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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#101

Post by topgrain2 »

anonu wrote: post #41

It's burnt me out too. I'm generating 10x more features and multitasking across 4 disparate projects. My greatest concern is I don't really have a strong connection to the underlying fundamentals anymore. I need to see how the things works to internalize it. Now I just trust that the agent wrote this piece correctly. The productivity drive and the sheer feature set you can generate in record time makes it easy to for…

Knowing how things work, knowing what should be possible and where “there be dragons”, and having a pretty well-developed “sixth sense” for all kinds of things is proving just as valuable with LLM-heavy programming as it did before.

… but I am almost certain I’d never have developed those in the first place if I hadn’t spent 25ish years programming on a bunch of different platforms and setting up servers and networks and all that, without LLMs.

I dunno how you make another “me”, now, while before lots and lots of programmers naturally ended up as someone with skills and knowledge like mine, and those skills seem super useful when writing code with LLMs.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#102

Post by nomel »

jaggederest wrote: post #6
nzeid wrote: post #4

I do not have the burnout but I certainly operate similarly to the author. I continue to be unable to establish a workflow where allowing the LLM to generate code that I review is faster than writing the code myself. Literally the only two ways out of this dilemma is to blindly trust what was generated or to generate an uncharacteristically exhaustive suite of unit tests to validate every possible scenario. I just wr…

> generate an uncharacteristically exhaustive suite of unit tests to validate every possible scenario. This is what you want. You want comprehensive tests at every level, far more than is reasonable for a human to build or maintain, from unit, functional, to full end to end and beyond. Adversarial testing (both TDD-style "write tests to demonstrate this bug", and posthoc "prove this patch wrong with a new test") is t…

Yeap. Hundreds of tests for small tools are completely trivial now.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#103

Post by Yiin »

canada_dry wrote: post #68

The 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…

Cannot relate, my expectations might just gone up, because when I compare what I was producing with agents a year ago vs now, it's night and day.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#104

Post by UncleOxidant »

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…

> done by my clankers or clankers of other people

I'm getting so many requests to review LLM-generated documents - planning docs, docs intended for end-users, project docs, business plan docs. A team member sent me a zip file with about 30 LLM generated documents in it the other day and asked if I could review them right away. And a lot of it was just repetition and/or stuff that was just out of left field, made-up, hallucinated stuff. They're able to generate this stuff way faster than we can review. It used to be that it would take a significant part of a day for a project manager to come up with a planning doc - now they can generate one in a few minutes and send it out for review. It's just really tiring.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#106

Post by woutr_be »

I’m currently doing a project with someone who only uses LLMs, and it’s exhausting and mentally draining.

Whenever I give feedback on something, the answer is just “let me tell Claude”. The person has no understanding of how everything works, and most of the code reflects that.

The other day he hardcoded in a demo mode, simply because he didn’t even know how to set up a local environment and set environment variables. I’m confused as to why Claude didn’t even knew this, but it might just be the prompting.

I limit LLM usage myself, and if I do use it, I try to use it on extremely specific tasks. It’s the only way it works for me.

I honestly don’t understand how all these companies are getting away with generating AI code. Even in a small project I quickly fall behind on my understanding of the project.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#107

Post by j_bum »

treefry wrote: post #67

From my experience, there are mainly 3 burnout reasons. 1. Multi-tasking is the top one. I usually have to frequently switch between 3 to 5 agent windows which are on different things. It's extremely exhausting when each round takes a few minutes. Before coding agent era, I believe most developers had chance to spend 2+ hours focusing on one thing. Now coding agents have increased my spectrum on the tech stack, but t…

Agreed. I am working hard to restrict myself to only 1-2 agent workflows at a time. More is untenable, though it’s so easy to fall into the trap of deploying an agent “just for this minor fix.”

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#108

Post by doawoo »

LastTrain wrote: post #99
canada_dry wrote: post #68

The 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

I'd bet more on this personally.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#109

Post by thewhitetulip »

woutr_be wrote: post #106

I’m currently doing a project with someone who only uses LLMs, and it’s exhausting and mentally draining. Whenever I give feedback on something, the answer is just “let me tell Claude”. The person has no understanding of how everything works, and most of the code reflects that. The other day he hardcoded in a demo mode, simply because he didn’t even know how to set up a local environment and set environment variables…

LLM generated code is obtuse and dense, unnecessarily so

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#110

Post by wisty »

apsurd wrote: post #56
wisty wrote: post #40

Earlier 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.

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.

I'm just waiting for Bezos to order all work with human agents to use the same API and guardrails as an LLM.
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