LLMs can be exhausting
tomjohnell.com
LLMs can be exhausting
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Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#2I think the exhausting part is more probably more tied to the evaluation of the work the agent is doing, understanding its thought process and catching the hang up can be tedious in the current state of AI reasoning.
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#3I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit.
Funny enough, I get this feeling with a lot of modern technology. iPhones, all the modern messaging apps, etc make it much too easy to fragment your attention across a million different things. It’s draining. Much more draining than the old days
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#4I 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.
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#5I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…
The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine (easy) to avoid putting in the work to plan a fun game (hard).
The more clarity you have about what you’re building, then the larger blocks of work you can delegate / outsource.
So I think one overwhelming part of LLMs is that you don’t get the downtime of working on implementation since that’s now trivial; you are stuck doing the hard part of steering and planning. But that’s also a good thing.
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#6Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#7In agent-mode mode, IMO, the sweet spot is 2-3 concurrent tasks/sessions. You don’t want to sit waiting for it, but you don’t want to context-switch across more than a couple contexts yourself.
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#8I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…
I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc. The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine…
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#9I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs. I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit. Funny enough, I get this feeling…
I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc. The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine…
Re: LLMs can be exhausting
#10same thing happened with crypto - the underlying technology is cool but the community is what makes it so hated