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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#131

Post by chii »

qq66 wrote: post #128
superfrank wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice. In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnove…

I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for, and when there was a bug, you simply sat down and fixed the bug. With the rise of open source, there started to be more black-box compositing, you grabbed some big libraries like Django or NumPy and honest…

> bafflingly, it works pretty well, except in those cases where it doesn't

so as a human, you would make the judgement that the cases where it works well enough is more than make up for the mistakes. Comfort is a mental state, and can be easily defeated by separating your own identity and ego with the output you create.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#132

Post by onion2k »

raincole wrote: post #23
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…

If you care at code quality of course it is exhausting. It's supposed to be. Now there is more code for you to assure quality in the same length of time.

If you care about code quality you should be steering your LLM towards generating high quality code rather than writing just 'more code' though. What's exhausting is believing you care about high quality code, then assuming the only way to get high quality code from an LLM is to get it to write lots of low quality code that you have to fix yourself.

LLMs will do pretty much exactly what you tell them, and if you don't tell them something they'll make up something based on what they've been trained to do. If you have rules for what good code looks like, and those are a higher bar than 'just what's in the training data' then you need to build a clear context and write an unambiguous prompt that gets you what you want. That's a lot of work once to build a good agent or skill, but then the output will be much better.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#134

Post by block_dagger »

I get exhausted because of the cognitive overhead of switching between 2 or 3 projects at once. I always want to be manually verifying or prompt writing, and keeping it all straight is taxing. But I’m getting so much more done.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#135

Post by nixpulvis »

mlaretallack wrote: post #116
olejorgenb wrote: post #42

I find working more asynchronous with the agents help. I've disabled the in-your-face agent-is-done/need-input notifications [1]. I work across a few different tasks at my own pace. It works quite well, and when/if I find a rhythm to it, it's absolutely less intense than normal programming. You might think that the "constant" task switching is draining, but I don't switch that frequently. Often I keep the main focus…

Yes, I follow the same sort of pattern, it took a while to convince myself that it was ok to leave the agent waiting, but it helps with the human context switching. I also try to stagger the agests, so one may be planning and designing, while another is coding, that way i can spend more time on the planning and designing ones and leave the coding one to get on with it.

That's actually one of the best parts. You can trust some of the context you have loaded is side loaded in the LLM, making task switching feel less risky and often improving your ability to work on needed and/or related changes elsewhere.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#136

Post by jumploops »

hackit2 wrote: post #108
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.

Yeah the old adage "what you put in is what you get out" is highly relevant here.

Admittedly I'm knowledgable in most of the domains I use LLMs for, but even so, my prompts are much longer now than they used to be.

LLMs are token happy, especially Claude, so if you give it a short 1-2 sentence prompt, your results will be wildly variable.

I now spend a lot of mental energy on my prompting, and resist the urge to use less-than-professional language.

Instead of "build me an app to track fitness" it's more like:

> "We're building a companion app for novice barbell users, roughly inspired by the book 'Starting Strength.' The app should be entirely local, with no back-end. We're focusing on iOS, and want to use SwiftUI. Users should [..] Given this high-level description, let's draft a high-level design doc, including implementation decisions, open questions, etc. Before writing any code, we'll review and iterate on this spec."

I've found success in this method for building apps/tools in languages I'm not proficient in (Rust, Swift, etc.).

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#137

Post by xienze »

qq66 wrote: post #128
superfrank wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice. In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnove…

I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for, and when there was a bug, you simply sat down and fixed the bug. With the rise of open source, there started to be more black-box compositing, you grabbed some big libraries like Django or NumPy and honest…

> I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for

Not just that, but the fact that with programming languages you can have the utmost precision to describe _how_ the problem needs to be solved _and_ you can have some degree of certainty that your directions (code) will be followed accurately.

It’s maddening to go from that to using natural language which is interpreted by a non-deterministic entity. And then having to endlessly iterate on the results with some variation of “no, do it better” or, even worse, some clever “pattern” of directing multiple agents to check each other’s work, which you’ll have to check as well eventually.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#138

Post by nixpulvis »

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.

A junior engineer who might spend a few hours trying to understand why you added a mutex, reading blogs on common patterns, might come back with a question about why you locked it twice in one thread in some case you didn't consider. Just because someone lacks the experience and knowledge you have, doesn't mean they cannot learn and be helpful. Sometimes those with the most to learn are the most willing to put the hours in trying.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#139

Post by nixpulvis »

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…

Agreed.

It's clear to me as a more seasoned engineer that I can prompt the LLM to do what I want (more or less) and it will catch generally small errors in my approach before I spend time trying them. I don't often feel like I ended up in a different place than I would have on my own. I just ended up there faster, making fewer concessions along the way.

I do worry I'll become lazy and spoiled. And then lose access to the LLM and feel crippled. That's concerning. I also worry that others aren't reading the patches the AI generates like I am before opening PRs, which is also concerning.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#140

Post by drchickensalad »

akhrail1996 wrote: post #125

LLM coding is addictive as hell though. you're like a kid at disneyland, everything builds so fast, just one more feature, one more fix... and then you're 4 hours in and your prompts are garbage but you don't want to stop because everything feels so close to done

You're so lucky you feel this way...every day is a worse hell for me since these demons arrived. I miss my job.
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