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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#141

Post by Ultimatt »

willtemperley wrote: post #99

I wonder if the same people using "agentic AI" are the same that spend days setting up the "perfect" work environment with four screens. I find LLMs are great for building ideas, improving understanding and basic prototyping. This is more useful at the start of the project lifecycle, however when getting toward release it's much more about refactoring and dealing with large numbers of files and resources, making very…

Maybe if you've spent decades on the same codebase. Now try doing that in a recent codebase thats been agnatically engineered by five people spiffing into the same repository. Good luck with your VIM muscle memory where the entire code base changes every five seconds around you so that no human can actually track wtf is happening week on week.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#142

Post by xyzal »

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…

10k, really? Are you supposed to understand all that code? This is crazy and a one way street to burnout.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#143

Post by duskdozer »

nightpool wrote: post #37
anonzzzies wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder where HNers worked or work; we do ERP and troubleshooting on legacy systems for medium to large corps; PRs by humans were always pretty random and barely looked at as well, even though the human wrote it (copy/pasted from SO and changed it somewhat); if you ask what it does they cannot tell you. This is not an exception, this is the norm as far as I can see outside HN. People who talk a lot, don't und…

I would hope that most people who are technically competent enough to be on HN are technically competent enough to quit orgs with coding standards that bad. Or, they're masochists who have taken on the chamllenge of working to fix them

Half the posts here are talking about how they 100xd their output with the latest agentic loop harness, so I'm not sure why you would get that impression.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#145

Post by cbg0 »

razorbeamz wrote: post #32
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.

The only people who use LLMs "as a tool" are those who are incapable of doing it without using it at all.

No true scotsman, right?

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#146

Post by Frieren »

onion2k wrote: post #132
raincole wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> write an unambiguous prompt

That's an oxymoron. Prompts by definition are ambiguous otherwise you will be writing code.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#147

Post by Leynos »

qudat wrote: post #40
senectus1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine code reviewing is a very different sort of skill than coding. When you vibe code (assuming you're reading teh code that is written for you) you become a coder reviewer... I suspect you're learning a new skill.

It’s easier to write code than read it.

It's important to enforce the rules that make the code easier to read.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#148

Post by qq66 »

chii wrote: post #131
qq66 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, you could make that judgment in some cases, but clearly not all. If you use AI to ship 20 additional features but accidentally delete your production database you definitely have not come out ahead.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1m4lqvh/replit_ai_w...

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#149

Post by antonvs »

iainctduncan wrote: post #88

Everytime I read articles here describing the LLM prompt engineering workflow, all I can think is, "This sounds like such a fucking awful job". I imagine I will greatly reduce my job prospects as a hold out, but honestly, from what I've read I think I'd rather take a hefty pay hit and not go there. It sounds like a mental heath disaster and fast track to serious burnout. YMMV, I realize I'm in the minority, this is u…

It seems to me like any other tech: how you use it is up to you. You don’t have to run 10 agents simultaneously, etc.

I use them when I find them helpful, and that’s the case in plenty of situations. Figuring out architecture and design, finding bugs, analyzing and explaining a codebase, writing little scripts and utilities (especially in areas where you lack familiarity), etc. are all pure wins, imo. They increase my productivity and quality of output without any real downside.

When it comes to writing the bulk of a codebase or doing ongoing maintenance on a nontrivial system, a lot of ymmv comes into play. There’s no real reason (yet!) to believe that if you’re not committing 10k lines of generated slop per day, you’re going to be left behind. People doing that are on a bleeding edge that may have already cut them deeper than they realize.

In short, there’s an enormous middle ground between Yegge’s Gas Town and “I refuse to use LLMs for development”. I’m enjoying working in that middle ground. It’s interesting and stimulating, it makes a lot of things easier and quicker, and I’m growing and learning. If that stops, I’ll just change what I’m doing.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#150

Post by duskdozer »

Apocryphon wrote: post #16
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 "…

I mean, how often do we feel the same thing about the compiler?

Never? I can rely on the compiler to pretty much do the same thing every time. If I broke some rule, it points out where and what it is.
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