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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

371–380 of 391 posts

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#371

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?

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#372
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…

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly. Add it to the fact that the world was never particularly "fair" to deep thinkers, because said deep thinkers are often not prioritizing "production". It already rewarded people who could search for and ship a working solution before they understand it perfectly. The person who can only move after fully understanding the problem was at a disadvantage long before LLMs, almost everywhere outside academia.

Yes, and you can see this principle clearly reflected in the large majority of all software today, which is absolute, dysfunctional, crap.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I picked beeswax because the petroleum-based ones smell terrible, and I found some that weren't much more expensive than unscented soy. They have a nice smell!

But burning non-petroleum candles a couple hours each evening (and I found it took two tapers to have enough to comfortably read by) is pretty expensive. Plus burning anything isn't great for air quality, even if it smells OK. One person doing it in a full-sized house, alight, maybe. Three or more people in a house carrying around pairs of candles every night? You might start to notice the air quality and your shelves or walls getting a bit sooty.

If I wanted to do it longer term I'd probably build a few shaded (it actually hurts to look directly at even something as dim as a single candle flame, let alone a slightly-brighter bulb, when your eyes are adjusted to low light; I didn't come up with a solution for this with my candles, in the ~3 weeks I was using them) nightlight-level-output battery powered lamps. Most of the lamps or lanterns you can buy have built-in LEDs these days (so, limited ability to modify them) and their dimmest setting is way brighter than two actual candles, plus you'd want a candle-warmth color temp and lots of them are cool sunlight-temp. So I think building a few would be the best option.

Standard modern nighttime lighting started seeming insanely bright after a few days of doing the candle thing. It really takes very little light to navigate your house and do many tasks safely and comfortably, if you let your eyes adjust and don't have some kind of serious vision problems, and if you've got a few people awake in your house doing things after dark it's easy to have hundreds of times as much illumination active as anyone really needs. I also kinda liked carrying my light with me, rather than flipping switches from room to room.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#376

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…

LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero. Therefore, you will exhaust yourself near-instantly trying to drive differentiated value out of cognitive work. Non-arbitrable labor is one safe haven: bending steel, drilling wells, running cables, flying drones, etc. Physical agency gets you a premium the clankers can’t (yet?) trespass upon. That’s why guys building data centers are making bank & job-hopping while the…

> LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero.

This isn't the problem; the problem is that people incorrectly believe it to be true.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You said "the coding is just a means to an end, try not to think too hard about the how".

That's tantamount to "I don't care about the coding itself, or the underlying quality of my systems".

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I picked beeswax because the petroleum-based ones smell terrible, and I found some that weren't much more expensive than unscented soy. They have a nice smell! But burning non-petroleum candles a couple hours each evening (and I found it took two tapers to have enough to comfortably read by) is pretty expensive. Plus burning anything isn't great for air quality, even if it smells OK. One person doing it in a full-siz…

I use the candles for a meditative gazing practice called trataka. Gazing at fire has never hurt me (edit: even at low light conditions), but usually feels calming, giving me more creativity as well. Also to optimize cost, I discovered beeswax tea light candles which are reasonably priced, between $0.30-$0.50/candle and I'd put them in these tiny single lanterns that you can carry around that make it more practical to use these for indoor light. I also found that having a incense burner device (theres ones where you use the beeswax candle under a metal mesh, as the source of heat (And now light too!) with my favorite resins like myrrh for scents also really helped set a great mood & regulate the nervous system for transition. I also would use these digital yellow candles that operate off of AA batteries and you can set on a schedule with a remote, they were so good and before I moved they would jsut automatically set the mood and light core areas with just enough light and brightness for night time. I suggest them! The brand I got was Aignis Flameless LED Candles (on Amazon). Get the orange and not white/blue.

>Standard modern nighttime lighting started seeming insanely bright after a few days of doing the candle thing. It really takes very little light to navigate your house and do many tasks safely and comfortably

Yes agreed. It's so nice once you get used to this, and I think this is how our ancestors lived for millions of years followed by candles, incandescent and then horrifyingly today's blue lights.

Did you notice blue in specific feel incredibly unnerving and painful to look at at night even in low light output after adjusting to night time settings?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#379

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…

How much of that code are you reading

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This may actually be a solid way to tackle the bullshit asymmetry problem caused by drive-by LLM sloppers.

I always laugh because I've been practicing prompting every single day for the last few years, if they want to start a prompt fight, brother let me at 'em.
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