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Task Paralysis and AI

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Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#91

Post by DANmode »

dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

> ready to go back to the old ways for my next personal project

This stood out to me.

Because you shouldn’t, or can’t go back, in your professional projects?

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#92

Post by pelasaco »

One side note: it's funny how everyone suddenly "hates AI" while happily using it and profiting from it every day. We all want AI like Gyges wanted and used the ring in Plato's Republic.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#93

Post by firegodjr »

Ozzie-D wrote: post #2

This resonates. The "idea to result" loop getting shorter with AI is genuinely addictive, I've noticed it in my own workflow too. But theres a flip side nobody talks about: once you get used to that speed, going back to manual implementation feels 10x worse than it did before. The paralysis dosn't go away, it just gets masked. The real question is whether AI is solving the problem or just compressing the dopamine cyc…

I really feel this. I find myself reaching for CC, typing half a prompt, and then realizing I could've done the task faster myself. But CC is exciting, and feels* fast, so I keep reaching for it. Somehow it feels worse to just do the work.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#94

Post by timacles »

stavros wrote: post #7
pllbnk wrote: post #5

So the end game for the current generation of AI companies won't be productivity improvements but gambling, just like everything else nowadays. That's why they want to get us all into these massive casinos they call data centers and don't want us to own the slot machines. So what that you have ideas - other people have them too. It's not ideas that build businesses but knowing right people or ability to sell products…

The gambling trope is so tired. AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree, certainly not more than hiring people to do a job can be considered "gambling" (you never know what you're going to get!). It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.

Not in that sense but social media companies already know the value of not giving a user exactly what they want. This keeps them on the platform longer and excited some lizard part of our brain for challenge.

Due to capitalism’s law of all businesses convergening on maximizing profit, it’s just a matter of time until AI companies employ similar techniques with LLMs. We can all imagine how that will look like

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#95

Post by hirvi74 »

hyperific wrote: post #45

Addressing the end of the article, I think that we are all very much still learning how to use AI responsibly. It's like we just discovered alcohol and we're going on a rager every night because we don't know any better yet. It's too easy to buy €100 of Claude tokens and burn through them to make those dream projects appear as if by magic. There's a middle ground where, for example, instead of building a whole projec…

That's how I use LLMs for programming. I predominately use the chatbots instead of the CLI tools. Every so often, I'll ask for a one-shot of some MVP, but then I take that MVP and make all the changes myself. However, I must say that I rarely do the one-shot-and-edit style of development. I find that such a process can save time, but not always.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#96

Post by rubslopes »

entrox wrote: post #49
dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

Almost a decade ago, I moved my career into the management track. I am a director by now and have two more management levels between myself and individual contributors. I can strongly relate to what you‘re writing, because I share that same sentiment often in my daily (non-AI) work. In fact, coming from that background, the switch from coding to working with agents feels eerily similar to moving into management. You…

I feel lucky to have been promoted to a management position recently, just as I was starting to feel less excited about dev work because of AI. I still enjoy building systems, but I have to admit that the loss of challenge made the work much less enjoyable for me.

Now I have a team of interns to mentor. They're sharp and use AI constantly, so my guidance is less about code and more about UI/UX, understanding what the client actually wants, good work practices, well-documented tickets, thorough reviews, and so on. Thankfully, I like this work, it has been very rewarding.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#97

Post by MrGilbert »

KallDrexx wrote: post #53
dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

I have done a lot of introspection on this and realized that I'm very much driven by intrinsic rewards moreso than extrinsic. I got into coding over a decade before it was my career because of the exploration, learning, and puzzle/challenge aspect. Every time I have tried to be extrinsically driven (career or OSS wise) it's never worked out anyway. I could have done more to make it successful but I never cared about…

> But I felt no accomplishment. It felt just the same as if I downloaded the tool from someone else's repo (and who had an overly eager maintainer that would implement my GitHub issue requests).

I get that. I recently watched a "talking head" style video by javid9x, where he said something along the lines of disconnecting from the code emotionally [0]. He has to get into the code to understand that. I get the same feeling, however, for me, it feeds my curiosity and my need of exploration. At least for now, I might add.

[0]: https://youtu.be/1qjn1QRxlng?si=_75-J51UnZ0eJyb7&t=705

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#98

Post by ryandrake »

MrGilbert wrote: post #97
KallDrexx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done a lot of introspection on this and realized that I'm very much driven by intrinsic rewards moreso than extrinsic. I got into coding over a decade before it was my career because of the exploration, learning, and puzzle/challenge aspect. Every time I have tried to be extrinsically driven (career or OSS wise) it's never worked out anyway. I could have done more to make it successful but I never cared about…

> But I felt no accomplishment. It felt just the same as if I downloaded the tool from someone else's repo (and who had an overly eager maintainer that would implement my GitHub issue requests). I get that. I recently watched a "talking head" style video by javid9x, where he said something along the lines of disconnecting from the code emotionally [0]. He has to get into the code to understand that. I get the same fe…

That’s exactly it! There is no feeling of accomplishment whatsoever, because we aren’t really accomplishing anything. The LLM is doing all the work. Out pops an application, but it might as well have been written by someone else, because it was, but also it wasn’t!

It’s great that an application now exists where there wasn’t one before, but it’s hollow because I didn’t make it. Nobody made it! It just exists now with nothing actually accomplished by anyone. It’s a very spooky way to conjure things up.

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#99

Post by munksbeer »

KallDrexx wrote: post #53
dgellow wrote: post #20

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage flee…

I have done a lot of introspection on this and realized that I'm very much driven by intrinsic rewards moreso than extrinsic. I got into coding over a decade before it was my career because of the exploration, learning, and puzzle/challenge aspect. Every time I have tried to be extrinsically driven (career or OSS wise) it's never worked out anyway. I could have done more to make it successful but I never cared about…

> I have done a lot of introspection on this and realized that I'm very much driven by intrinsic rewards moreso than extrinsic. > I got into coding over a decade before it was my career because of the exploration, learning, and puzzle/challenge aspect. .. > LLMs take all the intrinsic wins and leaves only the extrinsic ones.

I'm not sure I understand this. For me, programming was at first a tool to use to satisfy my curiousity. When I first started coding I knew nothing about software patterns, how I should be naming my variables, length of functions, DOD vs OOP, functional vs imperative, single responsibility principle, and on and on.

I wrote a mess of a program and got it to do very cool things (for me). I loved it.

Then I got taught more, got my first jobs, learned why programming large systems needs standards, patterns, etc. I became good at that, and have had a long lucrative career out of it.

But I cannot wait for the day when I no longer need to earn money from programming and I can go back to using it just to do "cool shit". At that point, whether I am hacking and slashing myself, or working with an LLM to do something, I don't care. It is the intrinsic goal of solving a puzzle and programming just happens to be the tool I use.

Thinking more deeply about your words, is it that you enjoy figuring out the instructions to use to solve a problem? In other words, figuring out the algorithm and writing the code out to create something? Would you feel if you just tell the LLM what you want to create and it does it, you've lost the enjoyment?

Re: Task Paralysis and AI

#100

Post by stavros »

daveguy wrote: post #89
stavros wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a process problem. LLMs, like any tool, work better if you don't use them in the naive "do this" way. This works well for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083267

> The gambling trope is so tired... >>> That sounds like a process problem. LLMs, like any tool, work better if you don't use them in the naive "do this" way... The "you're holding it wrong" trope is even more tired than the gambling trope.

If you can't get results with the thing I'm getting results with, what other explanation would you give?
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