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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#141

Post by woutr_be »

jordanb wrote: post #115
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.

At least to me, before LLMs, those people could somewhat be trained. You could give them feedback, and they would improve and learn the code.

Now your feedback is just another prompt for them, the code might be slightly better, but the person learned nothing from it.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#142

Post by alexchantavy »

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.

Voice really matters in writing. If everyone uses Opus to write without editing, then it all sounds the same regardless of who it came from.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#143

Post by ehnto »

sarchertech wrote: post #71
MitziMoto wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah at many places you still can. It’s just so easy to turn your brain off and let the robot do a maybe good enough job that even people who know better are merging slop. We’ve had 3 production incidents this week that slipped past CI because there’s a whole team that is just shoving out PRs without understanding what’s going out.

A lot is said about context you can feed into the LLM but I do think there is still superior power in human context awareness. That kind of ambient collation and organisation of the whole business and its purpose, all the different work going on and how it all relates to eachother. It happens when you isolate business units a bit too much also.

It's not surprising that if you have a hundred separate, isolated contexts working on the same business, that don't cross-talk and have no ability to subconsciously receive and collate, prioritize the thousands of signals we get from our work environment, that you end up shipping lots of incomplete or incompatible work.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#144

Post by infinite_spin »

16bitvoid wrote: post #92
infinite_spin wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

You okay?

This isn't a response I expect from people who are here for a productive discussion. I'm sorry that you are sick of hearing this, but I'm not responsible for making sure you only read what you find worthy of your own personal brand of respect. Instead of attacking someone for simply offering their point of view, in what appears to be a quasi-gatekeeping effort, maybe you should look inward and discover what is making you this upset toward a complete stranger.

__I cannot take away the joy you have for programming simply by stating what drives me.__

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#145

Post by infinite_spin »

jdashg wrote: post #98
16bitvoid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If solving jigsaw puzzles with claude will enable the creation of tools that help the people I want to help (students with disabilities), then I would use it for that, without feeling any guilt at all for doing so.

Why should I regret that? Why should I care about your purity tests?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#146

Post by eloisius »

efnx wrote: post #127
ryandrake wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Man. If I had this kind of mandate I could really burn some tokens. Review each new PR and extract 100 topics to debate related to it. Spin up 1000 sub agents, each with a different personality profile system prompt, to debate each point until consensus has been reached. Synthesize the learnings into a limerick. Build a Spotify playlist that pairs with the tone of the debates. Post the limerick and link to playlist on the PR and tag me to notify me that I have a PR to review.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#147

Post by Hilliard_Ohiooo »

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…

That ALL sounds horrible, is that really life in tech these days?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#148

Post by cuu508 »

sefrost wrote: post #94
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…

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. A…

Perhaps do the last 5% yourself?
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