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AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

siddhantkhare.com

191–200 of 334 posts

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#191

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…

That's a type of fatigue that is not new but I hear you, context switching fatigue has increased ten fold with the introduction of agentic AI coding tools. Here are some more types of fatigue that have been increased with the adoption of LLMs in writing code.

There are plenty of articles on review fatigue including https://www.exploravention.com/blogs/soft_arch_agentic_ai/ which I published recently. The focus there is less about the impact on the developer and more about the impact on the organization as letting bugs go to production will trigger the returning to high ceremony releases and release anxiety.

The OP article talks about AI fatigue of which review fatigue is a part. I guess that I would sum up the other parts like this. The agentic AI workflow is so focused on optimizing for productivity that it burns the human out.

The remedy is also not new for office work, take frequent breaks. I would also argue that the human developer should still write some code every now and then, not because the AI cannot do it but because it would slow the process down and allow for the human to recover while still feeling invested.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In couple of minutes? My claude code takes like 5 mins just to wake up and write a simple plan.

You are taking to simonw, surely Claude have given him free super fast unlimited token access to nightly version of Claude 5.1 Opus. (just joking, your posts are great, Simon!)

I still use Opus for difficult challenges, but if we're building a web app or creating a few scripts, I default to Haiku. It's so much faster, and obviously doesn't impact your usage as much.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#194

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…

Wow, this is a new low I did not expect to see. "Just get high and you'll be able to code with an LLM." Preceded by, "I know it's terrible."

I'm wholly unwilling to relinquish my health and my morals to "AI" so I can "ship faster." What a pathetic existence that would be.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#195
post #5

I really feel this. I can make meaningful progress on half a dozen projects in the course of a day now but I end the day exhausted . I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible. Decades of intuition about sustainable working practices just got disrupted. It's going to take a while and some discipline to…

Throw in the fact that clawdbot can work 24/7. It reminds me of why people wanted financial markets to be 24/7. We as a society should probably take a look at that otherwise it may lead to burnout in a not so small percentage of people

Why we as a society should give a fuck if someone can’t stop prompting? Unless you mean we as a society should make you pay for the damages your prompts are doing to nature?

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#196

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…

yeah that's how I do it too but careful with the blunt, yesterday I was working away, had some time while an agent swarm ran, took a "little break" and now ghostty looks like this: https://s.h4x.club/kpuGgD12 :|

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#197

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…

20 years ago we had the Ballmer Peak. With AI you may have found the next thing!

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that’s vibe coding.

That’s vibe coding while high. Probably terrible for assesing the results from Claude

The code works quite well, but I wouldn't inflict it on other humans. In my view, when you use a coding agent you're committing to forever maintaining that code with a coding agent. There are no human programmers participating in these projects.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#199

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.

Speaking as someone with over 40 years paid programming experience, I've never understood this "flow" thing. I typically do about half an hours typing, get up and walk around, mooch over to colleague and yack bit, or go to the coffee machine, or just think a bit and then go back to the keyboard.

Never used headphones - if the environment is too loud, make it quieter. I once moved into a new office area that had a dot-matrix printer that "logged", in the worst sense of the word (how could you find any access on such a giant printout), every door open/close in the block. It was beyond annoying (ever heard a DM printer? only thing worse is a daisy wheel) so I simply unplugged it, took out the ink ribbon and twisted off the print head. It was never replaced, because as is very often the case nobody ever used the "reports" it produced.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#200

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 don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that in 1-2 years inference speed with have increased enough to allow for “real time” prompting where the agent finishes work in a few seconds instead of a couple minutes. That will certainly change our workflows. Seems like we are in the dial-up era currently.

It's arguably already here, only cost is a concern. We now have an open weights model - =you can throw as much hardware at it as you want to speed it up - at Sonnet 4.5+ level.

Today Anthropic started offering 3x(?) Opus speed at 5x cost as well.

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