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Task Paralysis and AI

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Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#61

Post by seba_dos1 »

dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

Agentic harnesses go in the exact opposite direction to what I'd want to get from LLMs. I don't want another black box to (poorly) work on a black box for me, I want to be better at reaching into and understanding boxes that I already have in front of me. I don't want tools to autocompact contexts and store generated memories to facilitate long runs I have barely any control over, I want tools that allow me to painlessly craft a more relevant context for short ones. I don't want agents to author commits, I want them to use Git (or other tools) to get the information that I'm looking for when it's tedious to do it myself. I don't need them to do the fun and beneficial part of the job for me, I want them to do the boring parts that I already know how to do which block me from proceeding because my brain just isn't interested. Some of those things you can script yourself relatively easily, but the current tooling for LLM coding is absolutely atrocious and disconnected from programmer's needs.

The main output of my work is gaining a better mental model of systems I work with. That's what lets me grow and that's what makes people want to pay me rather than someone else to work on these things. Anything else, including the produced code itself, is secondary to that. In general I find it pretty hard, although not impossible, to use LLMs in a way that doesn't diminish my output, especially with this tooling that seems explicitly designed to make it hard. After all, reviewing things is so much harder than writing them yourself, and you can't feel accomplished by something you haven't done.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#62

Post by Weebs »

rufasterisco wrote: post #40

Some traits I recognized in many excellent coders i worked with, their drive to optimization, intellectual thirst, critical and creative thinking are attributes i consistently correlated with them being in some sort of neurodivergence spectrum. Being able to remove the "first step" block is great, but what worries me is that this is coupled with LLMs sycophantic behaviours. My gut feeling is that coupling the feeling…

I'm wrestling with this right now. I only use LLMs for design and exploration because I am not employed and can't pay for a subscription right now, and they make the design phase feel like less of a fever dream because checking my ideas doesn't involve hours of scanning search results online and trying to see how my ideas fit with what exists or trying to evaluate if my ideas even make sense, so I feel more encouraged to get started on working, but I often wonder if the prompts are being sycophants

In one case recently I explained a garbage collector design I had been toying with a while ago, but couldn't find research related to my idea or really evaluate if my idea would work. After enough arguing with the prompt it finally "understood", started praising my "novelty", and when I later asked for research related to it I was given a paper that already implemented most of my idea

It was a funny moment of seeing how it was clearly trained on too many online forum comments (simply mentioning reference counting got it on this whole awkward line of false folklore about memory management) before switching to sycophancy, to finally showing me a paper

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#63

Post by bluefirebrand »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #51
MrGilbert wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. It's so wild that it never dawned on me, why some people around me were so quick with "Let AI do that!". I'm not saying that each and everyone has ADHD, but I think I underestimated a) the flow of dopamine a successful prompt can set free and b) the craving for it by folks that I deemed…

As someone with ADHD, it’s really a problem. I have so many random documents of random outputs from prompts I didn’t track. It’s honestly accelerated some of my worst habits because it feels like I actually completed a task. The reality is I just have folders of half finished projects, which anyone with ADHD can relate to. I’ll finish modding that Dreamcast one day…

I feel kind of lucky in a way that I hate working with AI so much. I'd rather hammer nails through my fingers than spend my time prompting

So my ADHD isn't being satisfied by those little dopamine hits from LLMs, Any time I'm forced to use them I'm mad about it, and can't wait to be done with it

I still have that folder of half finished things just like you, though. It's just not AI generated

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#64

Post by mkeeter »

Ozzie-D wrote: post #2

This resonates. The "idea to result" loop getting shorter with AI is genuinely addictive, I've noticed it in my own workflow too. But theres a flip side nobody talks about: once you get used to that speed, going back to manual implementation feels 10x worse than it did before. The paralysis dosn't go away, it just gets masked. The real question is whether AI is solving the problem or just compressing the dopamine cyc…

Does one also get dopamine from using LLMs to write comments on Hacker News?

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#65

Post by visarga »

dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

> I do not want to rediscover for the hundredth time that in fact all this time an agent took shortcuts for acceptance tests I rely upon and didn’t catch. Or once again get the agent to understand why and what I want it to do after its context got bloated and it start to drift completely.

100% agree, neither do I, but I see this as an opportunity to think "how can we gain trust in the outputs AI produced for us?"

Is it about tests, reviews, some methodology? Better observability? Formal specification? It's really interesting to think how you can relieve this pain. I think the answer to this question will show the path ahead for agentic coding.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#66

Post by robotbikes »

KallDrexx wrote: post #53
dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

I have done a lot of introspection on this and realized that I'm very much driven by intrinsic rewards moreso than extrinsic. I got into coding over a decade before it was my career because of the exploration, learning, and puzzle/challenge aspect. Every time I have tried to be extrinsically driven (career or OSS wise) it's never worked out anyway. I could have done more to make it successful but I never cared about…

I have found the opposite to be true. I really like getting stuff done for people and struggled for years with all of the specific syntax and details of solving any particular problem. I have a relatively in-depth knowledge of computers and how they work and algorithms and the like but always struggled with the exact details of how to do something so it feels like a blessing to be able to spit ball some conceptual understanding and get back real code. I always struggled with making my ideas real before the novelty of the inspiration wore off unless I happened to get hyper focused on solving a particular problem.

Now I can step through everything in a way that it feels like a super power. I have enough sense and knowledge to I think intuit whether the solution being provided is bloated or perhaps even unnecessary and I can reiterate over it. I've just been using Cursor for work as I adopted a personal restriction to only use AI I can run on my own devices for personal use, but if I'm getting paid and the tools are provided I'm going to do my best to solve the problems that I'm confronted with and so far the LLM connected IDE has been helpful.

It's best in my experience when I use it as a tool to augment trouble shooting and brainstorming but when you are fixing one liner bugs in other people's side it's not like me typing the fix is very different from a machine auto completing it.

It might feel like cheating on a crossword puzzle but that is also something I do if I get stuck and the fun of solving the problem has become a time sink.

I think the real risk is if you don't understand conceptually what you are commiting anymore and I've tried to make sure that I always understand what and how the code is working and also understanding the pitfalls of being able to propose bullshit hypothesis that the agreeability of the LLM will go along with.

I've yet to seriously use a LLM for a personal project and when I tried to use Devstral that ran on my Nvidia 4090 it hallucinated so much that it wasn't super helpful but it still shot out boiler plate code that I could then spend time fixing and helped me overcome my own task paralysis regarding initiating.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#67

Post by dinfinity »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #29

Nitpick: Stop the throat clearing and get to the point. The final paragraph is the whole point of the article. It's a real turnoff when I have to scroll past a moral lecture on artistry and piracy when I just want to hear your thoughts on task paralysis. --- To the author's point though, AI is incredible at building some initial momentum on a task. The initialization energy is basically zero.

Not a nitpick, but a justified criticism of the post. The technical term is "burying the lede" and it is incompetence at best and malice at worst.

It's absolutely awful. It's not a novel or entertainment. Don't "foreshadow" or "set the scene". Just get to the fucking point.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#68

Post by righthand »

dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

I have never jumped on the train but I am writing a project that uses v4l2 or libcamera. I have been experimenting with both and spent 4 hours reading linux kernel docs, libcamera docs, and not writing any code. I’m okay with that and the project has still moved ahead even though I only have written v4l2 sample code.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#69

Post by Weryj »

MrGilbert wrote: post #11
Weryj wrote: post #3

I could have written this article myself. The addiction part, the ADHD part and the pending test part. The fear of becoming addicted to AI is real and I don't think I'll be capable to stop it, considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. My Pro went to Max(5) to Max(20) pretty quickly and I was burning through that weekly limit still, wit…

> [...] considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. It's so wild that it never dawned on me, why some people around me were so quick with "Let AI do that!". I'm not saying that each and everyone has ADHD, but I think I underestimated a) the flow of dopamine a successful prompt can set free and b) the craving for it by folks that I deemed…

I thought about it a little deeper and I think software development has always had the addictive tendency. That hunt for the solution to the problem, has a rush when you complete it.

It’s just that the rush is more frequent, addiction intensity scales with dose and frequency.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#70

Post by rsyring »

albert_e wrote: post #36

Resonates with me. In a paradoxical way, the amount of stuff you can get done in an hour now is like a firehose -- which we rarely experienced in our earlier life -- which can be overwhelming to my brain. So I subconsciously resist starting a session because I never feel fully rested, calm, and focussed to take all that and process it well. There are also 10x more "active" projects now -- and prioritization and choos…

I've been using Augment's agents (VS code, CLI) for 8ish months. It let's me easily switch between GPT and Claude models.

I've found the best results from letting GPT 5.4 code and then asking Opus to do code reviews to a file. I do the review in a different agent session so it's "fresh". Then I review the file, edit until I agree with everything, and let the existing GPT agent session address the items in the review file. I've found Clause agents don't perform as well for me in coding for whatever reason. They feel more sloppy.

I've also been doing a very organic spec-driven development process where I have a md file for each non-trivial project update and use that to define the task and address questions or problems the agent has.

I've also found I can give agents conditional instructions which they will usually use like skills. This gives me a way to easily distribute my instructions to any agent/model on any machine with a single AGENTS.md as the entry point:

https://github.com/rsyring/agent-configs/blob/main/default.m...

This has all been very effective, more than I would have predicted a year ago.

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