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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#151

Post by galaxyLogic »

eucyclos wrote: post #114
galaxyLogic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right when you're coding with LLM it's not you asking the LLM questions, it's LLM asking you questions, about what to build, how should it work exactly, should it do this or that under what conditions. Because the LLM does the coding, it's you have to do more thinking. :-) And when you make the decisions it is you who is responsible for them. Whereas if you just do the coding the decisions about the code are left lar…

Hehe, speak for yourself- as a 1x coder on a good day, having a nonjudgmental partner who can explain stuff to me is one of the best parts of writing with an llm :)

I like that aspect of it too. LLM never seems to get offended even when I tell it its wrong. Just trying to understand why some people say it can feel exhausting. Instead of focusing on narrowly defined coding tasks, the work has changed and you are responsible for a much larger area of work, and expectations are similarly higher. You're supposed to produce 10x code now.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#152

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

qudat wrote: post #45
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The velocity is up AND the quality is up. This is not my experience on a team of experienced SWEs working on a product worth 100m/year. Agents are a great search engine for a codebase and really nice for debugging but anytime we have it write feature code it makes too many mistakes. We end up spending more time tuning the process than it takes to just write the code AND you are trading human context with agent cont…

Whenever actual studies are made about LLM coding they always show that LLM coding is a net loss in quality and delivery speed.

(They are good as coder psychotherapy tho.)

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#154

Post by nvardakas »

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…

[dead]

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#157

Post by solumunus »

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.

You're just bad at using them. It's a skill like anything else. I also suspect bad coders become even worse with LLM's, and the opposite is true.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#158

Post by rhysfonixone »

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…

Working with LLMs for coding tasks feels more like juggling I think. You're fixating on the positions of all of the jobs you're handling simultaneously and while muscle memory (in this metaphor, the LLMs) are keeping each individual item in the air, you're actively managing, considering your next trick/move, getting things back on track when one object drifts from what you'd anticipated, etc. It simultaneously feels markedly more productive and requiring carefully divided (and mentally taxing) focus. It's an adjustment, though I do worry if there's a real tangible trade-off at play and I'm loosing my edge for instances where I need to do something carefully, meticulously and manually.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#159

Post by whywhywhywhy »

One thing I’ve noticed is sometimes it feels like I’m more of a QA person testing output than solving the problem.

If AI is doing the coding then it gets to solve the problems and I don’t get the satisfaction/dopamine/motivation you get when you solve a programming problem in a clever way.

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