I Think I Have LLM Burnout

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• Hacker News
• It sounds kind of like being stuck working with coworkers who--while not overtly hostile--need constant hand-holding and repeat the same kinds of mistakes every day and can't even be genuinely sorry about it.

  Just because we work with computers doesn't mean we don't take, er, social-damage. Or perhaps parasocial damage, in this case.

  by Terr_
• The reason I'm getting LLM burnout is from dealing with the obvious neutering and opaque downgrading of all the top models.

  Prior to the last 12mos AI companies were hell bent on squeezing out the best results from mediocre models.

  But... now that the top models have progressed, those same AI companies have switched their efforts into reducing the computation (cost of a producing a result) as much as possible without being too obvious.

  What was an exponential slope in the quality of results over the last 36 months has now nearly flat lined.

  Addendum: IMHO results have 'flat lined' not because the models aren't much more capable than a year ago, but because conserving the enormous processing cost (of an over subscribed user base) supersedes the goal of following the user's explicit instructions (e.g. especially if that means more processing cost) to generate the best results.

  by canada_dry
• I am feeling very tired. Since I’ve started working with LLMs my output as a solo dev has easily gone up 20x. I’m closing client projects including ones that previously would have been far too ambitious to take on alone. Long running codebases are getting features that have dragged out for months or been sitting in the planning stages for even longer. And overall quality is way up now with more complete (and honestly better) test coverage.

  I’m building personal projects at a prodigious pace. In a role reversal I treat the agents like I’m one of my clients (albeit a more technical one who gives them architectural direction) and they are me. I’m using the apps and tooling they make every day. I’ve cancelled SaaS subs for tools I’ve built myself.

  I watch the tool calls and realize I should be better at core command line tools so I have a study plan to catch up (just a little bit a day). I’m revisiting long standing config that I dropped in to vim and tmux way back when I started and didn’t know anything.

  I guess in theory I could hold my productivity to previous levels and read more. But it doesn’t feel like that’s possible. It feels like we are in one of those sea changes where the promise is less work, but the reality is increased productivity and expectations (the Industrial Revolution feels like the right parallel to reach for). Increased expectations happen in small ways and large. The agents are so good at polishing data presentations that I always send cleaned up visually impactful reports that would have taken significant time in the past just as a matter of course now.

  But, I’m tired. I’ve spent the Fable on subscription window sprinting through as much work as I can before it goes API only. (As an aside, I don’t understand how everyone is using so many tokens. I’m sleeping very little and running as much code as I can through fable and I can barely touch a 20x max plan limit.) I keep telling myself I will slow down when it comes off, now it’s extended to the 12th and my window just reset, a few more days to keep knocking out backlog items. I feel like I have to keep the robots busy overnight so when I wake up I can immediately sit down to review. I give directions to agents on my phone which feels wild to me.

  by springtimesun
• I do not have the burnout but I certainly operate similarly to the author. I continue to be unable to establish a workflow where allowing the LLM to generate code that I review is faster than writing the code myself. Literally the only two ways out of this dilemma is to blindly trust what was generated or to generate an uncharacteristically exhaustive suite of unit tests to validate every possible scenario. I just write the business logic myself and have the LLM do a lot of the rest. Boilerplate falls into the latter as well.
  by nzeid
• I’m currently doing a project with someone who only uses LLMs, and it’s exhausting and mentally draining.

  Whenever I give feedback on something, the answer is just “let me tell Claude”. The person has no understanding of how everything works, and most of the code reflects that.

  The other day he hardcoded in a demo mode, simply because he didn’t even know how to set up a local environment and set environment variables. I’m confused as to why Claude didn’t even knew this, but it might just be the prompting.

  I limit LLM usage myself, and if I do use it, I try to use it on extremely specific tasks. It’s the only way it works for me.

  I honestly don’t understand how all these companies are getting away with generating AI code. Even in a small project I quickly fall behind on my understanding of the project.

  by woutr_be
• I've started feeling slightly physically ill when I read Opus output for hours straight. This article rings very true for me. I've started complaining about it with my team; at least have a personal style guide in your agent rules that eliminates emdashes, the "it's not X, it's Y"s, the long lists of modifiers before the noun, using the word "land" to mean finish, etc. I hope this is just a phase of adolescent LLMs.
  by block_dagger
• From my experience, there are mainly 3 burnout reasons. 1. Multi-tasking is the top one. I usually have to frequently switch between 3 to 5 agent windows which are on different things. It's extremely exhausting when each round takes a few minutes. Before coding agent era, I believe most developers had chance to spend 2+ hours focusing on one thing. Now coding agents have increased my spectrum on the tech stack, but the bandwidth to do deep work isn't increased. 2. Agents are good at getting things running without crash, but do not guarantee to produce correct code. This is quite different from human experts with fundamental knowledge. 3. I also get frustrated when reviewing piles of AI generated low quality PRs. My attention is a limited resource. I don't waste too much energy on other people's work, but if I don't spend more effort, the entire project is corrupted quickly by reckless AI generated code without human author's careful thoughts and designs. Working with people who have less due diligence in mind is painful, working with them in coding agent era is 10x painful because they produce 10x shit. It's a team culture challenge that cannot be easily enforced.
  by treefry
• I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, and there could be 10x more if everyone just "optimized" and streamlined processes fed the AI even more tasks in parallel faster. It just being a bottleneck of everything, all the time is tiring...

  I am happy about all the little side-projects, and ideas it help my realize, and I enjoy exploring this new world, but I've noticed LLMs feed my unhealthy "don't want to take a break and waste time being idle" mindset, and I need to correct it.

  W.r.t. article's main complain - I think the similar thing happened due to factory manufacturing automation. What used to be a varied skillful craft in a shop became standing in a single place of an assembly line doing the exact same thing whole day. LLM took away the more creative and variable part of the work, and left the repetitive QA rubber-stamping. Probably some of the mitigations used back then could be rediscovered today.

  by dpc_01234