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AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

siddhantkhare.com

51–60 of 334 posts

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#51
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There will be a split of two major outcomes from LLM coding near-term.

The larger often half-baked projects will flail like they always have. People will get tired of bothering to attempt these. Oh look you created a big bloated pile of garbage that nobody will ever use. And of course there will be rare exceptions, some group of N people will work together to vibe code a clone of a billion dollar business and it'll actually start taking off and that'll garner a lot of attention. It'll remain forever extremely difficult to get users to a service. And if app & website creation scales up in volume due to simplicity of creation, the attention economy problem will only get more intense (neutralizing most of the benefits of the LLMs as an advantage).

The smaller, quasi micro projects used to more immediately solve narrow problems will thrive in a huge way, resulting in tangible productivity gains, and there will be a zillion of these, both at home and within businesses of all sizes.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#52

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 tur…

Why do you think author used ChatGPT to write this? It has human imperfections and except this 'The "just one more prompt" trap' I didnt think it was written by a prompt

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#53
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.

> It reduces the friction of coding tremendously. Coding was usually not the bottleneck but it still took a significant amount of time.

I don’t think I agree. How can something be both “usually not a bottleneck” that usually “takes 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.

Sounds like you might really enjoy a PM role. Either way, LLM or not, whatever gets written up and presented will have a lot of focus on a bike shed or will make the end user realize allllll the other things they want added/changed, so the requirements change, the priorities change…

So now we just don’t get to do the interesting part… engineer things.

If I wanted to be a PM I’d do that.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#54

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

This way you can do twice the terrible job twice as fast!

(Also, this only applies if what you're working on happens to be easily parallelizable _and_ you're part of the extremely privileged subset of SV software engineers. Try getting two Android Studios/XCodes/Clang builds in parallel without 128GB of RAM, see what happens).

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#56
post #38

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.

Not the OP, but the new LLMs together with harnesses (OpenCode in my case) can handle larger scopes of work - so the workflow moves away from pair programming (single-file changes, small scope diffs) to full-feature PR reviewing.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#57

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

Context switching like that is exhausting

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#58
I said this a few times here. Tech is never to make the life easier for the worker. It is to make the worker more productive and product more competitive.

Moving from horses to cars did not give you more free time. Moving from telephone to smartphone did not give more fishing time. You just became more mobile, more productive and more reachable.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#59
post #2

Author here. Not an anti-AI post. It's about the cognitive cost - faster tasks lead to more tasks, reviewing AI output all day causes decision fatigue, and the tool landscape churns weekly. Wrote about what actually helped. Curious if others are hitting similar walls.

Great post, I certainly feel you. Not just the anxiety but the need to push myself more and accomplish more now that I have some help. Setting right expectations and what is more practical and not every "AI magic post" is worth the attention, has helped me by not being anxious and with the FOMO.

Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

#60
Executive functioning fatigue. Usually you’re doing this in between applying skills, here it’s always making top level decisions and reasoning about possibilities. You don’t have nearly as much downtime because you don’t have to implement, you go from hard problem to hard problem with little time in between. You’re probably running your prefrontal cortex a lot hotter than usual.

People say AI will make us less intelligent, make certain brain regions shrink, but if it stays like this (and I suspect it won’t, but anyway…) then it’ll just make executive functioning super strong because that’s all you’re doing.

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