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Task Paralysis and AI

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Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#111

Post by wrer »

dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

People will blame this on 'your org is shaped wrong' but the reality is - until and unless LLMs becomes shaped to match the human it'll lead to pear-shaped outcomes.

Are people forgetting that we needed to make PC's more powerful to enable better experiences and interfaces to make them super intuitive and easy to use for humans...? It's amazing how all these learnings get lost in the midst of disruption.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#112

Post by wrer »

stavros wrote: post #100
daveguy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gambling trope is so tired... >>> That sounds like a process problem. LLMs, like any tool, work better if you don't use them in the naive "do this" way... The "you're holding it wrong" trope is even more tired than the gambling trope.

If you can't get results with the thing I'm getting results with, what other explanation would you give?

What results lmao? Literally everything you've shared has zero-value - yes I checked them out. Thinking wtf is this?

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#114

Post by fasterik »

KallDrexx wrote: post #53
dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

I have done a lot of introspection on this and realized that I'm very much driven by intrinsic rewards moreso than extrinsic. I got into coding over a decade before it was my career because of the exploration, learning, and puzzle/challenge aspect. Every time I have tried to be extrinsically driven (career or OSS wise) it's never worked out anyway. I could have done more to make it successful but I never cared about…

Hard agree about the intrinsic motivation. The intrinsic/extrinsic distinction is an unspoken assumption in a lot of conversations about AI and work in general. Not everyone is motivated by money and status.

I do believe you can use LLMs while maintaining the intrinsic rewards of programming. For me, right now that means writing code by hand and using LLMs primarily for research, documentation, and brainstorming. Sometimes I ask it to write a piece of code just so that I can see what it comes up with and maybe learn something from it. I'm also planning on experimenting with coding agents, but I will probably have it work in its own parallel repo and hand-pick the changes I want to keep.

I think a "late adopter" mindset is actually beneficial. It allows you to focus on fundamental skills that will never be outdated, and you get the benefits of new technologies once they mature.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#116

Post by pickleRick243 »

Thanemate wrote: post #37
stavros wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gambling trope is so tired. AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree, certainly not more than hiring people to do a job can be considered "gambling" (you never know what you're going to get!). It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.

>AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree Reading this while I'm prompting for the third time to fix a 100+ line function is amusing, to say the least. I don't care about the definition of "appreciable", but I definitely have to repeat myself to get stuff done, sometimes even to undo things I never told it to touch.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

There is certainly randomness in model output that the user has to work around, but sending the same prompt with the same context (or even worse- with added entropy leaving the previous failed prompt in the context) over and over again akin to pulling a slot machine lever is certainly user error and not the way to "hold it".

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#117

Post by thoughtpeddler »

MrGilbert wrote: post #11
Weryj wrote: post #3

I could have written this article myself. The addiction part, the ADHD part and the pending test part. The fear of becoming addicted to AI is real and I don't think I'll be capable to stop it, considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. My Pro went to Max(5) to Max(20) pretty quickly and I was burning through that weekly limit still, wit…

> [...] considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. It's so wild that it never dawned on me, why some people around me were so quick with "Let AI do that!". I'm not saying that each and everyone has ADHD, but I think I underestimated a) the flow of dopamine a successful prompt can set free and b) the craving for it by folks that I deemed…

I struggle to see the difference between "Let AI do that" and what a founder/executive is instinctively led to do also (i.e. delegate). Why does it have to be an ADHD thing? Yes, I see the risks of AI for someone with ADHD (described well in this article [0]), and for that reason I agree that ADHDers should be careful with these tools, as they present both a lot of promise and peril. But also... delegating functions to an 'agent' (whether human or AI) is just what people end up doing in life. Hard to tell these things apart...

[0] Rachel Thomas - Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding: Sinister variations on the positive state of flow (https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/)

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#119

Post by protocolture »

I am in a similar position but I have worked things out so that the AI enhances me and not the other way around. Depending on the project its about clearing my blockers, and giving me training, rather than being a slot machine that successful results fall out of.

One of the big issues I had to overcome was realising that theres nearly zero value in a solution I dont understand. And my understanding is woefully incomplete.

For instance, I have started doing a lot of personal electronics work. Its easy enough to request a circuit diagram and a BOM. but, the work still has to be done with my hands and crucially, the parts are purchased with my money. So I see a circuit diagram and I go "Hey why does this work" or "Uh shouldnt the added resistance between these components send the charge straight to ground" and by the time I have asked 100 questions, I have either established dominance (proven that the original diagram was incorrect) or learned some valuable information. And the questions I ask I can be generally assured are not worthy of being answered by skilled electrical people, and they definitely arent awake/wanting to answer my annoying questions at 2am or whatever.

I have done this for years, when I started I approached it as "Hey ChatGPT, teach me python" and its been really good.

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