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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#21

Post by 193572 »

It looks like Stockholm syndrome or a traditional abusive relationship 100 years ago where the woman tries to figure out how to best prompt her husband to do something.

You know you can leave abusive relationships. Ditch the clanker and free your mind.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#22

Post by bombdailer »

colecut wrote: post #14
SchemaLoad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds exhausting having to non stop prompt and review without a second to stop and think.

There is nothing dictating how long you stop and think for.

Until that becomes the metric measured in performance reviews.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#23

Post by raincole »

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…

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.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#24

Post by somewhereoutth »

Of course. Any scenario where you are expected to deliver results using non-deterministic tooling is going to be painful and exhausting. Imagine driving a car that might dive one way or the other of its own accord, with controls that frequently changed how they worked. At the end of any decently sized journey you would be an emotional wreck - perhaps even an actual wreck.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#25

Post by anonzzzies »

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…

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 understand anything and write code that is almost alien. LLMs, for us, are a huge step up. There is a 40 nested if with a loop to prevent it from failing on a missing case in a critical Shell (the company) ERP system. LLMs would not do that. It is a nightmare but makes us a lot of money for keeping things like that running.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#26

Post by razorbeamz »

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.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#28

Post by jatora »

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 need to learn to use the tool better, clearly, if you have such an unhinged take as this.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#30

Post by grey-area »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #5
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…

I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc. The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine…

Maintenance is the hard part, not writing new code or steering and planning.
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