LLMs poison your mind. The more AI slop you read, the more your mind turns into something like slop. This isn't very different from the idea that the food you eat is what your body is made of.
I think I have LLM burnout
91–100 of 391 posts
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#92This 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
We get it, you don't have a passion for the act or the craft, just the end result, but I'm absolutely sick of hearing it all over this site as if it's a universal truth that some of us just don't recognize yet.
Sorry, some of us have a joy for programming where the how is just as important, if not more so, than the what and the why. No matter how much people proclaim that the how doesn't matter to them, it isn't going to suddenly make it true for others.
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm... I think the majority of people working jobs are mostly just there "for the paychecks." It'd be rather beautiful if all jobs were purely passion driven, but that is simply not the case. Nor could it be. And yeah, there are programmers with jobs that are mostly driven by passion, but most would pack it up and go home immediately if there was a sudden "we have stopped paying you" announcement.
Why else would you "work", if it weren't for the pay cheques to support yourself and your family?
Because I believed in the product! (Firefox, in my case)
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#94I 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…
One of the reasons they exhaust me, is that it's always "one more prompt" to get a UI correct. It's often just slightly off, but it can take 5-10 mins sometimes to rework something. It has led to me working much longer hours.
I think this is in part because I am one of the software engineers that always liked building products more than writing complex software. So, I am driven by the feeling of creating something. And I want to get the feature perfect and complete. But getting from 95%->100% done can take a long time with UI work for me.
So I work much longer hours now, unfortunately.
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Could you describe your usual workflows and usage patterns with AI?
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#96Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this get mentioned a lot but I still am skeptical that AI can generate tests we can trust more than any other code we know we cannot trust. Yes tests are conceptually isolated and that helps, but I've personally seen unit tests get generated that are semantically incorrect - that is, they test the structure of the code (e.g. they can check function output types and values), but they can't know _why_ the unit te…
I don't even care about tests being correct as you can still verify them even when tedious. What I care is that, more often than not, the shape of the solution is not fixed. Having unit tests for those can be extremely costly as when the changes happens, you have to change all the tests. I've been burned by this in my honeymoon period with unit testing (pretty much the reason it ended). These days, I prefer broader s…
I want all the layers of the pyramid, eventually, but the top layers matter the most. I can't count the number of times my paranoid "make sure that customers can successfully pay us" end to end test suite has prevented the money faucet from being shut off. I install one perennially at any company I work at and they always pay for themselves surprisingly quickly.
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
We get it, you don't have a passion for the act or the craft, just the end result, but I'm absolutely sick of hearing it all over this site as if it's a universal truth that some of us just don't recognize yet. Sorry, some of us have a joy for programming where the how is just as important, if not more so, than the what and the why. No matter how much people proclaim that the how doesn't matter to them , it isn't goi…
Claude: Solve this jigsaw puzzle for me...
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#99The reason I'm getting LLM burnout is from dealing with the obvious neutering and opaque downgrading of all the top models. Prior to the last 12mos AI companies were hell bent on squeezing out the best results from mediocre models. But... now that the top models have progressed, those same AI companies have switched their efforts into reducing the computation (cost of a producing a result) as much as possible without…
You sure about that? Maybe it is reality hitting expectations after the initial “holy shit” wears off
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting because I would feed that benchmark back into the agent and loop over it, to see how much faster you could get it, and agents are really good at that kind of recursive optimization. And I would definitely add at least a simulated 1GiB write test, probably a real one honestly, if I was building something like that. At least with agent-run tests I care about loop speed a lot, but I care about complet…
You're right. This was just a performance issue, but what if next time it is a corruption bug or a security vulnerability or really anything that can cause real consequences if happened in production? I don't think that LLM systems are inherently bound to have this flaw, but I think that we are pretty far from harnesses and algorithms becoming advanced enough so that the LLM system can kind of continuously evaluate i…
I don't know about that, Fable is, when properly guided, a better engineer for those things than I am. Narrow breadth, weird priorities, myopic and ivory tower as hell, but superhuman. Maybe that says more about me, or maybe not, but certainly it's caught bugs I would not have, and point it at things like a fuzzer, woo buddy, it has been many years since I broke out valgrind and nailed down a memory leak, but it sure can.