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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#101

Post by halayli »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #39
razorbeamz wrote: post #26

LLMs do not actually make anything better for anyone. You have to constantly correct them. It's like having a junior coder under your wing that never learns from its mistakes. I can't imagine anyone actually feeling productive using one to work.

I don't know what to think about comments like this. So many of them come from accounts that are days or at most weeks old. I don't know if this is astroturfing, or you really are just a new account and this is your experience. As somebody who has been coding for just shy of 40 years and has gone through the actual pain on learning to run a high level and productive dev team, your experience does not match mine. Even…

This is a very reasonable comment. IMO it's a falacy to take into consideration the age of an account especially when it is subjective experience.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#102

Post by ThunderSizzle »

Sirental wrote: post #33
jatora wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to learn to use the tool better, clearly, if you have such an unhinged take as this.

No to be fair I do see what he's saying. I see a major difference between the more expensive models and the cheaper ones. The cheaper (usually default) ones make mistakes all the damn time. You can be as clear as day with them and they simply don't have the context window or specs to make accurate, well reasoned desicions and it is a bit like having a terrible junior work alongside you, fresh out of university.

Emphasis on the "terrible" part of the junior.

The cheaper models can't be taught or improved due to their inherit limitations, which makes it a huge pain to even try with even the simplest of tasks. Perpetually, no matter your instruction file(s).

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#103

Post by jumploops »

A lot of these resonate with me, particularly the mental fatigue. It feels like normal coding forced me to slow my brain down, whereas now my mind is the limit.

For context, I started an experiment to rebuild a previous project entirely with LLMs back in June '25 ("fully vibecoded" - not even reading the source).

After iterating and finally settling on a design/plan/debug loop that works relatively well, I'm now experiencing an old problem like new: doing too much!

As a junior engineer, it's common to underestimate the scope of some task, and to pile on extra features/edge cases/etc. until you miss your deadline. A valuable lesson any new programmer/software engineer necessarily goes though.

With "agentic engineering," it's like I'm right back at square one. Code is so cheap/fast to write, I find myself doing it the "right way" from the get go, adding more features even though I know I shouldn't, and ballooning projects until they reach a state of never launching.

I feel like a kid again (:

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#104

Post by green_wheel »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #12

Does anyone else see this as dystopian? Someone is unironically writing about how exhausted they are and up at night thinking about how they can be a better good-boy at prompting the LLM and reminding us how we shouldn't cope by blaming the AI or its supposed limitations (context size, etc). This is not a dig at the author. It just seems crazy that this is an unironic post. It's like we are gleefully running to the "…

Yeah I thought the same thing. Kinda eerie reading all that about prompts when not that long ago it would all pertain to actual coding.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#106

Post by ipaddr »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #5
cglan wrote: post #3

I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…

I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc. The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine…

You can outsource that to another llm

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#107

Post by chewbacha »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #63
rednafi wrote: post #11

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent. But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Review…

> Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. That's a big red flag if I ever saw one. Corporate should be empowering the engineering team to use AI tooling to improve their own process organically. Is this true or exaggeration? If it's true I'd start looking for a more balanced position at more disciplined org.

Mandates are becoming normal. Most devs don’t seem to want to but they want to keep their jobs.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#108

Post by hackit2 »

jumploops wrote: post #103

A lot of these resonate with me, particularly the mental fatigue. It feels like normal coding forced me to slow my brain down, whereas now my mind is the limit. For context, I started an experiment to rebuild a previous project entirely with LLMs back in June '25 ("fully vibecoded" - not even reading the source). After iterating and finally settling on a design/plan/debug loop that works relatively well, I'm now expe…

I spent more time correcting LLMs or agentics systems than just learning the domain and doing the coding myself. I mainly leave LLM to the boring work of doing tedious repetitive code.

If I give it anything resembling anything that I'm not an expert on, it will make a mess of things.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#109

Post by CGamesPlay »

LLM coding has made programming feel like playing Factorio to me. It's simultaneously much more addictive and much more strenuous than it's even been for me before. Each commit feels like moving to a new link in the supply chain, but each link is imperfect so I have to drop back down to debug them. At the end of a long evening, "one more assembly line" and "one more prompt" feel exactly the same.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#110

Post by gopher_space »

rednafi wrote: post #90
sarchertech wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently work at one of the biggest tech companies. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve worked at scrappy startups, unicorns, and medium size companies. I’ve certainly seen my share of what I call slot driven development where a developer just throws things at the wall until something mostly works. And plenty if cut and paste development. But it’s far from the majority. It’s usually the same few devel…

I also work at a huge company, and this observation is true. The way AI is being rammed down our throats is burning out the best engineers. OTOH, the mediocre simian army “empowered” by AI is pushing slop like there’s no tomorrow. The expectation from leadership, who tried Claude for a single evening, is that you should be able to deliver everything yesterday. The resilience of the system has taken a massive hit, and…

> The expectation from leadership, who tried Claude for a single evening, is that you should be able to deliver everything yesterday.

"Look, if the AI fairy worked like that our company would be me and the investors."

I should make t-shirts. They'll be worth a fortune in ironic street cred once the AI fairy works like that.

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