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.
Lots of companies (nearly all, I’d wager) of any size were leaving bare-minimum a 2x software development speed increase on the table before LLMs, having nothing whatsoever to do with how fast anyone was typing or thinking up code, and everything to do with how they organized and supported development work, and with your basic ordinary corporate dysfunction.
My company, I’d say it was more like 4x or 5x they could have achieved before LLMs, by fixing processes and reducing how often management steps on their own dicks.
All the people I’m seeing with crazy-high LLM productivity at my company? They’ve been given enormous autonomy to basically go do WTF ever they want, and people are jumping to get them anything they need (and most of what they’re doing is prototyping, for that matter). So right off the bat, if they’re competent, they should see a notable multiplier on productivity even if they weren’t using LLMs. Not that those aren’t helping, too, but if you don’t change processes they’re not all that effective, because the problem wasn’t speed of code-writing (and if you can change processes, you already could have sped up development a lot before LLMs…)