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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#121

Post by jumploops »

apsurd wrote: post #120
jumploops wrote: post #103

A lot of these resonate with me, particularly the mental fatigue. It feels like normal coding forced me to slow my brain down, whereas now my mind is the limit. For context, I started an experiment to rebuild a previous project entirely with LLMs back in June '25 ("fully vibecoded" - not even reading the source). After iterating and finally settling on a design/plan/debug loop that works relatively well, I'm now expe…

What do you mean doing it the "right way" from the get-go, as then paired with more features, ballooning projects, and never launching? Is that why it's in quotes because it's the opposite of the right way? If there's one thing I learned in a decade+ of professional programming, it's that we can't predict the future. That's it, that simple. YANGNI. (also: model the data, but I'm trying to make a point here) We got in…

Yeah exactly, "right way" is in quotes because there is no right way.

The most important thing is shipping/getting feedback, everything else is theatre at best, or a project-killing distraction at worst.

As a concrete example, I wanted to update my personal website to show some of these fully-vibecoded projects off. That seemed too simple, so instead I created a Rotten Tomatoes-inspired web app where I could list the projects. Cool, should be an afternoon or two.

A few yak shaves later, and I'm adding automatic repo import[0] from Github...

Totally unnecessary, because I don't actually expect anyone to use the site other than me!

[0]https://github.com/jumploops/slop.haus/pull/9

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#122

Post by apsurd »

superfrank wrote: post #96
cglan wrote: post #3

I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…

> I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice. In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnove…

Thanks for the story. I also spent time as a delivery driver at an italian restaurant. It was a blast in the sense that i look back at that slice of life with pride and becoming. Never got the chance to be a waiter, but definitely they were characters and worked hard for their money. Also the cooking staff. What a hoot.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#123

Post by hihellokath »

I really hate having to wait 20 seconds to a minute between every interaction with the LLM— I end up alternating between prompting and doom scrolling for several hours, a viciously unsatisfying cycle. (I know I could probably fix this by having multiple agents running at once, but context switching to that level also seems like a stressful doom-scroll-esque experience lol)

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#124

Post by apsurd »

jumploops wrote: post #121
apsurd wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean doing it the "right way" from the get-go, as then paired with more features, ballooning projects, and never launching? Is that why it's in quotes because it's the opposite of the right way? If there's one thing I learned in a decade+ of professional programming, it's that we can't predict the future. That's it, that simple. YANGNI. (also: model the data, but I'm trying to make a point here) We got in…

Yeah exactly, "right way" is in quotes because there is no right way. The most important thing is shipping/getting feedback, everything else is theatre at best, or a project-killing distraction at worst. As a concrete example, I wanted to update my personal website to show some of these fully-vibecoded projects off. That seemed too simple, so instead I created a Rotten Tomatoes-inspired web app where I could list the…

lol. for whatever reason what came to mind is "it's like alcoholics anonymous". it's so liberating to be self-aware that we have a problem.

I JUST WANT TO CODE!

It gets us all. And it makes us better I think, to care about the craft. LLM people seem split on that. But it's both to me: gotta care about the craft, also as a professional, it's not the code, it's business outcomes. All good. hold two truths.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#125

Post by akhrail1996 »

LLM coding is addictive as hell though. you're like a kid at disneyland, everything builds so fast, just one more feature, one more fix... and then you're 4 hours in and your prompts are garbage but you don't want to stop because everything feels so close to done

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#127

Post by kstenerud »

I've found LLMs to be liberating and energizing, not at all exhausting.

I can finally do my preferred workflow: Research, (design, critique), (plan, critique, design), implement.

Design and planning has a quick enough turnaround cycle to not get annoying. By the time the agent is writing code, I have no involvement anymore. Just set it and forget it, come back in half an hour or so to see if it's done yet. Meanwhile, I look at the bigger picture and plan out my next prompt cycles as it churns out code.

For example, this project was entirely written by LLM:

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai

I never wrote a single line of this code (I do review it, of course, but even then the heavy lifting for that can be offloaded to an LLM so that I can focus on wider issues, which most often are architectural).

In particular, take a look at the docs/dev subdir to see the planning and design. Once the agent has that, it's MUCH harder for it to screw things up.

Is it as tight as it could be? Nope, but it has a solid architecture, does its job well, and has good debugging infrastructure so fixes are fast. I wouldn't use this approach for embedded or projects requiring maximum performance, but for regular code it's great!

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#128

Post by qq66 »

superfrank wrote: post #96
cglan wrote: post #3

I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…

> I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice. In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnove…

I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for, and when there was a bug, you simply sat down and fixed the bug.

With the rise of open source, there started to be more black-box compositing, you grabbed some big libraries like Django or NumPy and honestly just hoped there weren't any bugs, but if there were, you could plausibly step through the debugger and figure out what was going wrong and file a bug report.

Now, the LLMs are generating so many orders of magnitude more code than any human could ever have the chance to debug, you're basically just firing this stuff out like a firehose on a house fire, giving it as much control as you can muster but really just trusting the raw power of the thing to get the job done. And, bafflingly, it works pretty well, except in those cases where it doesn't, so you can't stop using the tool but you can't really ever get comfortable with it either.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#129

Post by p_v_doom »

esafak wrote: post #115
akomtu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used to be a Formula 1 driver. Now you are an instructor for a Formula 1 autopilot. You have to watch it at all times with full attention for it's a fast and reckless driver.

You're being generous to the humans; we're more like Ladas in comparison.

That may not be a bad comparison. A F1 car is really fast, really specialized car, that is also extremely fragile. A Lada may not be too fast but its incredibly versatile and robust even after decades of use. And has more luggage space

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#130

Post by dyauspitr »

rednafi wrote: post #11

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent. But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Review…

I do “TDD” LLM coding and only review the tests. That way if the tests pass I ship it. It hasn’t bitten me in the ass yet.
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