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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#191

Post by throwaway_7274 »

block_dagger wrote: post #25

I've started feeling slightly physically ill when I read Opus output for hours straight. This article rings very true for me. I've started complaining about it with my team; at least have a personal style guide in your agent rules that eliminates emdashes, the "it's not X, it's Y"s, the long lists of modifiers before the noun, using the word "land" to mean finish, etc. I hope this is just a phase of adolescent LLMs.

Me too. It feels like I’m taking psychic damage from reading so much of this stuff. Contrary to the theory that it’s “just the contract workers’ Nigerian English,” I think the models are developing an ultra-terse hyper-stylized dialect of their own under RL pressure. They seem to be writing increasingly in _code_, and I don’t mean computer code. The words don’t mean quite what they mean to humans.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#192

Post by cobbzilla »

The cost of code production is trending to zero. Therefore, the things that come before it and after it become much more crucial.

On the “pre” side, the specification of the problem becomes much more important. On the “post” side: QA and verification that the change has its desired effect, and no ill effects, also becomes much more important.

Sure, these are the next things to be automated, and people will try, but it’s easier on the backend (testing/verification can be automated) than the front end (the spec will be human-written as long as someone cares = forever for brands that matter), there will always be a need for humans on the specification side.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#193

Post by soonnow »

mrandish wrote: post #72

> My job has changed from designing and writing code to designing code, describing the design to an LLM, reviewing code the LLM produces As a long-time engineering manager, PM and, eventually, product owner my response is, "Congrats! You've just been promoted to management." :-) As a new manager, your first challenge will be successfully delivering commercial results using only a team of 'differently abled' new grad…

As a former manager, I am sorry, but the last paragraph just sounds like normal rookie team members.

Including myself as well. It's how you grow into the role.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#194

Post by imhoguy »

ehnto wrote: post #80
nacozarina wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero. Therefore, you will exhaust yourself near-instantly trying to drive differentiated value out of cognitive work. Non-arbitrable labor is one safe haven: bending steel, drilling wells, running cables, flying drones, etc. Physical agency gets you a premium the clankers can’t (yet?) trespass upon. That’s why guys building data centers are making bank & job-hopping while the…

Flying drones is an interesting one, I guess you do have to drive the car out to site and set up the drone. But a lot of drone ops are waypointed, automatic flight. I can see a future in which the only thing the operator does is drive the drone van to site, hit the deploy button as the drone pops out the roof, and wait for it to return. Mission set up already by an LLM prompt back at the office.

I bet drone van is the next thing to be automated.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#195

Post by imhoguy »

wisty wrote: post #110
apsurd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is valid in the other direction as well. Principle engineers, CTOs, with legitimately earned authority end up using that authority to 100x their output onto the team as if it was a Godsend unlock. It's not. There is no one person that has universally good taste. Also, we're not in your head, no matter how much better of a coder or whatever. We're not in your head and it's all terribly painful to navigate.

I'm just waiting for Bezos to order all work with human agents to use the same API and guardrails as an LLM.

Isn't it how these fulfilment centers already work that way with all these work manuals. Read AMAZON.md /s

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#196

Post by fragmede »

nearlyepic wrote: post #82
fragmede wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a non zero chance that someone in your life is going to have fun and whimsy and their life improved by vibe coding. Why focus on the negative?

"drunk driving helps people get home from the bar. why focus on the negative?"

Don't drive drunk. I'm pro self-driving cars.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#197

Post by imhoguy »

topgrain2 wrote: post #81
wisty wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual gains from llm seem much larger than net productivity increases. I think a major source of this discrepency is people creating more work for their coworkers at the speed of slop. Especially the people with no idea. "I did a Chat output, please fix and review it " is the kind of thing that empowers the people who used to have a minimal productivity, and now lets them to wreck things on an industrial scale.

> Individual gains from llm seem much larger than net productivity increases. I think a major source of this discrepency is people creating more work for their coworkers at the speed of slop. Especially the people with no idea. Lots of companies (nearly all, I’d wager) of any size were leaving bare-minimum a 2x software development speed increase on the table before LLMs, having nothing whatsoever to do with how fast…

In my place I see currently a governance panel effort mandating around LLM agent skills usage, it is so much shit show that I expect productivity is going to fall to 0.5x pre-agents. But not pre-LLM as autocompletion was really helpful in the trenches. The tool in wrong governing hands and you get sand into cogs thrown.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#198

Post by NateEag »

fragmede wrote: post #62
slopinthebag wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes who cares if they die as long as they had some fun and whimsy first! :P Edit: fr though I have plenty of fun and whimsy without needing vibe coded apps and I'd prefer a 911 call didn't get routed to Burger King because someone vibe coded the comm stack...

To each their own. Would you rather live a long boring safe life, or a fast short exciting one? You decide!

If people live lives wherein they build important societal systems to be biased towards "short fast exciting" lives, the opportunity to live a long, boring, safe one may just evaporate.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#199

Post by fragmede »

aakresearch wrote: post #153
fragmede wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a non zero chance that someone in your life is going to have fun and whimsy and their life improved by vibe coding. Why focus on the negative?

If the life of everyone (all 8 billion people) is improved by tech by some margin (pick the margin - 10%, 1%, 0.1%) at the cost of x people (pick the x - a thousand, a million, a billion) being killed by the same tech - is it still positive or negative? How do you even reason about it?

Fortunately, I'm not actually in charge of anything. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. There are some real life trolly problems out there that I'm glad I don't have to answer.

https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/

But yeah if you want to put it in a spreadsheet, what numbers do you want for it to work out? Because I'm using a smartphone to access the Internet and post here, which means I have no idea how much human misery went into my being able to do that. Someone has died to make my totally average smartphone came to be in my hands. LLMs are nothing new under capitalism.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#200

Post by fhd2 »

eloisius wrote: post #146
efnx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just have an agent chug on a side-project for you, or set up a CI script to review every pull request or some similarly “helpful” task. That should eat a lot of tokens!

Man. If I had this kind of mandate I could really burn some tokens. Review each new PR and extract 100 topics to debate related to it. Spin up 1000 sub agents, each with a different personality profile system prompt, to debate each point until consensus has been reached. Synthesize the learnings into a limerick. Build a Spotify playlist that pairs with the tone of the debates. Post the limerick and link to playlist o…

Depends on how much you're asked to burn I guess. Until one point, it's actually helpful. Then there's a point where you can do stuff that's semi helpful but doesn't get in the way. But then I would imagine you reach a point where you have to come up with a token burn strategy and some kind of narrative for your manager that's in line with it. I bet at that last point, it gets taxing.

Probably like eating. Having to eat less to loose weight isn't great. Eating anything you want without worries is great. Having to eat more than you want to gain weight, not great.

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