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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

121–130 of 391 posts

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#121
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.

iwould advise that if you love it, stay and coast.

this AI bubble will pop. when it does you'll be hot stuff all over again.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#122
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.

Leave programing for what though?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#123

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…

> 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.

I see a different type of pressure: I'm at a company that still is requiring everyone use LLMs with token leaderboards, time-spent measurements, and impacts to performance reviews, and all that. So I find myself having to carve out some percent of my time to stop doing productive work, and "go do AI to show token use." So my workload hasn't changed (or it's gone up), but I have N% less time to work on it because I have to spend time appeasing the AI gods...

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#124

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…

Yeah, but it's that KIND OF AWESOME?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#125
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

I got into programming because I like programming, and computers. Not whatever the hell this is.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#126
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?

It’s not there yet but we’re clearly heading towards a world where the answer is “no, you have no choice”. AI is weaved into business processes. If Ai leaves a comment on your pr, you must resolve it before merging, you’re expected to “get things done” at a particular pace consistent with using ai, regardless of whether what you did is any good.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#127

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…

> 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. I see a different type of pressure: I'm at a company that still is requiring everyone use LLMs with token leaderboards, time-spent…

Just have an agent chug on a side-project for you, or set up a CI script to review every pull request or some similarly “helpful” task. That should eat a lot of tokens!

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#129

[flagged]

How?

Ask random questions until you get enough sense of things to ask "the right" questions. Never stop asking questions. Use everything you can to get the answers and never settle for any answer no matter how good it sounds, doubt it and go back to step 1.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve been involved in B2B (so no payment flow). But it’s basically the same with an handful of integration tests for common workflows. They run fast and mostly serve a canary to ensure that we are not crippling some use cases. When a bug hits us, a test case is added/modified for it.

They’re mostly a reflection of the current requirement of the project.

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