Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

This is a time management problem and a setting boundaries problem. When I leave work, if I have an idea (work related) I jot it into a notebook to review the next day. After I leave (no later than 1630 every day) I am not obligated to work, so I don't. I exercise, read, study, spend time with my wife, play with the cats, whatever I feel like doing. If they want me to work 24x7, they can increase my pay by 20x because they'll only get a year of use out of me and I can retire with that income in a year or so without issue. They pay for 8 hours, they get 8 hours.

> 2. The outputs with ChatGPT are so fast, that my "review load" is too high. At times it feels like we are working for ChatGPT and not the other way around.

Then slow down. See my response to (1). Your time management skills are in desperate need of development. Ask less of ChatGPT. Only ask enough to complete an objective, no more. Don't ask it for information faster than you can process it. And if you feel the need to ask it a million and one questions, delegate processing its responses to others (bring back your juniors).

> 3. ChatGPT has the habit of throwing new knowledge back at you. Google does that too, but this feels 10x of Google. Sometimes it is overwhelming. Good thing is we learn a lot, bad thing is that if often slows down our decision making.

> 4. I tried to put a schedule to use it - but when everybody has access to this tech, I have a genuine fear of missing out.

FOMO is real, but like most fears it's a waste. There is no existential crisis. You are not being chased by a bear, you appear to be a professional so you have steady income you know where your next meal is coming from and have shelter. Your fear is unwarranted, even if normal. Seek out counseling or therapy to learn how to manage fear and anxiety more effectively.

Github copilot and other tools help you scale up, not out. At the end of the day teams may be smaller, but someone needs to guide it.

I'm not sure what you do, but I can't see it for most SWE jobs. These posts make me question whether people understand llms or have zero quality controls at their workplace.

It almost feels like every day people just make up wild stories that seem untrue.

I feel like a lot of the evergreen hype in computing is framework, practices, etc, that try to break things down into a system where any junior could then just fill in each piece and of course this always collides with the larger context problems.

Once you get to a certain point with such a system, either you have been paying attention all along or you have no idea what you've made and how to deal with a real cross cutting problem and you get to the point where the systems promise is really irrelevant, you succeed based on actual expertise you supposedly weren't going to need.

With GPT-like AI around its current level, I feel like some of these systems for breaking down programming projects are going to face an actual test now that the junior engineers to do it are some GPU costs that could be run in parallel and won't have the usual heterogeneous resources problems of testing with a real project team.

I'm not really sure if any systems will survive (or something learned in the process will make a good one) but I feel like it would be a proof of a holy grail that is suppose quite important, and just the refutation of many systems is itself a major disruption to the field.

Add to this the limited usefulness for generating code that's contextual - making some method deep inside a component tree that needs to reference a service class, and pick some dom elements to mutate etc... it requires knowledge and reasoning about the project and overall code structure.

I don't understand how folks are using it as a productivity booster, unless maybe as something like a better StackOverflow?

As an American parent of young children, I keep being told that college is a scam and I should steer my kids toward the trades. 90+% of the time, I am being told this by a white-collar worker who went to college themselves, and is just bloviating.

When we reach a real crisis point, severe enough to actually consider granting skilled tradespeople access to a fraction of the privilege enjoyed by white-collar workers, then I might consider nudging my kids toward electrician or plumbing work. But under the current social caste system, of course I am going to do everything possible to give my kids access to college and steer them that way.

I believe that virtually everyone, white-collar and blue-collar alike, quietly feels likewise. We make a pretense of giving contrary advice, but mostly just in hopes that other people will move in that direction for us. To take the bullet and help with this imbalance, and also to relieve the intense competition our own kids face.