Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

> 2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative.

> A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow humans are now being delegated to ChatGPT. And I can get the results immediately and at any time I want. I agree that it cannot operate on its own. I still need to review and correct things. I have do that even when working with other humans. The only difference is that I can start trusting a human to improve, but I cannot expect ChatGPT to do so. Not that it is incapable, but because it is restricted by OpenAI.

I think this point bears repeating.

The threat of these models isn't that they'll go all Skynet and kill everyone, it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living through labor requiring skill and knowledge, especially future generations of skilled labor. Then there will be a decision point: either the senior-level people who thought they were safe get replaced by a more-advanced model, or they don't and there's a future society-level shortage because the pipeline to produce more senior-level people has been shut down (like the OP is doing).

The only people who will come out (relatively) unscathed are the ownership class, like always.

Of course, this is inevitable because it's impossible to question or change our society's ideological assumptions. They must be played out until they utterly destroy society.

Maybe buy a juicer as well? I hear that is a pretty amazing technology, you just set it and forget it.

> 2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative.

The way I view it, I don't hire juniors either. I'm much rather hiring the regular admin I'll have on the team in a year or two who will take over all of the mundane stuff I currently have to handle. At that point, I don't have to ask ChatGPT for a fix, think about the fix, implement the good parts... at that point, Zabbix will just open a ticket "This is broken" and someone else will take care of it.

That takes away real workload from me, and allows them to learn a lot.

> 1. Humans work 9-5 (or some schedule), but ChatGPT is available always and works instantly. Now, when I have some idea I want to try out - I start working on it immediately with the help of AI. Earlier I just used to put a note in the todo-list and stash it for the next day.

Here, my main question would be: Why is ChatGPT special? I've burned midnight oil for an employer just with boring tools like terraform and a configuration management. They are paying me 9 - 5, and I'll work for them most effectively during that time, which at this point certainly includes ChatGPT or Copilot. But I don't really see the point of putting work in for them outside of office hours (and emergencies), regardless of the tools involved.

I’m reminded of the difference between being efficient vs effective. So much of the example use cases I see people — including myself — using GPT for are unimportant short-term tasks that necessarily take away head space and time from long-term important tasks. Those long-term important tasks are the hard ones requiring existing application context where I experience LLMs struggling. If we’re not careful we’ll get DDoS’ed by the tasks that an LLM can complete at the expense of other tasks. Of course this may change in the future as things progress, but is my observation for now.

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