So, I've also discovered my limits: 4 terminal tabs with claude. Anything above that and my attention gets shredded and I have to reread whole conversations. That being said, after a day of doing 4 sessions simultaneously like this, my brain is fried in the sense that nothing I do can/will relief the stress. It different from normal stress. I completely zone out in the evening.
I think I have LLM burnout
231–240 of 391 posts
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#232This 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?
There are plenty of shops where they are requiring people to use LLMs. Not "we require you to produce work at X rate" such that one can't hit the target without an LLM, but actually mandating use of LLMs based on the (unproven) assumption that it will boost productivity.
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#233I do not have the burnout but I certainly operate similarly to the author. I continue to be unable to establish a workflow where allowing the LLM to generate code that I review is faster than writing the code myself. Literally the only two ways out of this dilemma is to blindly trust what was generated or to generate an uncharacteristically exhaustive suite of unit tests to validate every possible scenario. I just wr…
If you can't review the code faster than you could write it yourself, write it yourself.
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got into programming because I like programming, and computers. Not whatever the hell this is.
> Not whatever the hell this is. do you mean my enjoyment from building things? I'm genuinely confused by this response.
Yes, there are generally two kinds of people:
Those who like having a finished thing. Product people. These people love LLMs.
Those who love the process of building a thing, working through a problem, learning something new. Finishing a project is generally not required. For them LLMs are soul sucking hell.
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#235I'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.
" That's such a clever way to see things! Let's delve into that! " The bots (all of them) seem to show patterns of overuse of specific phrases, words, and punctuation. Some of those are the ones you mentioned. Another that I've been seeing lately is overuse of the term "gate", wherein: As a human, I know what a gate is. A gate is a thing that can be open, or that can be closed. It might be locked or unlocked. The pat…
I like the word "botspeak".
Another example of typical botspeak is "smoke test". Why not just say "test"? It feels like a way of downplaying the ability to detect problems.
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#236> Some small part of me has started to dread reading LLM output because I know what I’m going to find. False assumptions and hallucinations. Emphatic, staccato fragments. Excessive emojis :sparkle:. :rocket: It’s not just me—these are real patterns (:barf:).
It takes like 5 seconds to add a quick CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md with a quick style guide, or even just “EMOJI ARE FORBIDDEN” and I find it makes llm output significantly more tolerable. That and a quick style guide with some banned words and phrases.
That won’t help with the false assumptions though, gotta use old fashioned careful reading and critical thinking the catch those.
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
Feed it into an AI and ask it to adversarially criticize it, doc for doc, send back 30 responses in a zip folder, wipe hands on pants, return to HN.
Don't know if you are serious, but why become part of the problem?
Why not just review a single document quickly, find an error which invalidates the document, and send it back saying "Policy paper 1 mentions X as being on the business plan for Y, it's not on the plan, please can you fix."
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
The only way to even start to counter that is to make it a firm company policy that if you use an LLM to hallucinate any documents you absolutely must thoroughly review them yourself before you send them to anybody else, and that you are still responsible for the quality of LLM-generated content. Getting an LLM to vomit out a bunch of documents and sending them straight to another colleague is absolutely unacceptable…
This is going to just run up against the insanity that is tokenmaxxing every moment of the day. When people are incentivized (upon pain of firing) to get the LLM to vomit out as much as possible, they're hardly going to stop and ponder if schlepping the slop over the wall is acceptable if the alternative is a pink slip.
Which is going to win?
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#239I have found (partial) remedy: let it go.
There's some YOLO approach to it, but now Codex has self-approving as well as Claude Code (auto mode). I implemented the same feature by my own on Pi with models through OpenRouter and found results very stable thus I have (as always) limited confidence it can fly.
So (disclaimer: I'm Jujutsu advocate :)) I do "jj new", tell it what to do and then let it run, and check in back later.
If there are things I'm not comfortable (like creating PRs or pushing to repo) I ask it to create Ruby scripts instead named like "__pr.rb" (double underscore files are in my global gitignore). So I can leave it working and then inspect back and edit manually before I run "ruby __pr.rb".
The only thing that's not yet there is tying multiple tmux Claude/Codex session together, but I'm thinking about creating a small Rust app that communicates with Tmux for a preview (or a Ruby script that communicates with my LogSeq directly and manages nodes there :))
Re: I think I have LLM burnout
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. It feels like I’m taking psychic damage from reading so much of this stuff. Contrary to the theory that it’s “just the contract workers’ Nigerian English,” I think the models are developing an ultra-terse hyper-stylized dialect of their own under RL pressure. They seem to be writing increasingly in _code_, and I don’t mean computer code. The words don’t mean quite what they mean to humans.
Over the last few days with fable I've found it at times incomprehensible, terse word salad. It also invents phrases assuming I'll understand (but that could be because it's reusing terms in the codebase I no longer remember). I've often had to paste its output back in to ask it what it actually means. Weird. I think the main thing is just fatigue. There's so little variety. Each model has its preferred idiolect whic…
"It's like always eating fast food". That right there