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Great post. So the people who are claiming huge jumps in productivity in the workplace, how are they dealing with this 'review fatigue'?
I notice myself not reviewing in depth, and I assume many many others are not either.
LLMs can be exhausting
81–90 of 232 posts
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#82Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#83I wonder if it's more or less tiring to work with LLMs in YOLO/--dangerously-skip-permissions mode. I mostly use YOLO mode which means I'm not constantly watching them and approving things they want to do... but also means I'm much more likely to have 2-3 agent sessions running in parallel, resulting in constant switching which is very mentally taxing.
It's orthogonal IMO. YOLO or not is simply a sign of trust for the harness or not. Trust slightly affects cognition, but not much. My working hypothesis: exhaustion is the residue of use of cognition.
What impacts cognition for me, and IMO for a lot of folks, is how well we end up defining our outcomes. Agents are tremendous at working towards the outcome (hence by TDD red-green works wonderfully), but if you point them to a goal slightly off, then you'll have to do the work of getting them on track, demanding cognition.
So the better you're at your initial research/plan phase, where you document all of your direction and constraints, the lesser effort is needed in the review.
The other thing impacting cognition is how many parallel threads you're running. I have defaulted to major/minor system - at any time I have 1 major project (higher cognition) and 1 minor agent (lower cognition) going. It's where managing this is comfortable.
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#84[flagged]
LLM spam, ironically
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#85[dead]
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#86Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#87I 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.
True at Doordash, Amazon, and salesforce - speaking from experience.
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#88Everytime I read articles here describing the LLM prompt engineering workflow, all I can think is, "This sounds like such a fucking awful job".
I imagine I will greatly reduce my job prospects as a hold out, but honestly, from what I've read I think I'd rather take a hefty pay hit and not go there. It sounds like a mental heath disaster and fast track to serious burnout.
YMMV, I realize I'm in the minority, this is unproductive ranting, yada yada yada
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#89I’ve found LLM development expands the scope of what I can do to an absurd level. This is what exhausts me.
My limits are now many of the same things that are have always been core to software dev, but are now even more obvious:
- what is the thing we are building? What is the core product or bug fix or feature?
- what are we _not_ building? What do we not care about?
- do I understand the code enough to guide design and architecture?
- can I guide dev and make good choices when it’s far outside my expertise but I know enough to “smell” when things are going off the rails
It’s a weird time
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always wonder where HNers worked or work; we do ERP and troubleshooting on legacy systems for medium to large corps; PRs by humans were always pretty random and barely looked at as well, even though the human wrote it (copy/pasted from SO and changed it somewhat); if you ask what it does they cannot tell you. This is not an exception, this is the norm as far as I can see outside HN. People who talk a lot, don't und…
I currently work at one of the biggest tech companies. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve worked at scrappy startups, unicorns, and medium size companies. I’ve certainly seen my share of what I call slot driven development where a developer just throws things at the wall until something mostly works. And plenty if cut and paste development. But it’s far from the majority. It’s usually the same few devel…
I also work at a huge company, and this observation is true. The way AI is being rammed down our throats is burning out the best engineers. OTOH, the mediocre simian army “empowered” by AI is pushing slop like there’s no tomorrow. The expectation from leadership, who tried Claude for a single evening, is that you should be able to deliver everything yesterday.
The resilience of the system has taken a massive hit, and we were told that it doesn’t matter. Managers, designers, and product folks are being asked to make PRs. When things cause Sev0 or Sev1 incidents, engineers are being held responsible. It’s a huge clown show.