7 ms·

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, b

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.
- apsurd 3mo ago
  This is valid in the other direction as well. Principle engineers, CTOs, with legitimately earned authority end up using that authority to 100x their output onto the team as if it was a Godsend unlock. It's not. There is no one person that has universally good taste. Also, we're not in your head, no matter how much better of a coder or whatever. We're not in your head and it's all terribly painful to navigate.
  - wisty 3mo ago
    I'm just waiting for Bezos to order all work with human agents to use the same API and guardrails as an LLM.
    - imhoguy 3mo ago
      Isn't it how these fulfilment centers already work that way with all these work manuals. Read AMAZON.md /s
- yuye 3mo ago
  >"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. AI is not a productivity multiplier. There are diminishing results. The ones that notice the highest increases of productivity are usually the ones that were unproductive at best and dangerously incompetent at worst.
  - nomel 3mo ago
    Could you describe your usual workflows and usage patterns with AI?
    - nomel 3mo ago
      I think this is a perfectly reasonable question. They're having a very different experience than many other people (including myself). It would be interesting to get an idea of why it's so different.
fp_hub 3mo ago
[dead]
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
adverbly 3mo ago
> No one is really pushing me to increase my workload Spoken like someone who is not at an org/team that has undergone layoffs and reduced hiring in the last 3 years. You might be in the minority there - especially when it comes to those who are facing burnout.
- missedthecue 3mo ago
  I don't have an employer. But most of the excuses I used to tell myself are simply not believable anymore and that causes pressure leading to overworking myself.
- bsoles 3mo ago
  My employer literally put "effective use of AI" as a yearly performance review criteria this year. So there is that...
nacozarina 3mo ago
LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero. Therefore, you will exhaust yourself near-instantly trying to drive differentiated value out of cognitive work. Non-arbitrable labor is one safe haven: bending steel, drilling wells, running cables, flying drones, etc. Physical agency gets you a premium the clankers can’t (yet?) trespass upon. That’s why guys building data centers are making bank & job-hopping while the SAs administering the computational guts of them are struggling. A second vector is reputational: either by authority (you’re a regulator) or by taste (you’re a rare/reknown specialist) you make quality attestations about cheaply-produced cognitive artifacts. The first vector is a big community; the second is not. Get out of being in a knife fight with the clankers on their own turf, they’ll gut you.
- ehnto 3mo ago
  Flying drones is an interesting one, I guess you do have to drive the car out to site and set up the drone. But a lot of drone ops are waypointed, automatic flight. I can see a future in which the only thing the operator does is drive the drone van to site, hit the deploy button as the drone pops out the roof, and wait for it to return. Mission set up already by an LLM prompt back at the office.
  - imhoguy 3mo ago
    I bet drone van is the next thing to be automated.
    - reverius42 3mo ago
      For legal reasons, a human will still need to be in the self-driving van, so the job description will change to "drone van chaperone".
      - Freak_NL 3mo ago
        Or 'drone accident scapegoat'.
    - deleted 3mo ago
sefrost 3mo ago
One of the reasons they exhaust me, is that it's always "one more prompt" to get a UI correct. It's often just slightly off, but it can take 5-10 mins sometimes to rework something. It has led to me working much longer hours. I think this is in part because I am one of the software engineers that always liked building products more than writing complex software. So, I am driven by the feeling of creating something. And I want to get the feature perfect and complete. But getting from 95%->100% done can take a long time with UI work for me. So I work much longer hours now, unfortunately.
- ssl-3 3mo ago
  Maybe when they get better at making SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles, they'll also get better at making UIs that can be reworked into sensible form without too much effort.
- cuu508 3mo ago
  Perhaps do the last 5% yourself?
  - r0b05 3mo ago
    This is what I do as I have learnt after much frustration.
  - sefrost 3mo ago
    You're right, I should! Main blocker is I am using apps like Conductor and have lots of plates spinning at once. But that's on, me and I should try and start completing the last part myself.
- jaynetics 3mo ago
  It's a bit paradoxical to use AI to increase productivity, and then feel the need to work longer hours to fully actualize said productivity. But it's probably a common feeling. I wonder if we'll see an increased number of people burn out in the serious, medical sense.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
UncleOxidant 3mo ago
> done by my clankers or clankers of other people I'm getting so many requests to review LLM-generated documents - planning docs, docs intended for end-users, project docs, business plan docs. A team member sent me a zip file with about 30 LLM generated documents in it the other day and asked if I could review them right away. And a lot of it was just repetition and/or stuff that was just out of left field, made-up, hallucinated stuff. They're able to generate this stuff way faster than we can review. It used to be that it would take a significant part of a day for a project manager to come up with a planning doc - now they can generate one in a few minutes and send it out for review. It's just really tiring.
- PsylentKnight 3mo ago
  Thats gonna be a no from me dog. I don’t expect anyone to read something I didn’t read myself
- aakresearch 3mo ago
  Wait, what? I thought everyone agrees that modern models post September 2025 (or whenever Opus or whatever 5.6789 was released) do not hallucinate, make things up, contradict themselves and can review their own output into perfection regardless of task, goal or context???? /s
  - UncleOxidant 3mo ago
    In general I think from the coding side they're more robust now. However, people generating docs are maybe not as experienced with how to prompt in ways that avoid having the LLM tell you what you want to hear. I think this is still a pitfall that can easily be fallen into. Those of us who are doing LLM-assisted coding for the last couple of years are more aware of this now. Those who are planning/management folks are still kind of susceptible depending on how much experience they've had dealing with LLMs.
  - KronisLV 3mo ago
    What a take with no nuance. > do not hallucinate They do, just less. To the degree of being usable, as long as there are guardrails and they're used responsibly. For example, if there's code being output, there should be type checking and compilation, as well as code tests that prove that it works or that it doesn't - seeing how abysmal code coverage is in most of the projects I've seem, for whatever reason people thought that they didn't really need it much. They were wrong. This also implies you need SOTA models on max reasoning. > make things up Same as above. Ideally you'd give them some way to verify their claims, like web search or browsing and referencing docs, Jira tickets etc., basically improve the signal to noise ratio. > contradict themselves They do so way less than before, as long as the above is true. > can review their own output into perfection They are pretty good at reviewing things, especially if you make them do adversarial review! It will never be perfect, but can be close in quality to human output (e.g. the code they produce, when used properly and with intent, is better than the code I've seen many developers write and ship before LLMs were a thing). This also more or less scales with how much compute you give them - three parallel review agents will turn one output artifact into something good with higher confidence than two, and definitely better than with no review. There's a cost vs quality balance and it seems that all those xhigh and max reasoning modes are still geared way too much towards cost, instead of quality. So you have to make up for that shortcoming yourself. > regardless of task, goal or context???? Garbage in, garbage out. I won't be an asshole and say that you're holding it wrong, nor will I say that anyone should listen to the claims marketing AI (absolutely delusional takes, meant to attract investors), but we're slowly getting to a better position in regards to LLMs, year by year. It's just a shame that the peak of inflated expectations hit while the technology still hasn't fully plateaued and reached whatever its ceiling is. I probably also shouldn't ignore the fact that some people will not care about any of it and send AI generated slop verbatim and to an outside observer there's no way to easily tell apart the difference between the two, unless you make a technical report contain exact references to where the data is sourced from, for example (and then either verify the references yourself, or make another agent do it).
ryandrake 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. I see a different type of pressure: I'm at a company that still is requiring everyone use LLMs with token leaderboards, time-spent measurements, and impacts to performance reviews, and all that. So I find myself having to carve out some percent of my time to stop doing productive work, and "go do AI to show token use." So my workload hasn't changed (or it's gone up), but I have N% less time to work on it because I have to spend time appeasing the AI gods...
- efnx 3mo ago
  Just have an agent chug on a side-project for you, or set up a CI script to review every pull request or some similarly “helpful” task. That should eat a lot of tokens!
  - vkou 3mo ago
    Ideally, you should ask the LLM to write that CI script.
  - eloisius 3mo ago
    Man. If I had this kind of mandate I could really burn some tokens. Review each new PR and extract 100 topics to debate related to it. Spin up 1000 sub agents, each with a different personality profile system prompt, to debate each point until consensus has been reached. Synthesize the learnings into a limerick. Build a Spotify playlist that pairs with the tone of the debates. Post the limerick and link to playlist on the PR and tag me to notify me that I have a PR to review.
    - marking-time 3mo ago
      Also, post the limerick to HN.
    - jaggederest 3mo ago
rib3ye 3mo ago
Yeah, but it's that KIND OF AWESOME?
syou1024 3mo ago
[flagged]
Hilliard_Ohiooo 3mo ago
That ALL sounds horrible, is that really life in tech these days?
- jjav 3mo ago
  Yes. Run away if you can, run far away.
onion2k 3mo ago
I am happy about all the little side-projects, and ideas it help my realize.. Same, but I really have to fight the urge to just add fun new features to things I work on any time inspiration strikes. I am an appalling 'feature factory' if I don't actively keep myself in check. The cost of just building everything is so low, but the value of those things is also incredibly low, so I'm often just bloating what I build. There's been a lot of articles and posts about the increasing importance of 'taste' in software built with AI, and I'm finding I know need to look for strategies to find some.
thefourthchime 3mo ago
I echo this entirely, brother. I think a lot of us developers have a lot of ideas that were unrealized, and now we have this opportunity to do it. And any time an LLM is sitting idle, it feels like we're wasting our time. Why aren't we having it built something for us? Currently, I work on about three projects at work at the same time and about four personal projects at the same time. My day just zips by. I'll burn four hours without even thinking about it. It's exhausting but exhilarating. I do wonder if burnouts in the future though.
xg15 3mo ago
> 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. I had to think of the factory scenes in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The author's feeling is basically the main idea of the sketches, i.e. humans having to follow the pace of the machines instead of the other way around. Reverse centaurs are nothing new. Ask any worker movement from the last centuries.
sph 3mo ago
> LLM took away the more creative and variable part of the work, and left the repetitive QA rubber-stamping “I wanted a machine to do the dishes so I could concentrate on my creative work, and all I got was a machine to do my work so I’m left to wash the dishes.”
agumonkey 3mo ago
I wonder if anybody has an implicit fear that with LLM you're expected to be a 20x engineering all the time, otherwise you're out. Can also lead to people producing shiny apps that impress others (sometimes for legit reasons) even though they have no idea how anything work. A "ship value" culture will not bother with the inner workings or actual skills.
alfiedotwtf 3mo ago
> 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. Embrace it if you’re like me and feel uncomfortable having an idle mind, embrace it! You’ll get more done and being 120% go go go is impossible over the long run so eventually your body will just say I need a break then once you recover full steam head again on the treadmill
jjav 3mo ago
> but at every moment there is always something ready Yes, this is to me the primary driver of the extreme AI burnout. In ~30 years in Silicon Valley and many, many startups, the pressure has never been as intense. Before AI I'd mostly work on one thing at a time (at least within a given hour) and in the evening I wouldn't start a new 6 hour task because it's too long, so tomorrow is another day. Now, that 6 hour task is more like 30 minutes, so there is intense pressure to just knock it off tonight. And then the next one. And one more. And while the bot is thinking, to have 4 other work streams in parallel so there is never, ever, a break in the day. The human mind is not built for 100% utilization 15 hours a day.
KronisLV 3mo ago
> 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. I find LLMs to help me manage the unrealistic workload I have, because at least now it's feasible instead of just getting more work piled on top of me with a never ending backlog (that people actually expect me to thin, not let grow). Add on top of that colleagues that would have death by commitee'd many ideas and now just have to argue against actual MVPs that work instead of ideas (or can be proven to not work and discarded without wasting time on them in some cases), and I don't even hate my job as much! It's just that to ensure that the technology is not a net negative, I need millions upon millions of tokens every single day (tool runs, adversarial reviews, testing), but once you get that inflection point, alongside needing a good enough model, the floor for which currently I'd say GLM 5.2 on Max reasoning reaches, or use something like SOTA Anthropic/OpenAI models, it becomes a pretty good way of working. That said if you have missing pieces there (e.g. using cheap models that aren't very good), the curve of getting stuff done can go downwards and you'll just end up with a lot of slop - useless docs, bad code and an ever increasing amount of technical debt. On average, each task that I do, needs about 15 minutes to 2 hours of planning and making the agents explore the codebase and refine the plans first. Curiously, in my case this leads to less burnout cause I can actually pause and grab a drink, meal or go for a walk, while parallel agents do the work, once I've planned things well enough and have dispatched something that will work for 1-4 hours. I don't have to review their output immediately once they finish but can just batch things.
AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
Hmm. When you put it that way, it sounds like LLMs and social media trigger the same "I have to see what's going on now" pattern (and therefore can wind up at the same kind of addiction, with the same problems).
jug 3mo ago
This article is also related to exhausting AI through generating pressure and posted here recently: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-is-addictive-engineers-are-paying-the-price https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-is-addictive-engineers-are-...

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.

apsurd 3mo ago
This is valid in the other direction as well. Principle engineers, CTOs, with legitimately earned authority end up using that authority to 100x their output onto the team as if it was a Godsend unlock. It's not. There is no one person that has universally good taste. Also, we're not in your head, no matter how much better of a coder or whatever. We're not in your head and it's all terribly painful to navigate.
- wisty 3mo ago
  I'm just waiting for Bezos to order all work with human agents to use the same API and guardrails as an LLM.
  - imhoguy 3mo ago
    Isn't it how these fulfilment centers already work that way with all these work manuals. Read AMAZON.md /s
yuye 3mo ago
>"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. AI is not a productivity multiplier. There are diminishing results. The ones that notice the highest increases of productivity are usually the ones that were unproductive at best and dangerously incompetent at worst.
- nomel 3mo ago
  Could you describe your usual workflows and usage patterns with AI?
  - nomel 3mo ago
    I think this is a perfectly reasonable question. They're having a very different experience than many other people (including myself). It would be interesting to get an idea of why it's so different.

fp_hub 3mo ago

[dead]

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

adverbly 3mo ago

> No one is really pushing me to increase my workload Spoken like someone who is not at an org/team that has undergone layoffs and reduced hiring in the last 3 years. You might be in the minority there - especially when it comes to those who are facing burnout.

missedthecue 3mo ago
I don't have an employer. But most of the excuses I used to tell myself are simply not believable anymore and that causes pressure leading to overworking myself.
bsoles 3mo ago
My employer literally put "effective use of AI" as a yearly performance review criteria this year. So there is that...

nacozarina 3mo ago

LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero. Therefore, you will exhaust yourself near-instantly trying to drive differentiated value out of cognitive work. Non-arbitrable labor is one safe haven: bending steel, drilling wells, running cables, flying drones, etc. Physical agency gets you a premium the clankers can’t (yet?) trespass upon. That’s why guys building data centers are making bank & job-hopping while the SAs administering the computational guts of them are struggling. A second vector is reputational: either by authority (you’re a regulator) or by taste (you’re a rare/reknown specialist) you make quality attestations about cheaply-produced cognitive artifacts. The first vector is a big community; the second is not. Get out of being in a knife fight with the clankers on their own turf, they’ll gut you.

ehnto 3mo ago
Flying drones is an interesting one, I guess you do have to drive the car out to site and set up the drone. But a lot of drone ops are waypointed, automatic flight. I can see a future in which the only thing the operator does is drive the drone van to site, hit the deploy button as the drone pops out the roof, and wait for it to return. Mission set up already by an LLM prompt back at the office.
- imhoguy 3mo ago
  I bet drone van is the next thing to be automated.
  - reverius42 3mo ago
    For legal reasons, a human will still need to be in the self-driving van, so the job description will change to "drone van chaperone".
    - Freak_NL 3mo ago
      Or 'drone accident scapegoat'.
  - deleted 3mo ago

sefrost 3mo ago

One of the reasons they exhaust me, is that it's always "one more prompt" to get a UI correct. It's often just slightly off, but it can take 5-10 mins sometimes to rework something. It has led to me working much longer hours. I think this is in part because I am one of the software engineers that always liked building products more than writing complex software. So, I am driven by the feeling of creating something. And I want to get the feature perfect and complete. But getting from 95%->100% done can take a long time with UI work for me. So I work much longer hours now, unfortunately.

ssl-3 3mo ago
Maybe when they get better at making SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles, they'll also get better at making UIs that can be reworked into sensible form without too much effort.
cuu508 3mo ago
Perhaps do the last 5% yourself?
- r0b05 3mo ago
  This is what I do as I have learnt after much frustration.
- sefrost 3mo ago
  You're right, I should! Main blocker is I am using apps like Conductor and have lots of plates spinning at once. But that's on, me and I should try and start completing the last part myself.
jaynetics 3mo ago
It's a bit paradoxical to use AI to increase productivity, and then feel the need to work longer hours to fully actualize said productivity. But it's probably a common feeling. I wonder if we'll see an increased number of people burn out in the serious, medical sense.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

UncleOxidant 3mo ago

> done by my clankers or clankers of other people I'm getting so many requests to review LLM-generated documents - planning docs, docs intended for end-users, project docs, business plan docs. A team member sent me a zip file with about 30 LLM generated documents in it the other day and asked if I could review them right away. And a lot of it was just repetition and/or stuff that was just out of left field, made-up, hallucinated stuff. They're able to generate this stuff way faster than we can review. It used to be that it would take a significant part of a day for a project manager to come up with a planning doc - now they can generate one in a few minutes and send it out for review. It's just really tiring.

PsylentKnight 3mo ago
Thats gonna be a no from me dog. I don’t expect anyone to read something I didn’t read myself
aakresearch 3mo ago
Wait, what? I thought everyone agrees that modern models post September 2025 (or whenever Opus or whatever 5.6789 was released) do not hallucinate, make things up, contradict themselves and can review their own output into perfection regardless of task, goal or context???? /s
- UncleOxidant 3mo ago
  In general I think from the coding side they're more robust now. However, people generating docs are maybe not as experienced with how to prompt in ways that avoid having the LLM tell you what you want to hear. I think this is still a pitfall that can easily be fallen into. Those of us who are doing LLM-assisted coding for the last couple of years are more aware of this now. Those who are planning/management folks are still kind of susceptible depending on how much experience they've had dealing with LLMs.
- KronisLV 3mo ago
  What a take with no nuance. > do not hallucinate They do, just less. To the degree of being usable, as long as there are guardrails and they're used responsibly. For example, if there's code being output, there should be type checking and compilation, as well as code tests that prove that it works or that it doesn't - seeing how abysmal code coverage is in most of the projects I've seem, for whatever reason people thought that they didn't really need it much. They were wrong. This also implies you need SOTA models on max reasoning. > make things up Same as above. Ideally you'd give them some way to verify their claims, like web search or browsing and referencing docs, Jira tickets etc., basically improve the signal to noise ratio. > contradict themselves They do so way less than before, as long as the above is true. > can review their own output into perfection They are pretty good at reviewing things, especially if you make them do adversarial review! It will never be perfect, but can be close in quality to human output (e.g. the code they produce, when used properly and with intent, is better than the code I've seen many developers write and ship before LLMs were a thing). This also more or less scales with how much compute you give them - three parallel review agents will turn one output artifact into something good with higher confidence than two, and definitely better than with no review. There's a cost vs quality balance and it seems that all those xhigh and max reasoning modes are still geared way too much towards cost, instead of quality. So you have to make up for that shortcoming yourself. > regardless of task, goal or context???? Garbage in, garbage out. I won't be an asshole and say that you're holding it wrong, nor will I say that anyone should listen to the claims marketing AI (absolutely delusional takes, meant to attract investors), but we're slowly getting to a better position in regards to LLMs, year by year. It's just a shame that the peak of inflated expectations hit while the technology still hasn't fully plateaued and reached whatever its ceiling is. I probably also shouldn't ignore the fact that some people will not care about any of it and send AI generated slop verbatim and to an outside observer there's no way to easily tell apart the difference between the two, unless you make a technical report contain exact references to where the data is sourced from, for example (and then either verify the references yourself, or make another agent do it).

ryandrake 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. I see a different type of pressure: I'm at a company that still is requiring everyone use LLMs with token leaderboards, time-spent measurements, and impacts to performance reviews, and all that. So I find myself having to carve out some percent of my time to stop doing productive work, and "go do AI to show token use." So my workload hasn't changed (or it's gone up), but I have N% less time to work on it because I have to spend time appeasing the AI gods...

efnx 3mo ago
Just have an agent chug on a side-project for you, or set up a CI script to review every pull request or some similarly “helpful” task. That should eat a lot of tokens!
- vkou 3mo ago
  Ideally, you should ask the LLM to write that CI script.
- eloisius 3mo ago
  Man. If I had this kind of mandate I could really burn some tokens. Review each new PR and extract 100 topics to debate related to it. Spin up 1000 sub agents, each with a different personality profile system prompt, to debate each point until consensus has been reached. Synthesize the learnings into a limerick. Build a Spotify playlist that pairs with the tone of the debates. Post the limerick and link to playlist on the PR and tag me to notify me that I have a PR to review.
  - marking-time 3mo ago
    Also, post the limerick to HN.
  - jaggederest 3mo ago

rib3ye 3mo ago

Yeah, but it's that KIND OF AWESOME?

syou1024 3mo ago

[flagged]

Hilliard_Ohiooo 3mo ago

That ALL sounds horrible, is that really life in tech these days?

jjav 3mo ago
Yes. Run away if you can, run far away.

onion2k 3mo ago

I am happy about all the little side-projects, and ideas it help my realize.. Same, but I really have to fight the urge to just add fun new features to things I work on any time inspiration strikes. I am an appalling 'feature factory' if I don't actively keep myself in check. The cost of just building everything is so low, but the value of those things is also incredibly low, so I'm often just bloating what I build. There's been a lot of articles and posts about the increasing importance of 'taste' in software built with AI, and I'm finding I know need to look for strategies to find some.

thefourthchime 3mo ago

I echo this entirely, brother. I think a lot of us developers have a lot of ideas that were unrealized, and now we have this opportunity to do it. And any time an LLM is sitting idle, it feels like we're wasting our time. Why aren't we having it built something for us? Currently, I work on about three projects at work at the same time and about four personal projects at the same time. My day just zips by. I'll burn four hours without even thinking about it. It's exhausting but exhilarating. I do wonder if burnouts in the future though.

xg15 3mo ago

> 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. I had to think of the factory scenes in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The author's feeling is basically the main idea of the sketches, i.e. humans having to follow the pace of the machines instead of the other way around. Reverse centaurs are nothing new. Ask any worker movement from the last centuries.

sph 3mo ago

> LLM took away the more creative and variable part of the work, and left the repetitive QA rubber-stamping “I wanted a machine to do the dishes so I could concentrate on my creative work, and all I got was a machine to do my work so I’m left to wash the dishes.”

agumonkey 3mo ago

I wonder if anybody has an implicit fear that with LLM you're expected to be a 20x engineering all the time, otherwise you're out. Can also lead to people producing shiny apps that impress others (sometimes for legit reasons) even though they have no idea how anything work. A "ship value" culture will not bother with the inner workings or actual skills.

alfiedotwtf 3mo ago

> 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. Embrace it if you’re like me and feel uncomfortable having an idle mind, embrace it! You’ll get more done and being 120% go go go is impossible over the long run so eventually your body will just say I need a break then once you recover full steam head again on the treadmill

jjav 3mo ago

> but at every moment there is always something ready Yes, this is to me the primary driver of the extreme AI burnout. In ~30 years in Silicon Valley and many, many startups, the pressure has never been as intense. Before AI I'd mostly work on one thing at a time (at least within a given hour) and in the evening I wouldn't start a new 6 hour task because it's too long, so tomorrow is another day. Now, that 6 hour task is more like 30 minutes, so there is intense pressure to just knock it off tonight. And then the next one. And one more. And while the bot is thinking, to have 4 other work streams in parallel so there is never, ever, a break in the day. The human mind is not built for 100% utilization 15 hours a day.

KronisLV 3mo ago

> 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. I find LLMs to help me manage the unrealistic workload I have, because at least now it's feasible instead of just getting more work piled on top of me with a never ending backlog (that people actually expect me to thin, not let grow). Add on top of that colleagues that would have death by commitee'd many ideas and now just have to argue against actual MVPs that work instead of ideas (or can be proven to not work and discarded without wasting time on them in some cases), and I don't even hate my job as much! It's just that to ensure that the technology is not a net negative, I need millions upon millions of tokens every single day (tool runs, adversarial reviews, testing), but once you get that inflection point, alongside needing a good enough model, the floor for which currently I'd say GLM 5.2 on Max reasoning reaches, or use something like SOTA Anthropic/OpenAI models, it becomes a pretty good way of working. That said if you have missing pieces there (e.g. using cheap models that aren't very good), the curve of getting stuff done can go downwards and you'll just end up with a lot of slop - useless docs, bad code and an ever increasing amount of technical debt. On average, each task that I do, needs about 15 minutes to 2 hours of planning and making the agents explore the codebase and refine the plans first. Curiously, in my case this leads to less burnout cause I can actually pause and grab a drink, meal or go for a walk, while parallel agents do the work, once I've planned things well enough and have dispatched something that will work for 1-4 hours. I don't have to review their output immediately once they finish but can just batch things.

AnimalMuppet 3mo ago

Hmm. When you put it that way, it sounds like LLMs and social media trigger the same "I have to see what's going on now" pattern (and therefore can wind up at the same kind of addiction, with the same problems).

jug 3mo ago

This article is also related to exhausting AI through generating pressure and posted here recently: AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-is-addictive-engineers-are-paying-the-price https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-is-addictive-engineers-are-...