I think I have LLM burnout • Hacker News Board

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#111

Post by topgrain2 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:49 AM UTC

mannanj wrote: post #69

I had this too. Started after lay off in October. What helped was a sleep and work system, oriented around being offline that was inspired by nature and from my earlier days in working in tech while car camping across the national parks. Basically: the sun wins in terms of how all energy on the earth is structured, and expressed. All manners of cycles of organisms and living systems are in relation to its rise and fa…

I once experimented with beeswax candles as my only after-dark light source. This meant no hyper-stimulating screen activities whatsoever, too. TV, phone, video games, browsing the web? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. Just dim, warm light from actual flames.

Cured my lifelong “night owl” “trait” in a couple days. Shockingly effective.

Turned out to be hard to keep up and still, like, exist with other people, and you’d probably need to relax it a little in Winter unless your job lets you work reduced hours to kinda “hibernate” (otherwise when would you do anything that’s not work but requires light or electronics?) but it sure worked.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#112

Post by block_dagger » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:49 AM UTC

helloplanets wrote: post #77

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.

"You're right for pointing this out. Honestly, your comment raises a real concern — they genuinely RL'd that over the top." - Claude

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#113

Post by hjhart » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:50 AM UTC

dthedavid wrote: post #61

If you can afford it, I highly recommend quitting and going independent at least for a while. It’s so much fun building right now.

Can you elaborate on what you're doing to make a living?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#114

Post by charlesfries » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:51 AM UTC

jamesjhare wrote: post #57

is there any evidence that Alec Scollon, the first time blog author responsible for this post, even exists? look up the name. boo this post and the premise behind it.

The domain "alecscollon.com" was also registered today, according to WHOIS

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#115

Post by jordanb » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:52 AM UTC

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…

I remember working with people like this before AI and it was annoying but they struggled with productivity because they didn't understand what they were working on enough to produce good code efficiently, so the problem usually took care of itself.

Now these people can thrive because LLM coding encourages the incurious and punishes the deep thinker.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#116

Post by PsylentKnight » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:54 AM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #104

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,…

Thats gonna be a no from me dog. I don’t expect anyone to read something I didn’t read myself

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#117

Post by copperx » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:55 AM UTC

akomtu wrote: post #91

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.

It sounds far fetched at first, but I think it could be true. There was a time in my life when I read literature constantly and started using those patterns in my writing. The habit fell off quickly after I stopped reading for a while, so there might be hope.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#118

Post by jampa » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:58 AM UTC

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…

I feel the same way about consumer AI tools now. Gemini and ChatGPT have been abysmal lately. They can no longer be relied on to do multi-turn searching and thinking.

Before, they could stay in thinking mode for more than 7 minutes. For example, "find a source for this claim" would search, analyze, and self-adjust the query. Nowadays, even if I push for it, I cannot make these tools work for more than 30 seconds before they give generic answers, even in "Pro" mode.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#119

Post by Rudybega » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:58 AM UTC

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…

This seems hilariously, extremely revisionist.

Hell, the Opus 4.5 moment was only last November, and that was when agentic coding and most coding CLI tools became truly first class options. That's a wild paradigm shift. Hell, GPT-5 wasn't even out (that's August of last year). Most people were using 4o. Their current offerings are wildly better for coding than 4o was.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#120

Post by ____tom____ » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 4:01 AM UTC

I get burnout from frustration when the LLM just can't follow instructions.

Like when I'm trying to get it to create an image, and the first pass is beautiful, but ten different request to modify it, with different phrasing and even example images, produce the same image ten times. Or when you tell it not to use a cheap hack in AGENTS.md about six different ways and in your prompt, and it still does it again, and again.

It's like arguing with an idiot. And THAT gives me burnout.

Also: I've never once seen an emoji in LLM output. What are people talking about?