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AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

siddhantkhare.com

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Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#21

Post by nonethewiser »

simonw wrote: 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…

It reduces the friction of coding tremendously. Coding was usually not the bottleneck but it still took a significant amount of time. Now we get to spend more time on the real bottlenecks. Gathering requirements from end users, deciding what should be built, etc.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#23

Post by antirez »

1. Make long pauses: 1h of work, stop for 30 minutes or more. The productivity gain should leave you more time to rest. Alternatively work just 50% of time, 2h the morning, 2h the evening, instead of 8 hours. Yet trying to deliver more than before.

2. Don't mix N activities. Work in a very focused way in a single project, doing meaningful progresses.

3. Don't be too open-ended in the changes you do just because you can do it in little time now. Do what really matters.

4. When you are away, put an agent in the right rails to reiterate and provide potentially some very good result in terms of code quality, security, speed, testing, ... This increases the productivity without stressing you. When you return back, inspect the results, discard everything is trash, take the gems, if any.

5. Be minimalistic even if you no longer write the code. Prompt the agent (and your AGENT.md file) to be focused, to don't add useless dependencies, nor complexity, to take the line count low, to accept an improvement only the complexity-cost/gain is adequate.

6. Turn your flow into specification writing. Stop and write your specifications even for a long time, without interruptions. This will improve a lot the output of the coding agents. And it is a moment of calm focused work for you.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#24

Post by simonw »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #19
simonw wrote: 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…

> 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. My problem is - before, I'd get ideas, start something, and it would either become immediately obvious it wouldn't be worth the time, or immediately obvious that it wouldn't turn out well / how I thought. Now, the problem is, everything starts off so incredi…

I used to have ideas and jot them down in Apple Notes and then usually forget about them entirely.

Now I have an idea and jot it down in the Claude Code tab on my iPhone... and a couple of minutes later the idea is software, and now I have another half-baked project to feel guilty about for the rest of time.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#25

Post by nonethewiser »

wesm wrote: post #20

I've been building https://roborev.io/ (continuous background code review for agents) essentially as a cope to supervise the poor quality of the agents' work, since my agents write much more code than I can possible review directly or QA thoroughly. I think we'll see a bunch of interesting new tools to help alleviate the cognitive burden of supervising their work output.

You can see the exponential growth of tokens in real time! lol

Do you find it works well?

With these agents I've found that making the workflows more complicated has severe diminishing returns. And is outright worse in a lot of cases.

The real productivity boost I've found is giving it useful tools.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#26

Post by jezzamon »

Task switching sucks.

On the other side, I feel like using AI tools can reduce the cognitive overload of doing a single task, which can be nice. If you're able to work with a tool that's fast enough and just focus on a single task at a time, it feels like it makes things easier. When you try to parallelize that's when things get messier.

There's a negative for that too - cognitive effort is directly correlated with learning, so it means that your own skills start to feel less sharp too as you do that (as the article mentions)

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#28

Post by fhd2 »

antirez wrote: post #23

1. Make long pauses: 1h of work, stop for 30 minutes or more. The productivity gain should leave you more time to rest. Alternatively work just 50% of time, 2h the morning, 2h the evening, instead of 8 hours. Yet trying to deliver more than before. 2. Don't mix N activities. Work in a very focused way in a single project, doing meaningful progresses. 3. Don't be too open-ended in the changes you do just because you c…

(1) is not something the typical employee can do, in my experience. They're expected to work eight hours a day. Though I suppose the breaks could be replaced with low effort / brain power work to implement a version of that.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#29

Post by barishnamazov »

This write-up has good ideas but gives me the "AI-generated reading fatigue." Things that can cleanly be expressed in 1-2 sentences are whole paragraphs, often with examples that seem unnecessary or unrealistic. There are also some wrong claims like below:

> The Hacker News front page alone is enough to give you whiplash. One day it's "Show HN: Autonomous Research Swarm" and the next it's "Ask HN: How will AI swarms coordinate?" Nobody knows. Everyone's building anyway.

These posts got less than 5 upvotes, they didn't make it to home page. And while overall quality of Show HN might have dropped, HN homepage is still quite sane.

The topic is also not something "nobody talks about," it's being discussed even before agentic tools became available: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=AI+fatigue

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#30

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

Absolute middlebrow dismissal incoming, but the real thinking atrophy is writing blog posts about thinking atrophy caused by LLMs using an LLM.

It is getting very hard to continue viewing HN as a place where I want to come and read content others have written when blog posts written largely with ChatGPT are constantly upvoted to the top.

It's not the co-writing process I have a problem with, it's that ChatGPT can turn a shower thought into a 10 minute essay. This whole post could have been four paragraphs. The introduction was clearly written by an intelligent and skilled human, and then by the second half there's "it's not X, it's Y" reframe slop every second sentence.

The writing is too good to be entirely LLM generated, but the prose is awful enough that I'm confident this was a "paste outline into chatgpt and it generates an essay" workflow.

Frustrating world. I'm lambasting OP, but I want him to write, but actually, and not via a lens that turns every cool thought into marketing sludge.

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