of course now. But, I’m tired. I’ve spent the Fable on subscription window sprinting through as much work as I can before it goes API only. (As an aside, I don’t understand how everyone is using so many tokens. I’m sleeping very little and running as much code as I can through fable and I can barely touch a 20x max plan limit.) I keep telling myself I will slow down when it comes off, now it’s extended to the 12th and my window just reset, a few more days to keep knocking out backlog items. I feel like I have to keep the robots busy overnight so when I wake up I can immediately sit down to review. I give directions to agents on my phone which feels wild to me.
  • globular-toast 3mo ago
    Classic signs of addiction.
  • sph 3mo ago
    So the choice is squeezing every ounce of productivity out of me I didn’t even know I had before, burning myself out faster for likely the same amount of money (I doubt you are earning 20x) and not even having the pleasure of coding but just having to argue with a stupid machine that doesn’t even have the decency to get tired or frustrated, yet always falls short of the mark OR just keep coding by hand, thinking things in front of a whiteboard when it gets complicated, burning myself out slowly at a more humane pace as we have done for 50+ years of software engineering. Why is this even a choice? I mean, serious question, do you people have a little bit of self-respect? I am expecting the excuse of “but my boss expects me to use AI”. It is clear most of you have not experienced true burnout, because it’s going to be a world of pain when it hits. Stop turning yourself into machines. You are not.
• globular-toast 3mo ago
  I feel this is coming for me. I now have three people generating code using LLMs who have no experience or real understanding of what they're doing. Nor do they have a strong desire to learn, but how could they anyway? I learnt by screwing up time and time again, but each time I went back and learnt why and next time did it better. It would be bad enough if I was managing 5 different agents myself, but it's managing 5 people who are operating 5 agents.
• ramon156 3mo ago
  Speak for yourself! This is my third week on SSRI medication and I am the zombie the CEO wants me to be! /s (well, only half /s) At work, I ended up doing other chores, getting a lot more involved in projects I wouldn't even care to touch. Turns out it's kinda fun being the source of truth at work. I now have a clear sketch of what the company has done and what we can improve on. Being able to fill in the gaps at a company that doesn't do much feels like a company within a company. Sure, its not Silicon valley, but it's still fun! And job security is guaranteed if you do a bit more than just play the ticket factory
• Harsh_Dalal 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• renaudpawlak 3mo ago
  It looks that what you describe is partly a "burnout", partly a "sickness" of always the same LLM tricks and output (including errors). Of course LLMs tend to go back to their initial training and even if you "teach" them right, the attention mechanism make them forget things that are not often used (that's the KV-cache) even if they can be important for you (there is room for improvements here). That said, your reaction is totally human. I personally get sick of how the LLM writes prose with always the same tricks and formulas (even if you prompt it not to). Humans need variants and novelty, that's why fashion exists. We get fed up with repetition and after seeing too much green shoes, seeing a red one is so relieving :) (quick note: I don't like fashion - I'd advocate diversity and personal styles, not fashion) But that's also the way you work with AI that might be part of the problem. Personally, I don't review all the code the AI generates. I look at it, and I review only the code that matters. And with time on a given project I review less and less because I trust more the architecture and ability of the AI to follow it. In my settings, the AI gets confined to the existing architecture (that we define together at the beginning of the project), and has to ask for authorization to create new things (that's when I review the more). Hoping this could help to avoid burnout myself...
• dgellow 3mo ago
  Welcome to the club. Dealing with LLM is exhausting
• BatteryMountain 3mo ago
  So, I've also discovered my limits: 4 terminal tabs with claude. Anything above that and my attention gets shredded and I have to reread whole conversations. That being said, after a day of doing 4 sessions simultaneously like this, my brain is fried in the sense that nothing I do can/will relief the stress. It different from normal stress. I completely zone out in the evening.
• jedbrooke 3mo ago
  > Some small part of me has started to dread reading LLM output because I know what I’m going to find. False assumptions and hallucinations. Emphatic, staccato fragments. Excessive emojis :sparkle:. :rocket: It’s not just me—these are real patterns (:barf:). It takes like 5 seconds to add a quick CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md with a quick style guide, or even just “EMOJI ARE FORBIDDEN” and I find it makes llm output significantly more tolerable. That and a quick style guide with some banned words and phrases. That won’t help with the false assumptions though, gotta use old fashioned careful reading and critical thinking the catch those.
  • vaylian 3mo ago
    You are completely right! Do you want me to write these markdown files for you? </irony>
    • stasomatic 3mo ago
      And... Me: "The gap, stated plainly:" stop using the type of language. Claude: "You're right. That's one of the constructions your preferences told me to drop, and I used it anyway."
      • jedbrooke 3mo ago
        I find sonnet and haiku will do that, but I rarely get that with opus. When it does happen it’s a good cue to start a new session. That’s another benefit of the style guide is it’s a good canary for when the model has gone off the rails. If it’s left the style guide, the rest of the response can likely be discarded as departed from reality.
  • zahlman 3mo ago
    FWIW, I've been finding that ChatGPT doesn't use emoji at all when I engage with it like a pair programmer and bounce off design ideas, ask for implementation code, propose refactorings etc. But when I ask it to do data analysis or modeling, the emoji are all over the place, yes. (And judging by what I've seen on GitHub over the last year or so, I would never in a million years consider asking an LLM to write a project README or documentation unsupervised.)
• xlii 3mo ago
  I have found (partial) remedy: let it go. There's some YOLO approach to it, but now Codex has self-approving as well as Claude Code (auto mode). I implemented the same feature by my own on Pi with models through OpenRouter and found results very stable thus I have (as always) limited confidence it can fly. So (disclaimer: I'm Jujutsu advocate :)) I do "jj new", tell it what to do and then let it run, and check in back later. If there are things I'm not comfortable (like creating PRs or pushing to repo) I ask it to create Ruby scripts instead named like "__pr.rb" (double underscore files are in my global gitignore). So I can leave it working and then inspect back and edit manually before I run "ruby __pr.rb". The only thing that's not yet there is tying multiple tmux Claude/Codex session together, but I'm thinking about creating a small Rust app that communicates with Tmux for a preview (or a Ruby script that communicates with my LogSeq directly and manages nodes there :))
• PeterStuer 3mo ago
  "My main project right now is to establish a framework for large-scale, unsupervised code generation in our codebase... sifting through the unsupervised agent’s (Qwen’s) output" Ouch. I love my local AI setup with Qwen, but that is a mismatch right there. That model is not the right match for that project. It's like trying to develop a major software solution by just throwing in hundreds of fresh junior programmers and have them spew out random code bits, while what you needed is a good PM, a great architect and a handfull of senior engineers. Might as well pack it in for a year until your model has grown into the ability for those rolls. There is a reason why Opus 4.6 and now Fable dramatically changed the SWE capabilities, and IMHO Qwen is not there yet.
• xchip 3mo ago
  you are the one accountable here, not the llms
• larodi 3mo ago
  I’ve had it three times already in the last 2 years and it is something real. Dizziness and depressive swings is the first that comes, then comes memory loss and finally trouble with speech. At this point you should stop risking to burn your central cognitive capacity. Be advised. Note: myself a passionate Claude code user with multi agent parallel approach to dev. Plus 30 yrs of various oldskool dev experience. My blood and sugar and all tests are all within norm, and I bike and swim regularly. I’m not a major drinker and try to avoid alcohol in general. I count 25 trees outside my window and I’m not on any amphétamine pill such as Adderall.
  • hackeridiot12 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • human_eyes 3mo ago
      I can't remember the last time I commented on HN, but: what the fuck?
      • tomhow 3mo ago
        Please just flag comments like this, and if you're feeling extra helpful, email us (hn@ycombinator.com).
    • tomhow 3mo ago
      We've banned this account.
  • chadgpt3 3mo ago
    Whatever causes "burnout", it doesn't seem to be actual degradation of neurons. Your brain doesn't get used up and burn out like a lightbulb. It's more of an emotional state.
• cedws 3mo ago
  Not to minimise the author’s struggle but it sounds like they have relatively minor qualms about the tone of AI text. There are many people, myself included, questioning if this career is still for them. Giving up on writing code as a hobby. That sounds closer to the definition of burnout to me.
• JKCalhoun 3mo ago
  "If I want to know something, I’ll probably ask ChatGPT or read Gemini’s overview unless I know what sites I want to check." This is me. I hate the internet (and search) so much these days that I embrace anything that allows me to not Google a thing.
• steadybuilder 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• iainctduncan 3mo ago
  I think we are going to see a lot of programmers quitting the biz in the next couple of years. Everyone talks about the increased pressure, stress, and monotony of grinding with LLMs, and individual coders aren't seeing the benefit. Burning out to grind out tons of code - for which you get paid no extra above your salary - is not a net win for coders. It's only a net win for the employers and it's turning coders into serfs. People are going to get wise and realize the electricians have a way better deal right now. This is no longer a nice way to earn money for a 20 to 40 year career.
• deterministic 3mo ago
  I love using Claude Code in my daily work. It has made me much more productive. But I also know that trying to optimize every second of my workday is a recipe for stress and eventually burnout. Nobody benefits from that. So the key is to find the right balance between productivity and longevity. If you feel stressed and overwhelmed then you are not in balance.
• amebahead 3mo ago
  [dead]