Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

siddhantkhare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 334 posts

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#41

Post by preommr »

I'd like to also add 'perceived cost aversion':

AI generates a solution that's functional, but that's at a 70% quality level. But then it's really hard to make changes because it feels horrible to spend 1 hour+ to make minor improvements to something that was generated in a minute.

It also feels a lot worse because it would require context switching and really trying to understand the problem and solution at a deeper level rather than a surface level LGTM.

And if it functionally works, then why bother?

Except that it does matter in the long term as technical debt piles up. At a very fast rate too since we're using AI to generate it.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#43

Post by barishnamazov »

falloutx wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In couple of minutes? My claude code takes like 5 mins just to wake up and write a simple plan.

You are taking to simonw, surely Claude have given him free super fast unlimited token access to nightly version of Claude 5.1 Opus.

(just joking, your posts are great, Simon!)

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#44

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

parpfish wrote: post #18

For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something. The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks. You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this c…

That’s why now it’s legitimate to work on multiple features or projects at the same time

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#45

Post by gaigalas »

taway1874 wrote: post #35
gaigalas wrote: post #27

> Engineers are trained on determinism. I'm fatigued by this myth.

Explain?

True determinism is rare, we often don't get it. That's what purely functional languages are all about and they're a minority.

We are trained on the other thing: unpredictable user interaction, parallelism, circuit-breaking, etc. That's the bread and butter of engineering (of all kinds, really, not just IT).

The non-deterministic intuition is baked into engineering much more than determinism is.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#47

Post by bonoboTP »

I personally am a lot less stressed. It helped my mood a lot over the last couple of months. Less worries about forgetting things, about missing problems, about getting started, about planning and prioritizing in solo work. Much less of the "swirling mess" feeling. Context switches are simpler, less drudgery, less friction and pulling my hair out for hours banging against some dumb plumbing and gluing issue or installing stuff from github or configuring stuff on the computer.

Its a million little quality of life stuff.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#49

Post by mrits »

orangepanda wrote: post #39

> What should this function be named? I didn't care. Where should this config live? I didn't care. My brain was full. Not from writing code - from judging code. Does it matter anymore? Most good engineering principles are to ensure code is easy to read and maintain by humans. When we no longer are the target audience for that, many such decisions are no longer relevant.

I think we've spent exponentially more effort to ensure the code is readable by machines.

I also don't understand why you assume what the AI generates is more readable by AI than human generated code.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#50

Post by Forge36 »

pylua wrote: post #38
parpfish wrote: post #18

For me the fatigue is a little different— it’s the constant switching between doing a little bit of work/coding/reviewing and then stopping to wait for the llm to generate something. The waits are unpredictable length, so you never know if you should wait or switch to a new task. So you just do something to kill a little time while the machine thinks. You never get into a flow state and you feel worn down from this c…

What are you generating that the llm takes so long ? I usually prompt and review in small pieces.

For me: Will this task take 30 seconds or 3 minutes. With good planning I've been able to step away and come back. Sometimes it decides to prompt me within 5 seconds for permissions. Sometimes it runs for 15 minutes.

The output is still small and I can review it. I can switch tasks, however if it's my primary effort for the day I don't like stepping away for an hour to do something else.

Post reply on HN