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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#71

Post by sarchertech »

MitziMoto wrote: post #64
Bratmon wrote: post #3

This is legitimately the reason I'm looking to leave programming. I got into programming because the problems of programming were interesting to me. But if the problems go from "figure out why this calculator is off by one in France" to "Get this LLM to stop spamming cutsey emojis", then maybe it's time for a career change.

I'm no longer in corporate America, so maybe I'm out of touch a bit, but could you just...not...use an LLM? You can still solve interesting problems on your own if you choose to do so?

Yeah at many places you still can. It’s just so easy to turn your brain off and let the robot do a maybe good enough job that even people who know better are merging slop.

We’ve had 3 production incidents this week that slipped past CI because there’s a whole team that is just shoving out PRs without understanding what’s going out.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#72

Post by mrandish »

> My job has changed from designing and writing code to designing code, describing the design to an LLM, reviewing code the LLM produces

As a long-time engineering manager, PM and, eventually, product owner my response is, "Congrats! You've just been promoted to management." :-)

As a new manager, your first challenge will be successfully delivering commercial results using only a team of 'differently abled' new grad interns. Don't complain, new managers don't get to pick their first team! To be honest, these guys are more like alien brains raised in a vat with no direct senses. They've only ever experienced a data feed of the internet and, oh yeah, they get near-total amnesia a few times a day (but maybe you can teach them to write notes for themselves). They also have ADHD and are somewhere on the spectrum. But don't worry because what they lack in common sense, experience and intuition is offset by having a sort-of photographic memory and a willingness to grind on a problem 24/7. You should be fine. Good luck, we're all counting you...

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#73

Post by adverbly »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

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…

> No one is really pushing me to increase my workload

Spoken like someone who is not at an org/team that has undergone layoffs and reduced hiring in the last 3 years.

You might be in the minority there - especially when it comes to those who are facing burnout.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#74

Post by infinite_spin »

Bratmon wrote: post #3

This is legitimately the reason I'm looking to leave programming. I got into programming because the problems of programming were interesting to me. But if the problems go from "figure out why this calculator is off by one in France" to "Get this LLM to stop spamming cutsey emojis", then maybe it's time for a career change.

I got into programming to just build stuff, the coding is just a means to an end, try not to think too hard about the how and think more about the why and what

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#75

Post by strken »

block_dagger wrote: post #25

I've started feeling slightly physically ill when I read Opus output for hours straight. This article rings very true for me. I've started complaining about it with my team; at least have a personal style guide in your agent rules that eliminates emdashes, the "it's not X, it's Y"s, the long lists of modifiers before the noun, using the word "land" to mean finish, etc. I hope this is just a phase of adolescent LLMs.

`arc land` is burnt into my brain by Phabricator, so I'm aware that the term predates LLMs, but it still drives me nuts.

It's impossible to undo some of these linguistic wobbles. Even if you could filter out 100% of LLM input, the humans themselves are learning to say "land" at a higher frequency now.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#76

Post by nacozarina »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

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…

LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero. Therefore, you will exhaust yourself near-instantly trying to drive differentiated value out of cognitive work. Non-arbitrable labor is one safe haven: bending steel, drilling wells, running cables, flying drones, etc. Physical agency gets you a premium the clankers can’t (yet?) trespass upon. That’s why guys building data centers are making bank & job-hopping while the SAs administering the computational guts of them are struggling. A second vector is reputational: either by authority (you’re a regulator) or by taste (you’re a rare/reknown specialist) you make quality attestations about cheaply-produced cognitive artifacts. The first vector is a big community; the second is not. Get out of being in a knife fight with the clankers on their own turf, they’ll gut you.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#77

Post by helloplanets »

block_dagger wrote: post #25

I've started feeling slightly physically ill when I read Opus output for hours straight. This article rings very true for me. I've started complaining about it with my team; at least have a personal style guide in your agent rules that eliminates emdashes, the "it's not X, it's Y"s, the long lists of modifiers before the noun, using the word "land" to mean finish, etc. I hope this is just a phase of adolescent LLMs.

It's kind of offputting how much Anthropic models these days keep repeating "real", "genuine" and "honest". They've RL'd that way over the top.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#78

Post by hattmall »

wxre wrote: post #30

I don't mind interacting with LLMs myself and find they increase my productivity a decent amount. I just can't stand dealing with other people's slop. Getting sent IM responses that are copy pasted LLM nonsense. Getting a massive PR to review that was generated overnight and the author didn't read it first.

So annoying, I'm dealing with a client that just constantly feeds my responses to their question into AI. Which of course just asks more questions and tells me how clever I am. I also know the client isn't reading because in many spots I put "[Client Name] you need to answer this directly as we need to know the actual real business detail" and its ignored or the AI provides a detail I know is made up.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#79

Post by yuye »

wisty wrote: post #40
dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

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.

>"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.

AI is not a productivity multiplier. There are diminishing results.

The ones that notice the highest increases of productivity are usually the ones that were unproductive at best and dangerously incompetent at worst.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#80

Post by ehnto »

nacozarina wrote: post #76
dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

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…

LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero. Therefore, you will exhaust yourself near-instantly trying to drive differentiated value out of cognitive work. Non-arbitrable labor is one safe haven: bending steel, drilling wells, running cables, flying drones, etc. Physical agency gets you a premium the clankers can’t (yet?) trespass upon. That’s why guys building data centers are making bank & job-hopping while the…

Flying drones is an interesting one, I guess you do have to drive the car out to site and set up the drone. But a lot of drone ops are waypointed, automatic flight. I can see a future in which the only thing the operator does is drive the drone van to site, hit the deploy button as the drone pops out the roof, and wait for it to return. Mission set up already by an LLM prompt back at the office.
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