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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#361

Post by bsoles »

adverbly wrote: post #73
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…

> No one is really pushing me to increase my workload Spoken like someone who is not at an org/team that has undergone layoffs and reduced hiring in the last 3 years. You might be in the minority there - especially when it comes to those who are facing burnout.

My employer literally put "effective use of AI" as a yearly performance review criteria this year. So there is that...

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#362

Post by bluefirebrand »

springtimesun wrote: post #307
cpt_sobel wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who is a confessed LLM-addict and has told me pretty much everything you mentioned (you might be my friend!), I just have a question I want to ask that I never do to him: Why do you feel the need to churn out so many "personal projects" if they burn you out that much? I think we can all agree on the exhaustiveness of reviewing tons of AI-generated code in our $JOB$ - then why extend this unpleasant si…

I doubt it, but maybe :) RE personal projects specifically: addiction is an interesting angle. It feels more like anxiety though, that this thing is going to be taken away and this will be a brief and glorious window when I had the means and opportunity to make all the things I wanted, but never had time for. It’s also exhausting to have a bunch of stuff that you want to do piling up for years. Could just be a person…

> addiction is an interesting angle. It feels more like anxiety though

I would guess that anxiety and withdrawals are very similar

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#363

Post by yuye »

nomel wrote: post #95
yuye wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I did a Chat output, please fix and review it " is the kind of thing that empowers the people who used to have a minimal productivity, and now lets them to wreck things on an industrial scale. AI is not a productivity multiplier. There are diminishing results. The ones that notice the highest increases of productivity are usually the ones that were unproductive at best and dangerously incompetent at worst.

Could you describe your usual workflows and usage patterns with AI?

>Could you describe your usual workflows and usage patterns with AI?

I don't. I'm not a gambling man, and I respect my fellow engineers to not inundate them with slop.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#364

Post by mannanj »

topgrain2 wrote: post #111
mannanj wrote: post #69

I had this too. Started after lay off in October. What helped was a sleep and work system, oriented around being offline that was inspired by nature and from my earlier days in working in tech while car camping across the national parks. Basically: the sun wins in terms of how all energy on the earth is structured, and expressed. All manners of cycles of organisms and living systems are in relation to its rise and fa…

I once experimented with beeswax candles as my only after-dark light source. This meant no hyper-stimulating screen activities whatsoever, too. TV, phone, video games, browsing the web? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. Just dim, warm light from actual flames. Cured my lifelong “night owl” “trait” in a couple days. Shockingly effective. Turned out to be hard to keep up and still, like, exist with other people, and you’d pr…

That's so cool. And +1 to Beeswax candles. I have a dream we will orient ourselves with greater agency and autonomy and after traditional careers die if we get a UBI and still choose to work we would orient ourselves around the sun naturally and have time in the day for social lives.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#365

Post by infinite_spin »

lelanthran wrote: post #330
infinite_spin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'r…

I never said I don't care about the coding itself, or the underlying quality of my systems. I can care about more than one thing, while still identifying goals that I have for how I spend my time.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#366

Post by deterministic »

I love using Claude Code in my daily work. It has made me much more productive.

But I also know that trying to optimize every second of my workday is a recipe for stress and eventually burnout. Nobody benefits from that.

So the key is to find the right balance between productivity and longevity.

If you feel stressed and overwhelmed then you are not in balance.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#367

Post by deterministic »

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,…

Reject documents that contain LLM hallucinations.

Or use LLM's to generate 12+ pages of detailed reviews of those documents and return to sender.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#369

Post by jjav »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #321
jjav wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cre…

I'm fine with that. The company doesn't have infinite people so as long as someone spends 3 hours generating and I spend 5-15 minutes reviewing, that's fine.

Problem with AI is that generation is so many orders of magnitude faster than reviewing so it's basically infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#370

Post by cognitiveinline »

Terr_ wrote: post #7

It sounds kind of like being stuck working with coworkers who--while not overtly hostile--need constant hand-holding and repeat the same kinds of mistakes every day and can't even be genuinely sorry about it. Just because we work with computers doesn't mean we don't take, er, social-damage. Or perhaps para social damage, in this case.

These agents follow instructions to never make a specific mistake, if you simply record it on context (like AGENTs.md).

You'll frustrate yourself by not using this tool without above. You'll definintely frustrate yourself expecting the tool to be "genuinely sorry"!

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