Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 205 posts

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#101

Post by antod »

The future of being "prompt engineers" horrifies me. Prompt Engineering makes me think of Search Engine Optimisation as if it was a form of "Engineering". What I mean is that you are positioning yourself based on your "abilities" to get useful results out of some gigantic proprietary system subject to the whims of its corporate owners where the skills are at best cargo culting or at worst self delusional.

All the while, all you're really achieving is increasing the corporate masters profits at the expense of those getting left behind who don't want to participate in this wholesale devaluing of human talent across wide swathes of different careers.

I worry for my kids generation if we can't find a way for billions of people to add value again rather than squabble over the privilege of serving the decreasing few who profit from this.

Just my somewhat irrational luddite 2c worth.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#102

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

yodsanklai wrote: post #71

I'm a software engineer and I don't find much value in ChatGPT. It provides a bit of help when writing very specific and short pieces of code for languages I know but don't use often. I'd be curious to have actual data on how other SWEs use it.

The type of question I used to type into google, now I ask ChatGPT. For a language I know well it tends to bring a 5 minute task down to 2 minutes. For a language I don't know well it takes a 30 minute task down to 2 minutes (One weird day the site for a framework was down and I couldn't read the docs, but ChatGPT was there with the right answer).

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#103

Post by t1m0thy »

cheschire wrote: post #25
tivert wrote: post #11

> 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 i…

You can witness this happening in the trades right now. A whole generation of people were told to goto college and to avoid the trades, and now here we are in possibly the most significant manpower drought the trades have ever experienced. And this has a ripple effect as the older generations retire out, and take their hard won experiences with them with nobody to pass their knowledge onto. Can't tell a carpenter to…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#104

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

obblekk wrote: post #28

I've experienced a very similar feeling. To me it feels exactly like finding wikipedia in 2005, or getting an iphone + wikipanion in 2008. The frontiers of my mind have been unleashed. A real bicycle for the mind. Here are some tactics I use to "turn off gpt": 1. It'll be there tomorrow. The great thing about their threaded model is you can easily find the convo and continue it tomorrow. Remind yourself of that consc…

>Don't worry about juniors. They'll still be hired because now they'll ramp up faster and produce better code

So maybe the seniors should be worried, since we/they don't have much barrier to entry that means much more competition.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#105

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

kfarr wrote: post #17

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 DD…

OTOH, chatGPT can make a good rubber duck if you want to talk through a problem. It's advice is often useless (which is fine) but occasionally it may say something useful.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#106

Post by skepticATX »

fleeno wrote: post #30

Can you elaborate on how you're actually using ChatGPT? I'm a developer and I haven't felt any need to use ChatGPT constantly. What tasks are you delegating to ChatGPT that were previously done by humans? Most of my input from others is regarding current information specific to the task at hand. I don't see how ChatGPT would have any idea what I'm talking about. Do you have some specific examples you could share?

I think that we are the silent majority. ChatGPT can be mildly useful for me as a dev, but in general it actually slows me down. There have been a few times when it has really shined, but it’s not the norm.

If it was actually a life altering tool (and it might be one day) there wouldn’t need to be an entire industry of people trying to convince everyone that with just one small trick Google doesn’t want you to know, you can quadruple your productivity.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#107

Post by Exuma »

skepticATX wrote: post #106
fleeno wrote: post #30

Can you elaborate on how you're actually using ChatGPT? I'm a developer and I haven't felt any need to use ChatGPT constantly. What tasks are you delegating to ChatGPT that were previously done by humans? Most of my input from others is regarding current information specific to the task at hand. I don't see how ChatGPT would have any idea what I'm talking about. Do you have some specific examples you could share?

I think that we are the silent majority. ChatGPT can be mildly useful for me as a dev, but in general it actually slows me down. There have been a few times when it has really shined, but it’s not the norm. If it was actually a life altering tool (and it might be one day) there wouldn’t need to be an entire industry of people trying to convince everyone that with just one small trick Google doesn’t want you to know,…

It’s immensely helpful for learning. Orders of magnitude better than google which has ruined their search results with seo bait.

At the very least, its a much more powerful google (dont nitpick my comparison, i realize it hallucinates). Getting the EXACT context of your question is something generalized search/articles online will NEVER give you, and you can read hundreds of pages of docs all day. This is good for certain things, but not when you want to know just a single setting or atomic piece of information. I want to get the smallest amount of accurate information very specifically to my problem, as I'm programming many hours per day on my own companies as a one man show.

My search history on chat gpt includes a few things as examples:

- specific ways SOLID principles could be applied to Go which is non-OOP language

- helping me quickly learn nuances of Lua for configuring neovim, specifically for weird syntax or things annoying to google (ie what does # mean) or what does a specific error mean within the context of the configuration

- more efficient top k algorithms than what I was building for learning purposes

- asking to break down big o complexity of certain types of sort functions and whether they differ from n log n

- helping me learn enough rust to do a bug fix Pr that was annoying me

- x vs s in neovim config for keymap modes

- figuring out why Ruby doesn’t implement descending ranges

Etc etc etc

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#108

Post by aldarisbm »

slt2021 wrote: post #100
fleeno wrote: post #30

Can you elaborate on how you're actually using ChatGPT? I'm a developer and I haven't felt any need to use ChatGPT constantly. What tasks are you delegating to ChatGPT that were previously done by humans? Most of my input from others is regarding current information specific to the task at hand. I don't see how ChatGPT would have any idea what I'm talking about. Do you have some specific examples you could share?

if you use elasticsearch and not familiar with elastic search's syntax (I am not), you could use ChatGPT to write elastic queries for you. same for SQL, if you are not familiar with SQL. probably could be same with Splunk SPL, Kibana KQL, Prometheus PromQL, or any other DSL that you are not familiar with

the problem is that you dont get to know if the output is A-Okay. You just know "it works". This is the scariest part to me. Especially a DSL/programming language I'm not familiar with.

I want to contribute, while being fully aware what I'm contributing with. This doesn't lend itself to that.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#109

Post by GuB-42 »

simple-thoughts wrote: post #81
fleeno wrote: post #30

Can you elaborate on how you're actually using ChatGPT? I'm a developer and I haven't felt any need to use ChatGPT constantly. What tasks are you delegating to ChatGPT that were previously done by humans? Most of my input from others is regarding current information specific to the task at hand. I don't see how ChatGPT would have any idea what I'm talking about. Do you have some specific examples you could share?

For code I’ve found LLM mostly useless, since if I don’t understand something I need to read the docs anyway, and the generated code tends to be buggy even in react. Where I have found LLM useful is in generating text. Where I used to use a thesaurus I now use LLM to find words to name things in themed UX. But it’s not great at function or variable names, it tends to pick names that look good but don’t precisely desc…

I had a lot more success writing some code and have ChatGPT document it than doing the opposite. The documentation tends to be much better written than what I would have done by myself.

Indeed because ChatGPT is excellent at writing text. And because I know exactly what I want to see even if I have a hard time putting it into words myself, I can easily catch the mistakes and hallucinations.

I don't get why there is so much focus on code generating AIs and so little on code analysis. Have AIs do code reviews, write tests and analyze the results, etc... LLMs are awesome at reviewing code, they are able to tell you what's unexpected. And what is unexpected has a good chance of either being a bug or some key element of the code that needs attention. I think I have seen a single article about that, out of hundreds that are about code generation.

Re: Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

#110

Post by syndicatedjelly »

I'm a mid-senior level engineer, and I experienced the following beginning in December, when I first start using ChatGPT:

December - January: I need to explore this brand new tool called ChatGPT. This could be as big of a game changer as Google must have been (was not in the workforce back then)

January - March: This thing is a TOTAL game changer. I can do work at a Senior+ level, when I was barely scraping by as a mid just a few months ago. I'm going to learn as much as I can as quickly as possible, using this new tool.

March - May: Uh oh. The team has new expectations of me. I'm sure I can deliver!

May - July: I don't think I can deliver. I'm working constantly and feel burnt out.

====

Since July, I've changed projects to something less stressful (I work in consulting), as well as put a hard stop to computer-related activities after work hours. I'm slowly regaining my interest in programming again, after a few months of not even want to look at code.

In retrospect, I burned out myself because of the tremendous opportunity sitting right there with ChatGPT, and also the fear that all my peers will use the tool as religiously as I would and I may be out of a job if I don't work at a breakneck pace to acquaint myself in this new tool. I wrote articles and spoke on podcasts about this new tool, just to demonstrate that I'm a (false) expert in this thing.

The lesson I learned is it's okay to be exciting for new technology, but I should pace myself. Most of my peers will take a lot longer to get up to speed, so as long as I stay abreast of trends I'll be just fine.

Post reply on HN