I think I have LLM burnout • Hacker News Board

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#321

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #273

UncleOxidant wrote: post #104

Earlier 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,…

> I'm getting so many requests to review LLM-generated documents That's the other nightmare of AI slop. So easy to generate endless content. Who will review? Just today the boss request I review slides for a presentation. But it's all AI slop, generated from querying tickets and docs and who knows what. It's mostly sort of correct but also plenty misleading and incorrect. So now I have to fact check all this slop whi…

> If AI didn't exist, he would've had to do the research to generate the content and it would be 99% correct and I could just give a few notes of feedback in 5 minutes. But with the asymmetric AI workload, he can generate it in 5 minutes and I get to spend 3 hours correcting.

Maybe, depending on the boss. Some would have spent five minutes describing what they wanted, and someone else would have spent three hours creating the deck.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#322

Post by chadgpt3 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

cpt_sobel wrote: post #267

soonnow wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the same as you. Very specific tasks. Just now I spent two hours in a conversation with claude code to change 5 lines of code that change a significant semantic. On the other hand my buddy is spending $10k in tokens a day on agents to build something. He's a very smart guy, former developer so it's not just AI psychosis talking. Still trying to figure it out. Not that I have $10k to spend.

> $10k in tokens a day What on earth is he building?

And how can I become so rich?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#323

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

AgentMatt wrote: post #223

UncleOxidant wrote: post #104

Earlier 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,…

Seems like for such requests it's necessary to get some proof of work: require a meeting where for every artifact they sent you to review, they briefly explain the gist and point out the motivation for creating the artifact.

Side benefit: They get public humiliation for the problems in what they sent around. It could create some social pressure to not send out garbage.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#324

Post by chadgpt3 » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

larodi wrote: post #285

I’ve had it three times already in the last 2 years and it is something real. Dizziness and depressive swings is the first that comes, then comes memory loss and finally trouble with speech. At this point you should stop risking to burn your central cognitive capacity. Be advised. Note: myself a passionate Claude code user with multi agent parallel approach to dev. Plus 30 yrs of various oldskool dev experience. My b…

Whatever causes "burnout", it doesn't seem to be actual degradation of neurons. Your brain doesn't get used up and burn out like a lightbulb. It's more of an emotional state.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#325

Post by hoppp » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

sachamorard wrote: post #275

hoppp wrote: post #2

Tell the llm to answer like a cavemen, if llm talk like cavemen, the answers become shorter and more compressed. https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman It's for getting it to output shorter answers, but also could help with your burnout.

What does that have to do with the topic? Someone is sharing something serious on this thread, I don't see how your message helps.

The other guys commenting seems to understand. Not keeping the output in the default could make it more easy reading it, hence less burnout.

It's ok if you don't get it, but other people do, so can't generalize with your lack of comprehension.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#326

Post by historianistic » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

hraxz wrote: post #308

springtimesun wrote: post #208

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…

The industrial revolution made life better at mass scale but it certainly didn't make life better for the hand loom weaver who had previously went from working at home by hand to higher output but working hard all day in a factory. From the outside, this all sounds like my father who worked as a mechanic at a flour mill. His job was mostly watching the machine do the work and then fixing the machine when it broke dow…

I think people miss something fundamental this argument-by-analysis comparing LLMs to 1770s textile automation

(which why on earth would be applicable? yet this argument is thrown around begging the question [meaning assuming its own validity, begging to be questioned, not suggesting further downstream investigation])

Namely: there was a massive shift from household manufacture in the Indian subcontinent - then home to an estimated quarter of economic activity on earth - to Britain.

Industrialization was about out competing a geopolitical rival of the UK: Mughal India. It succeeded because the Crown adopted policy sabotaging Indian production, not because the capital intensiveness was inherently better. It was merely necessary for England to even aspire to outproduce a country with 20x its own population.

Industrialization was never about the sheer efficiency of the new industrial productive system. That wouldn't have tipped the scales in a matter of one or two decades. In fact, quite the opposite: the incredibly short timescale in this massive geographic shift in economic output necessitated an approach which was costlier, and socially and environmentally damaging.

The machine won out because it was the only way to get the job done. It was a way worse experience for everyone involved. Just look at the British elite's tenure: its 100 years of zenith pale in comparison to the Mughal third of a millennium ride. And now the center of gravity for global industry is shifting back to Asia despite the extremely heavy price paid by Atlantic society and the global environment for the anomaly state which is now waning.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#327

Post by jordanb » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #287

jordanb wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It punishes the inflexible deep thinker, perhaps. If you can’t figure out how to use an incredibly powerful tool to your advantage, how deeply are you thinking, really?

Well most experienced developers I know hate it and agree it's taken all pleasure out of the work. We've spent our careers designing and building high quality software systems. But now we're told our job is to use the plagiarism box to sling slop all the time. Those who can are transitioning out of the field.

This is an industry where American developers have successfully competed on quality with the rest of the world for years. We never were very cheap but we always were the best and worth our premium. Now that's being destroyed by a short-sighted industry.

I'd like to just do something else and work on open source. Except I know if I contribute to open source my work will just be stolen by the plagiarism bot.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#328

Post by win311fwg » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #251

ssl-3 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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…

This makes more sense if you think about the contexts in which people would talk about gates on the Internet, I dare say.

So what you are saying is if you don’t want to read about Gates, target Linux instead of Windows?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#329

Post by tanseydavid » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #205

UncleOxidant wrote: post #104

Earlier 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,…

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.

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

If this approach gets widely adopted, then I think you should probably start building an ARK.

Make it big enough to hold two of every animal species. /s

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#330

Post by lelanthran » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

infinite_spin wrote: post #136

ryandrake wrote: post #125

Earlier 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.

> do you mean my enjoyment from building things? I'm genuinely confused by this response.

I'm not surprised - your GGP comment indicated that you are more interested in the destination than the journey (you enjoy the output more than the process of crafting that output).

Nothing wrong with that - lots of programmers are interested in the final deliverable and don't really care about how the sausage is made, but you're reading a comment from someone who makes the sausage.