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I think I have LLM burnout

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#201

Post by imhoguy »

j_bum wrote: post #107
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.”

The worst is that every agent session is generating so many "btw fix this" side-quests that it is really hard to stay in the task focus. I throw some into todo list manually but still it is exploding by the day. Perfect is enemy of good.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#202

Post by [deleted] »

digitaltinfoil wrote: post #185
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.

I had to tell it never to say "hand-wavey" ever again to me. But I agree, I hate the way LLMs phrase sentences.

[deleted]

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#203

Post by slopinthebag »

fragmede wrote: post #196
nearlyepic wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"drunk driving helps people get home from the bar. why focus on the negative?"

Don't drive drunk. I'm pro self-driving cars.

But people have fun and whimsy and their life is improved by drunk driving. Why focus on the negative?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#204

Post by reverius42 »

imhoguy wrote: post #194
ehnto wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying drones is an interesting one, I guess you do have to drive the car out to site and set up the drone. But a lot of drone ops are waypointed, automatic flight. I can see a future in which the only thing the operator does is drive the drone van to site, hit the deploy button as the drone pops out the roof, and wait for it to return. Mission set up already by an LLM prompt back at the office.

I bet drone van is the next thing to be automated.

For legal reasons, a human will still need to be in the self-driving van, so the job description will change to "drone van chaperone".

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#205

Post by groby_b »

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,…

Write an LLM script to review them. Tell it to find at least three severe issues. Set to auto-reply.

He who brings the slop cannon shall be drowned by slop rain.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#206

Post by mdemare »

I’m experimenting with the following in my settings:

“Look at the first letter of the prompt, and use the style of the matching literary stylist enumerated here:

For English:

A — W. H. Auden

B — Bill Bryson

C — Italo Calvino

D — Joan Didion

E — T. S. Eliot

F — William Faulkner

G — Gabriel García Márquez

…”

I certainly don’t see emojis any more.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#207

Post by xg15 »

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…

> I think the similar thing happened due to factory manufacturing automation. What used to be a varied skillful craft in a shop became standing in a single place of an assembly line doing the exact same thing whole day.

I had to think of the factory scenes in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The author's feeling is basically the main idea of the sketches, i.e. humans having to follow the pace of the machines instead of the other way around.

Reverse centaurs are nothing new. Ask any worker movement from the last centuries.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#208

Post by springtimesun »

I am feeling very tired. Since I’ve started working with LLMs my output as a solo dev has easily gone up 20x. I’m closing client projects including ones that previously would have been far too ambitious to take on alone. Long running codebases are getting features that have dragged out for months or been sitting in the planning stages for even longer. And overall quality is way up now with more complete (and honestly better) test coverage.

I’m building personal projects at a prodigious pace. In a role reversal I treat the agents like I’m one of my clients (albeit a more technical one who gives them architectural direction) and they are me. I’m using the apps and tooling they make every day. I’ve cancelled SaaS subs for tools I’ve built myself.

I watch the tool calls and realize I should be better at core command line tools so I have a study plan to catch up (just a little bit a day). I’m revisiting long standing config that I dropped in to vim and tmux way back when I started and didn’t know anything.

I guess in theory I could hold my productivity to previous levels and read more. But it doesn’t feel like that’s possible. It feels like we are in one of those sea changes where the promise is less work, but the reality is increased productivity and expectations (the Industrial Revolution feels like the right parallel to reach for). Increased expectations happen in small ways and large. The agents are so good at polishing data presentations that I always send cleaned up visually impactful reports that would have taken significant time in the past just as a matter of course now.

But, I’m tired. I’ve spent the Fable on subscription window sprinting through as much work as I can before it goes API only. (As an aside, I don’t understand how everyone is using so many tokens. I’m sleeping very little and running as much code as I can through fable and I can barely touch a 20x max plan limit.) I keep telling myself I will slow down when it comes off, now it’s extended to the 12th and my window just reset, a few more days to keep knocking out backlog items. I feel like I have to keep the robots busy overnight so when I wake up I can immediately sit down to review. I give directions to agents on my phone which feels wild to me.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#209

Post by Freak_NL »

reverius42 wrote: post #204
imhoguy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet drone van is the next thing to be automated.

For legal reasons, a human will still need to be in the self-driving van, so the job description will change to "drone van chaperone".

Or 'drone accident scapegoat'.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#210

Post by aarjaneiro »

infinite_spin wrote: post #145
jdashg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nobody said you should? Some people merely enjoy programming more than engineering.
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