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LLMs can be exhausting

tomjohnell.com

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Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#61

Post by layer8 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #16
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #12

Does anyone else see this as dystopian? Someone is unironically writing about how exhausted they are and up at night thinking about how they can be a better good-boy at prompting the LLM and reminding us how we shouldn't cope by blaming the AI or its supposed limitations (context size, etc). This is not a dig at the author. It just seems crazy that this is an unironic post. It's like we are gleefully running to the "…

I mean, how often do we feel the same thing about the compiler?

What the compiler will do is highly predictable. What an LLM will produce considerably less so. That is the problem.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#63

Post by bmurphy1976 »

rednafi wrote: post #11

I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent. But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Review…

> Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day.

That's a big red flag if I ever saw one. Corporate should be empowering the engineering team to use AI tooling to improve their own process organically. Is this true or exaggeration? If it's true I'd start looking for a more balanced position at more disciplined org.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#64

Post by whoisthemachine »

bluebarbet wrote: post #17
anthonySs wrote: post #10

llms aren’t exhausting it’s the hype and all the people around it same thing happened with crypto - the underlying technology is cool but the community is what makes it so hated

How is "llms" pronounced?

I pronounce it language models or chat bots.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#65

Post by nanobuilds »

Your human context also needs compacting at some point. After hours of working with an LLM, your prompts tend to become less detailed, you tend to trust the LLM more, and it's easier to go down a solution that is not necessarily the best one. It becomes more of a brute forcing LLM assisted "solve this issue flow". What's funny is that it sometimes feels that the LLM itself is exhausted as well as the human and then the context compacting makes it even worse.

It's like with regular non-llm assisted coding. Sometimes you gotta sleep on it and make a new /plan with a fresh direction.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#68

Post by ccosky »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #54
qudat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The velocity is up AND the quality is up. This is not my experience on a team of experienced SWEs working on a product worth 100m/year. Agents are a great search engine for a codebase and really nice for debugging but anytime we have it write feature code it makes too many mistakes. We end up spending more time tuning the process than it takes to just write the code AND you are trading human context with agent cont…

I can't speak to your experience. I can only speak to mine. We've spent years reducing old debt and modernizing our application and processes. The places where we've made that investment are where we are currently seeing the additional acceleration. The places where we haven't are still stuck in the mud, but per your "search engine for a codebase" comment our engineers are starting to engage with systems they would n…

Your experience matches mine too. Experienced devs are increasing their output while maintaining quality. I'm personally writing better-quality code than before because it's trival to tell AI to refactor or rename something. I care about good code, but I'm also lazy, so I have my Claude skills set up to have AI do it for me. (Of course, I always keep the human in the loop and review the outputs.)

You said that you're restructuring the project to be LLM friendly, which also makes the app better for humans. I 100% agree with this. Code that is unreadable and unmaintainable for humans is much more difficult for AI to understand. I think companies that practiced or prioritized code hygiene will be ahead of the game when it comes to getting good results with agentic AI.

Re: LLMs can be exhausting

#70

Post by ccosky »

coffeefirst wrote: post #44
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #12

Does anyone else see this as dystopian? Someone is unironically writing about how exhausted they are and up at night thinking about how they can be a better good-boy at prompting the LLM and reminding us how we shouldn't cope by blaming the AI or its supposed limitations (context size, etc). This is not a dig at the author. It just seems crazy that this is an unironic post. It's like we are gleefully running to the "…

Oh, entirely. But the hype cycle is such that if you find a legitimate criticism or run into the hard limits of human cognition (there are real limits to multitasking), a lot of people blame themselves. My pet theory is we haven't figured out what the best way to use these tools are, or even seen all the options yet. But that's a bigger topic for another day.

With the trend going towards devs coordinating multiple agents at once, I am very curious to see how cognitive load increases due to the multitasking. We know multitasking reduces productivity and increases the likelihood of mistakes. Cal Newport talked about how important is to engage in "deep work." We're going in the opposite direction.
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