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I think I have LLM burnout

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#241

Post by htatche »

altairprime wrote: post #44
Bratmon wrote: post #3

This is legitimately the reason I'm looking to leave programming. I got into programming because the problems of programming were interesting to me. But if the problems go from "figure out why this calculator is off by one in France" to "Get this LLM to stop spamming cutsey emojis", then maybe it's time for a career change.

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Did you make the move yourself from software development? I'm considering a move into economics lately but I wouldn't want to leave IT completely i.e. saying bye to a 15y career in software and all the stuff I learnt along the way. Ideally I'd find something in between but I don't know how feasible that is.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#242

Post by vaylian »

jedbrooke wrote: post #236

> Some small part of me has started to dread reading LLM output because I know what I’m going to find. False assumptions and hallucinations. Emphatic, staccato fragments. Excessive emojis :sparkle:. :rocket: It’s not just me—these are real patterns (:barf:). It takes like 5 seconds to add a quick CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md with a quick style guide, or even just “EMOJI ARE FORBIDDEN” and I find it makes llm output signific…

You are completely right! Do you want me to write these markdown files for you?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#243

Post by thinkingemote »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #238
mathw wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to even start to counter that is to make it a firm company policy that if you use an LLM to hallucinate any documents you absolutely must thoroughly review them yourself before you send them to anybody else, and that you are still responsible for the quality of LLM-generated content. Getting an LLM to vomit out a bunch of documents and sending them straight to another colleague is absolutely unacceptable…

This is going to just run up against the insanity that is tokenmaxxing every moment of the day. When people are incentivized (upon pain of firing) to get the LLM to vomit out as much as possible, they're hardly going to stop and ponder if schlepping the slop over the wall is acceptable if the alternative is a pink slip. Which is going to win?

We employees need to remember that most software projects fail. So the work we produce should have lower value than we give it.

We also need to be motivated to stay in our jobs.

Most developers like their projects and value their work. But the chances are that it's for nothing.

Many developers know they work on bad products (gambling industry, military, surveillance, whatever) and so it's here that they focus on their technologies, tools and frameworks rather than the work they produce.

"Agentic engineering" for example.

Id be curious to see what and how Googlers are doing with their 20% time.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#244

Post by reed1234 »

nswango wrote: post #237
jaggederest wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feed it into an AI and ask it to adversarially criticize it, doc for doc, send back 30 responses in a zip folder, wipe hands on pants, return to HN.

Don't know if you are serious, but why become part of the problem? Why not just review a single document quickly, find an error which invalidates the document, and send it back saying "Policy paper 1 mentions X as being on the business plan for Y, it's not on the plan, please can you fix."

Why do your colleagues work when they could at least attempt it first?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#245

Post by [deleted] »

sefrost wrote: post #94
dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, a…

One of the reasons they exhaust me, is that it's always "one more prompt" to get a UI correct. It's often just slightly off, but it can take 5-10 mins sometimes to rework something. It has led to me working much longer hours. I think this is in part because I am one of the software engineers that always liked building products more than writing complex software. So, I am driven by the feeling of creating something. A…

[deleted]

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#246

Post by sph »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, a…

> LLM took away the more creative and variable part of the work, and left the repetitive QA rubber-stamping

“I wanted a machine to do the dishes so I could concentrate on my creative work, and all I got was a machine to do my work so I’m left to wash the dishes.”

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#247

Post by zahlman »

nacozarina wrote: post #76
dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, a…

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…

> LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero.

Then why are so many others in the thread reporting being swamped with requests to review coworkers' slop? If it's genuinely "cognition" at trivial cost, surely this review would be completely unnecessary?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#248

Post by zahlman »

yuye wrote: post #79
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.

>"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. AI is not a productivity multiplier. There are diminishing results. The ones that notice the highest increases of productivity are usually the ones that were unproductive at best and dangerously incompetent at worst.

> AI is not a productivity multiplier. There are diminishing results.

Sure it is. Just that some of the values being multiplied are negative.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#249

Post by zufallsheld »

nswango wrote: post #237
jaggederest wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feed it into an AI and ask it to adversarially criticize it, doc for doc, send back 30 responses in a zip folder, wipe hands on pants, return to HN.

Don't know if you are serious, but why become part of the problem? Why not just review a single document quickly, find an error which invalidates the document, and send it back saying "Policy paper 1 mentions X as being on the business plan for Y, it's not on the plan, please can you fix."

Because they'll just paste your remarks in their llm, let it correct the text and send it back to you.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#250

Post by agumonkey »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, a…

I wonder if anybody has an implicit fear that with LLM you're expected to be a 20x engineering all the time, otherwise you're out. Can also lead to people producing shiny apps that impress others (sometimes for legit reasons) even though they have no idea how anything work. A "ship value" culture will not bother with the inner workings or actual skills.
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