Live data from Hacker News

I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

51–60 of 391 posts

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#51
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t read the code!!

I actually dispute this, I read all the code, the core thing people have to give up is not "reading the code" per se, it's giving up on "that's not how I would have done it". When you see a perfectly clear function or object that just isn't your style, you have to accept it and move on. Where there are concrete concerns, or it's unreadable, demand excellence, but treat it like a coworker, not an IDE.

Yeah this is how I feel about it. Does it look correct? is it doing something weird? Is it forgetting about some gotcha in our domain that it hasn't been taught about yet? Otherwise, ship it.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#52

I don’t understand what could possibly need to be made so fast that isn’t totally made up billable hours. Running at top speed long enough to be burned out is either ineffective, or valuable enough that someone else can take over while you sleep.

Even with Fabel and all that I constantly keep having to babysit it and correct it like it’s an adolescent and it gets really old and the amount of code. It produces not all of its great at all. I’m burnt out looking at. It’s poor coating that somehow magically works.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#53
started to dread reading LLM output because I know what I’m going to find. False assumptions and hallucinations. Emphatic, staccato fragments. Excessive emojis .

I do not understand these complaints. Yes, those are the defaults and they're annoying, although the general public seems to like them. But you are not stuck with these. You can just tell the LLM how it should interact with you. If you're using any sort of harness beyond the chat window in a web browser, you can codify these instructions in a rules.md file or similar and have it automatically included in any new chat. It's not any harder than changing the default wallpaper or color scheme on your desktop operating system.

In reverse order, you can just tell the LLM to never use emojis. I don't like emphatic staccato fragments either, so I tell it to eschew the language of marketing and hype and stick to a factual and plain language, or to employ an academic tone. I explicitly instruct mine to ask clarifying questions whenever context is ambiguous and to push back on false assumptions or common misconceptions (by me). Hallucinationsa re the biggest problem of those you mention; it's not easy to totally eliminate them (for the same reason it's not easy to instruct people to not fall for scams or disinformation), but you can considerably reduce them by setting standards for citations.

I have ideas about reducing hallucinations over work material (ie a codebase) but am omitting them here as they are not fully thought out or tested.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every industry, and we wonder why everything is being enshittified. I'm not looking forward to using computers or technology over the next decade. There is a non-zero chance myself or a loved one is killed because of vibe coding.

There's also a non zero chance that someone in your life is going to have fun and whimsy and their life improved by vibe coding. Why focus on the negative?

Yes who cares if they die as long as they had some fun and whimsy first! :P

Edit: fr though I have plenty of fun and whimsy without needing vibe coded apps and I'd prefer a 911 call didn't get routed to Burger King because someone vibe coded the comm stack...

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#56
post #40

I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, a…

Individual gains from llm seem much larger than net productivity increases. I think a major source of this discrepency is people creating more work for their coworkers at the speed of slop. Especially the people with no idea. "I did a Chat output, please fix and review it " is the kind of thing that empowers the people who used to have a minimal productivity, and now lets them to wreck things on an industrial scale.

This is valid in the other direction as well. Principle engineers, CTOs, with legitimately earned authority end up using that authority to 100x their output onto the team as if it was a Godsend unlock.

It's not. There is no one person that has universally good taste. Also, we're not in your head, no matter how much better of a coder or whatever. We're not in your head and it's all terribly painful to navigate.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#58

I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, a…

[deleted]

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#59

I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, a…

[dead]

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a non zero chance that someone in your life is going to have fun and whimsy and their life improved by vibe coding. Why focus on the negative?

Yes who cares if they die as long as they had some fun and whimsy first! :P Edit: fr though I have plenty of fun and whimsy without needing vibe coded apps and I'd prefer a 911 call didn't get routed to Burger King because someone vibe coded the comm stack...

We're all going to die.

Have your fun and whimsy.

Post reply on HN