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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#351

Post by win311fwg »

ssl-3 wrote: post #350
win311fwg wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code that never opens is code you can delete. If the bot hasn't deleted dead code, especially given that this is code it recognizes as being dead and documents it as such, it must believe that you plan to use it again someday. That would imply an expectation of the gate opening eventually, even if not immediately.

Your description of this thing differs from my observation of the reality that I participate in. Perhaps we're holding it differently.

Like all code discussions on HN, we have never been given the code to hold.

I understand in the past HN accounts have been afraid to post code because it would reveal that they have no idea what they are doing, but now that we have the plausible deniability of "look at this stupid thing an LLM wrote!" it is curious the mindset persists. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#352

Post by palmotea »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #104
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…

> done by my clankers or clankers of other people I'm getting so many requests to review LLM-generated documents - planning docs, docs intended for end-users, project docs, business plan docs. A team member sent me a zip file with about 30 LLM generated documents in it the other day and asked if I could review them right away. And a lot of it was just repetition and/or stuff that was just out of left field, made-up,…

> A team member sent me a zip file with about 30 LLM generated documents in it the other day and asked if I could review them right away. And a lot of it was just repetition and/or stuff that was just out of left field, made-up, hallucinated stuff

You just discovered the unlock to massive AI-driven productivity increases: outsource the hard stuff to others, or just don't do it at all. Keep the easy tasks that generate a big volume of output for yourself.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#353

Post by throwaway_7274 »

cpt_sobel wrote: post #259
throwaway_7274 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My non-English-native-speaker head of development, to whom I report, does 100% of his work using LLMs and doesn't even check if the code compiles, but somehow this isn't my biggest problem with it – it's the botspeak in the PR comments (or answers to my PR comments) that are so clearly not written by him, and the documentation that makes absolutely 0 sense sometimes even if I break it down. Just a word salad of "robu…

comment reads clean. drafting response when it lands.

＊onanizing…

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#354

Post by ssl-3 »

win311fwg wrote: post #351
ssl-3 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your description of this thing differs from my observation of the reality that I participate in. Perhaps we're holding it differently.

Like all code discussions on HN, we have never been given the code to hold. I understand in the past HN accounts have been afraid to post code because it would reveal that they have no idea what they are doing, but now that we have the plausible deniability of "look at this stupid thing an LLM wrote!" it is curious the mindset persists. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I didn't realize that I was on trial and that there was a requirement that I back up my personal anecdotes and observations with working examples to prove their worth.

In reality, there's no reason for me to do so, because I'm not on trial here at all. Please keep your accusations to yourself, comrade.

My willingness to prove to you that a bot uses a word in a strange way is approximately zero.

Have a great day!

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#355

Post by nomel »

nomel wrote: post #95
yuye wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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.

Could you describe your usual workflows and usage patterns with AI?

I think this is a perfectly reasonable question. They're having a very different experience than many other people (including myself). It would be interesting to get an idea of why it's so different.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#356

Post by win311fwg »

ssl-3 wrote: post #354
win311fwg wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like all code discussions on HN, we have never been given the code to hold. I understand in the past HN accounts have been afraid to post code because it would reveal that they have no idea what they are doing, but now that we have the plausible deniability of "look at this stupid thing an LLM wrote!" it is curious the mindset persists. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I didn't realize that I was on trial and that there was a requirement that I back up my personal anecdotes and observations with working examples to prove their worth. In reality, there's no reason for me to do so, because I'm not on trial here at all. Please keep your accusations to yourself, comrade. My willingness to prove to you that a bot uses a word in a strange way is approximately zero. Have a great day!

Logically there is never an expectation for one to comment for anyone but themselves, but it remains that nobody can hold something that has never been given to them.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#357

Post by geoka9 »

nomel wrote: post #102
jaggederest wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generate an uncharacteristically exhaustive suite of unit tests to validate every possible scenario. This is what you want. You want comprehensive tests at every level, far more than is reasonable for a human to build or maintain, from unit, functional, to full end to end and beyond. Adversarial testing (both TDD-style "write tests to demonstrate this bug", and posthoc "prove this patch wrong with a new test") is t…

Yeap. Hundreds of tests for small tools are completely trivial now.

We end up having to review the copious tests. In addition to the code (we still review it, right)?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#358

Post by antonvs »

jordanb wrote: post #327
antonvs wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It punishes the inflexible deep thinker, perhaps. If you can’t figure out how to use an incredibly powerful tool to your advantage, how deeply are you thinking, really?

Well most experienced developers I know hate it and agree it's taken all pleasure out of the work. We've spent our careers designing and building high quality software systems. But now we're told our job is to use the plagiarism box to sling slop all the time. Those who can are transitioning out of the field. This is an industry where American developers have successfully competed on quality with the rest of the worl…

You can read many posts here by very experienced developers who disagree.

It’s possible that the experienced developers you know just aren’t that good at adapting to major changes like this.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#359

Post by archagon »

springtimesun wrote: post #307
cpt_sobel wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who is a confessed LLM-addict and has told me pretty much everything you mentioned (you might be my friend!), I just have a question I want to ask that I never do to him: Why do you feel the need to churn out so many "personal projects" if they burn you out that much? I think we can all agree on the exhaustiveness of reviewing tons of AI-generated code in our $JOB$ - then why extend this unpleasant si…

I doubt it, but maybe :) RE personal projects specifically: addiction is an interesting angle. It feels more like anxiety though, that this thing is going to be taken away and this will be a brief and glorious window when I had the means and opportunity to make all the things I wanted, but never had time for. It’s also exhausting to have a bunch of stuff that you want to do piling up for years. Could just be a person…

Maybe it's a good thing to only do those things you can find (or make) the time for.

When the rug gets pulled, what are you going to do with this giant pile of unfinished and unmaintained projects?

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#360

Post by jordanb »

antonvs wrote: post #358
jordanb wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well most experienced developers I know hate it and agree it's taken all pleasure out of the work. We've spent our careers designing and building high quality software systems. But now we're told our job is to use the plagiarism box to sling slop all the time. Those who can are transitioning out of the field. This is an industry where American developers have successfully competed on quality with the rest of the worl…

You can read many posts here by very experienced developers who disagree. It’s possible that the experienced developers you know just aren’t that good at adapting to major changes like this.

Another possibility is that people are afraid to speak up when the threat is termination

"Stroustrup points out that some senior developers are starting to retire because they're tired of constantly validating unpredictable AI code. "

https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/bjarne-stroustrup-...

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