Ask HN: Burnout because of ChatGPT?

TL;DR (summarised by ChatGPT) - I'm experiencing increased productivity and independence with ChatGPT but grappling with challenges such as lack of work-life boundaries and overwhelming information, leading to stress and burnout.

Long story...

I have been using ChatGPT for a while, and moved to the Plus subscription for their GPT-4 model, which I must say, is quite good.

1. ChatGPT makes us very productive. Personally, in my early 40s, I feel my brain is back in 20s.

2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative. [[EDIT: I may have implied a wrong meaning. To clarify - nobody's going yet because of ChatGPT. It is just raising the bar high and higher. What took me years to learn, this thing can do already and much more. And I cannot predict the financial future of OpenAI or the markets in general.]]

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.

And I have gotten better at using it. Calling myself a prompt-engineer sounds weird.

With all the good, I am now experiencing the cons, stress and burnout:

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.

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.

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.

5. I have zero doubt that AI is setting the bar high, and it is going to take away a ton of average-joe desk jobs. GPT-4 itself is quite capable and organisations are yet to embrace it.

And not the least, it makes me worry - what lies with the future models. I am not a layman when it comes to AI/ML - have worked with it until the past few years in the pre-GPT era.

Has anybody experienced these issues? And how do you deal with those?

* I could not resist asking ChatGPT the above - couple of strategies it told me were to "Seek Support from Others" and "Participating in discussions or groups focused on ethical AI". *

Interesting observations. For context, it looks like you are a software engineer from your comment history, is that correct?

I'm wondering why you're feeling the need to hire juniors because of GPT-4. Is it because GPT-4 has taken up the cognitive load capacity you need for mentoring juniors, or do you feel like GPT "obsoletes" less experienced people?

I think ChatGPT's advice is on the right track. It sounds to me like your experience of using it is kind of like my experience of pairing with someone else of equal-ish ability: productive, but draining, due to the need to constantly pay attention. If so, why not treat it similarly? Most people don't pair all day every day, probably because of the aforementioned cognitive load of doing so.

Last, but not least, while this may seem obvious, you should remember that you are human and not a machine. You need to separate yourself from this thing for at least some portion of your day. The constant stress (and, yes, that dopamine rush you feel when you use it is a kind of stress -- stress isn't always a purely negative thing) will take its toll on you eventually. That's the "burnout" you're perceiving, and the only way to prevent it is to just not let it happen.

Take care of yourself. Socialize and interact with humans, especially close friends and/or SO's as applicable. If you have a pet, spend some time with them. Take a walk.

But, most of all, remember that GPT-x, as smart as it may appear, can't actually learn anything from experience. It can only learn from an expensive and labor-intensive process, and once its training is done, it's frozen in time forever (modulo some fine-tuning, which is essentially an extension of said labor-intensive training process). And, at the end of the day, that just makes it a very versatile, very expensive, and very useful tool, but a tool nonetheless.

This seems like a pretty good take - you found that you could 'get rid of juniors' by working in an unsustainable way. Why not work with now-super-productive junior employees that can spread the cognitive load?

It would seem odd if this were the one time in the history of computing where a big productivity boost didn't just lead to increasingly big/complex software.

I've been exposed more to pipeline automation than GPT4, like argoCI/CD, and can see that taking away a lot of jobs. If customers are connected to the code repository then developers just need to push commits and argo will take care of the rest, including getting the latest code to the customer.

*This may be a bit of an oversimplification, but argo showed me that the whole pipeline can be automated