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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#311

Post by skydhash »

rapind wrote: post #170
skydhash wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I totally get that a lot of people won't want to adapt though. Or people don't want to be reverse centaur keeping the clankers happily running. Instead of helping to solve users/consumers problem.

Maybe famous last words, but I'm not buying the hype that the "clankers" will take over. I suspect reality will catch up soon and we'll be left with a set of pretty powerful but still limited tools. I see no evidence to the contrary, just investment hype on one side and sky is falling on the other.

The “clankers” won’t take over, but have you also noticed that most people are talking about their workflows/process instead of their results/outcomes? It’s all about “Is the train still running?” than “Are we getting close to the destination?”.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#312

Post by Insanity »

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…

+1. I’m in the exact opposite camp, I enjoy programming more than “shipping a product”. But the programming itself, coming up with solutions to tough problems, is the fun part. Shipping a product is a side-effect.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#313

Post by dthedavid »

hjhart wrote: post #113
dthedavid wrote: post #61

If you can afford it, I highly recommend quitting and going independent at least for a while. It’s so much fun building right now.

Can you elaborate on what you're doing to make a living?

I'm a SWE and still a SWE. Just moved from HCOL to LCOL and am working for myself.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#314

Post by gitaarik »

layer8 wrote: post #303
gitaarik wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so you experience that AI generated code, even on lower levels, is not good enough for you to be more productive?

It may be good enough to make me more productive, but only because I don’t relent on ensuring that the code is well-reasoned. Indeed, I don’t experience that when I do relent.

Ok, so you're basically saying that the AI-generated code does it's job, but when you actually review it you think the way it does it's job is not as it should, and if you get into that flow, your agentic productivity goes down?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#315

Post by aakresearch »

fragmede wrote: post #199
aakresearch wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fortunately, I'm not actually in charge of anything. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. There are some real life trolly problems out there that I'm glad I don't have to answer. https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/ But yeah if you want to put it in a spreadsheet, what numbers do you want for it to work out? Because I'm using a smartphone to access the Internet and post here, which means I have n…

I think we are in full agreement. Likewise, I am not in charge of any practical matter, and glad I don't have to answer to any moral or physical dilemma.

The link is fun :). My kill count was 75.

I was hinting at full impossibility to quantify those problems. Starting with un-define-ability (sorry, English is not my native tongue) of the very term "need" upon which the predicate "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". Maybe that is why I am leaning towards "deontological" resolution of trolley problems, rather than "utilitarian".

As for LLMs, I use them and benefit from them. For fun, and hopefully for profit too. But if I had a lever I could pull to make this tech disappear - I would not hesitate one second, deontology be damned. Even better if smartphones suddenly follow too.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#316

Post by nswango »

MitziMoto wrote: post #64
Bratmon wrote: 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?

Just keep on spinning cotton thread the old way, ignore what they're building in Manchester..

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#317

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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…

Hmm. When you put it that way, it sounds like LLMs and social media trigger the same "I have to see what's going on now" pattern (and therefore can wind up at the same kind of addiction, with the same problems).

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#318

Post by nswango »

lesostep wrote: post #296
nswango wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Because they will fix it and send again. Unless you can write a good-sounding reason why it's on them to review a LLM output before sending it to you, they will outsources this reviewing to you, and it's a lot of reviewing.

It's not a lot of reviewing if you simply find the first thing that makes the document unusable and call them out on it.

If it's genuinely hard to find that single bug .. perhaps the document has reached the quality required for corporate communication?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#319

Post by chadgpt3 »

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,…

It's spam, it's a DoS attack. The right way to handle a DoS attack is to blacklist the sender. But this doesn't work if the sender is paying you.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#320

Post by AnimalMuppet »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #238
mathw wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If tokenmaxxing wins in your company, your company is going to lose. There's an external reality out there, outside your company, and your company has to produce things that actually work out there. Hallucinated AI slop does not help you do that. It leads you to unworkable plans, and if the plans produce, they produce unsellable products.

If you're an employee in that situation, push back if you can. If you can't, put your resume on the street. (But that may not work, these days. If it doesn't, all I can say is ride it out as best you can, and try to maintain both your job and your sanity. How? I don't know.)

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