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AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

siddhantkhare.com

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Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#121

Post by safety1st »

ericmcer wrote: post #63
parpfish wrote: post #18

For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something. The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks. You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this c…

Seriously and beyond productivity, flow state was what I liked most about the job. A cup of coffee and noise cancelling headphones and a 2 hour locked in session were when I felt most in love with programming.

I'm not at all convinced that "break your concentration and go check on an agent once every several minutes" is a productivity increaser. We already know that compulsively checking your inbox while you try to code makes your output worse. Both kill your focus and that focus isn't optional when you're doing cognitively taxing work--you know, the stuff an AI can't do. So at the moment it's like we're lobotomizing ourselves in order to babysit a robot that's dumber than we are.

That said I don't dispute the value of agents but I haven't really figured out what the right workflow is. I think the AI either needs to be really fast if it's going to help me with my main task, so that it doesn't mess up my state of flow/concentration, or it needs to be something I set and forget for long periods of time. For the latter maybe the "AIs submitting PRs" approach will ultimately be the right way to go but I have yet to come across an agent whose output doesn't require quite a lot of planning, back and forth, and code review. I'm still thinking in the long run the main enduring value may be that these LLMs are a "conversational UI" to something, not that they're going to be like little mini-employees.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#122

Post by ryukoposting »

fhd2 wrote: post #28
antirez wrote: post #23

1. Make long pauses: 1h of work, stop for 30 minutes or more. The productivity gain should leave you more time to rest. Alternatively work just 50% of time, 2h the morning, 2h the evening, instead of 8 hours. Yet trying to deliver more than before. 2. Don't mix N activities. Work in a very focused way in a single project, doing meaningful progresses. 3. Don't be too open-ended in the changes you do just because you c…

(1) is not something the typical employee can do, in my experience. They're expected to work eight hours a day. Though I suppose the breaks could be replaced with low effort / brain power work to implement a version of that.

Work for a smaller company with more reasonable expectations of a knowledge worker.

You're an engineer, not a manager, or a chef, or anything else. Nothing you do needs to be done Monday-Friday between the hours of 8 and 5 (except for meetings). Sometimes it's better if you don't do that, actually. If your work doesn't understand that, they suck and you should leave.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#124

Post by Waterluvian »

mikkupikku wrote: post #112
parpfish wrote: post #18

For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something. The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks. You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this c…

I know this is a terribly irresponsible and immature suggestion, but what I've been doing is every time I give claude code a request of indeterminate length, I just hit a blunt and chill out. That and sometimes I'll tab into the kind of game that can be picked up and put down on very short notice, here's where I shameless plug for the free and open source game Endless Sky. For me personally, programming lost most of…

Now that’s vibe coding.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#125

Post by pfdietz »

Davidzheng wrote: post #78
parpfish wrote: post #18

For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something. The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks. You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this c…

makes you wonder how automate-able this babysitter roles is...

That was my reaction.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#126

Post by falcor84 »

CurleighBraces wrote: post #13

I loved the section about trying to fight against a system that isn't deterministic. LLMs because of their nature require constant hand-holding by humans, unless business are willing to make them entirely accountable for the systems/products they produce.

How would that make them any more deterministic? I haven't yet met a deterministic human dev.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#127

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

barishnamazov wrote: post #29

This write-up has good ideas but gives me the "AI-generated reading fatigue." Things that can cleanly be expressed in 1-2 sentences are whole paragraphs, often with examples that seem unnecessary or unrealistic. There are also some wrong claims like below: > The Hacker News front page alone is enough to give you whiplash. One day it's "Show HN: Autonomous Research Swarm" and the next it's "Ask HN: How will AI swarms…

The boring and likely answer is that is was just clauded out,”I’m tired chat, look through my last ten days of sessions and write and publish a blog post about why,” but it would be fascinating to discover that the author has actually looked at so much ai output that they just write like this now

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#129

Post by gaigalas »

taway1874 wrote: post #75
gaigalas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True determinism is rare, we often don't get it. That's what purely functional languages are all about and they're a minority. We are trained on the other thing: unpredictable user interaction, parallelism, circuit-breaking, etc. That's the bread and butter of engineering (of all kinds, really, not just IT). The non-deterministic intuition is baked into engineering much more than determinism is.

Fair point. But are we moving even further away from determinism with the current ways of working with AI?

I see, you're using "determinism" coloquially, in the sense of "exact outcome".

That's perfectly fine. We are honed for this too.

We don't need to produce exact solutions or answers. We need to make things work despite the presence of chaos. That is our job and we're good at it.

Product managers freak out when someone says "I don't know how much time it will take, there are too many variables!". CFOs freak out when someone says "we don't know how much it will cost". Those folk want exact, predictable outcomes.

Engineers don't, we always dealt with unpredictable chaotic things. We're just fine.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#130

Post by xnx »

parpfish wrote: post #100
jwarden wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like being a manager.

No, it’s like being a micro manager. I don’t just give somebody a bit’s ticket a let the go. I give them a ticket but have to hover over their shoulder and nitpick their design choices. Tell them “you should use a different name for that new class”, “that function should actually be a method on this other thing”, etc

Nitpicking seems like a choice. It's also possible to be more relaxed/removed and only delve in when there is a problem.
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