Engineers that have the audacity to think they can context switch between a dozen different lines of work deserve every ounce of burnout they feel. You're the tech equivalent of wanting to be a Kardashian and you're complicit in the damage being caused to society. No, this isn't hyperbole.
AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
61–70 of 334 posts
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#62> Your manager sees you shipping faster, so the expectations adjust. You see yourself shipping faster, so your own expectations adjust. The baseline moves.
This problem has been going on a long time, Helen Keller wrote about this almost 100 years ago:
> The only point I want to make here is this: that it is about time for us to begin using our labor-saving machinery actually to save labor instead of using it to flood the nation haphazardly with surplus goods which clog the channels of trade.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1932/08/put-you...
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#63For 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…
Seriously and beyond productivity, flow state was what I liked most about the job. A cup of coffee and noise cancelling headphones and a 2 hour locked in session were when I felt most in love with programming.
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why now it’s legitimate to work on multiple features or projects at the same time
Context switching like that is exhausting
It's a different kind of fatigue, but it's something a felt I got stronger at over time. Beats waiting IMHO, but be sure to give yourself a chance to rest.
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#65This write-up has good ideas but gives me the "AI-generated reading fatigue." Things that can cleanly be expressed in 1-2 sentences are whole paragraphs, often with examples that seem unnecessary or unrealistic. There are also some wrong claims like below: > The Hacker News front page alone is enough to give you whiplash. One day it's "Show HN: Autonomous Research Swarm" and the next it's "Ask HN: How will AI swarms…
The headline is clickbait-y but I think the article is well articulated. I found the "What actually helped" helpful too.
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#66But ... but ... your productivity as an engineer shoots up! You can take on more tasks and ship more!
-- Dumbass Engineering Director who has never written a line of code in their life.
Unfortunately, with these types of software simpleton's making decisions we are going to see way more push for AI usage and thus higher productivity expectations. They cannot wrap their heads around the fact (for starters) that AI is not deterministic so that increases the overhead on testing, security, requirements, integrations etc. making all those productivity gains evaporate. Worse (like the author mentioned), it makes your engineer less creative and more burnt-out.
Let's be honest here. Engineers picked this career broadly for 2 reasons, creativity and money. With AI, the creativity aspect is taken away and you are now more of a tester. As for money, those same dumbass decision makers are now going to view this skillset as a commodity and find people who can easily be trained in to "AI Engineers" for way less money to feed inputs.
I am all for technological evolution and welcome it but this isn't anything like that. It is purely based on profits, shareholders and any but building good, proper software systems. Quality be damned. Profession of Software Development be damned. We will regret it in the future.
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#67For 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…
I hope Google has been improving their diffusion model in the background this whole time. Having an agentic system that can spin up diffusion agents for lite tasks would be awesome
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#68We've all seen that if you are interacting with an AI over a lengthy chat, eventually it loses the plot. It gets confused. It appears to me that it's necessary, when coding an AI, to keep its task very limited in terms of the amount of information it needs to complete the task. Even then you still have to check the output very carefully. If it seems to be losing focus, I start a new task to reduce the context window, and focus on something that still needs to be fixed in the previous task.
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#69This was a good article.
I dont have exhaustion as such but an increasing sense of dread, the more incredibly work I achieve, the less valuable I realise it potentially will be due to its low cost effort.
Re: AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why now it’s legitimate to work on multiple features or projects at the same time
Context switching like that is exhausting
The next step is running an LLM that tries to figure out parts of the project that you aren't working on so it automatically starts coding that while letting you code in peace other stuff manually.