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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

151–160 of 391 posts

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#151
If an LLM was a person, it would be known as a "bullshit artist". I've worked with bullshit artists (people) before, and its exhausting trying to separate fact from fiction. It's a reason to avoid working with such people.

A good coworker will admit not knowing something, or if unsure give their best guess but discuss its limitations and why they might be wrong.

Question: Has anyone experimented with using voice to directly prompt an LLM, without doing speech-to-text? If an LLM can pick up on the skeptical nuances in a person's response, it might be prompted not to be overconfident in its subsequent output.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every industry, and we wonder why everything is being enshittified. I'm not looking forward to using computers or technology over the next decade. There is a non-zero chance myself or a loved one is killed because of vibe coding.

There's also a non zero chance that someone in your life is going to have fun and whimsy and their life improved by vibe coding. Why focus on the negative?

If the life of everyone (all 8 billion people) is improved by tech by some margin (pick the margin - 10%, 1%, 0.1%) at the cost of x people (pick the x - a thousand, a million, a billion) being killed by the same tech - is it still positive or negative? How do you even reason about it?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#154
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Also, post the limerick to HN.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#155
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

This mis-frames the actual issue. "Being there for the paycheck" isn't bad per se, it's the morality in the manner of doing such.

There's a marked difference in earning a paycheck via genuinely helping someone else out, as compared to... being apathetic to how that happens, or worse: earning a paycheck via deliberately sabotaging someone else's wellbeing.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#157

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.

I generally don't agree with the original commenter here. I think many of the complaints about model regressions are the result of increased usage and increased scrutiny revealing gaps there were there all the time. I've been more critical than most of the output quality since my initial "wow" moment was pretty early - GPT 3.5 API - and the results then were extremely obviously not production ready. But, keeping that level of scrutiny through my usage, I haven't seen the falloff that people who don't look at the output every time claim to see.

But that's also let me use "agent" stuff longer, I guess? The better you were at knowing what you wanted and how to ask for it, the less of an inflection point that you got from Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.

Some of the highest-time-saved-for-max-ROI agentic problems I've solved to date were in September and October of last year with Claude or Cursor.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#158

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,…

Wait, what? I thought everyone agrees that modern models post September 2025 (or whenever Opus or whatever 5.6789 was released) do not hallucinate, make things up, contradict themselves and can review their own output into perfection regardless of task, goal or context???? /s

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#159

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…

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…

I'm totally fine, just annoyed by how much this "try not to think too hard about the how and think more about the why and what"[0] is getting brought up every single time someone mentions why they prefer hand coding to vibe coding. At this point, it's being overstated, thus gives off less "this is why I use it" and more "come on, get onboard the hypetrain to dystopia or you're going to get left behind". It's hardly conducive to a "productive discussion" when it's the millionth time as a drive-by comment. What kind of response did you expect?

Look, I don't have a problem with your personal motivation. I just hate seeing it suggested that people should abandon their passion because someone else doesn't share it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with "I enjoy making something useful" just as there's nothing wrong with "I enjoy making something with my hands or figuring out how to make it". My problem is with "your enjoyment of that is invalid because I don't enjoy that, so learn to enjoy this".

0: Not really a statement of your drive, is it? More of a directive or suggestion.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#160

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,…

> now they can generate one in a few minutes and send it out for review.

I think we will very soon move to a prove to me you've read it protocol and/or introduce speed bumps to slow things down.

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