ExFed comments on Why not LLMs?

[–] ExFed@programming.dev 8 points 2 days ago (1 child)

It's not that my brain is tired or even that I trust LLMs, I just don't have time and either an LLM can create the thing I want or I do without. If the project fails, nothing of value is lost.

At home, that's the summary of so many of my hobby projects lately. At work, however, there's one phenomenon that I don't know if we have a name for yet: loss of job satisfaction because a large part of the joy of creative problem solving comes from the process of wrestling with a hard problem, making a breakthrough, and genuinely learning something. LLMs make it too easy. I don't feel like I'm learning anything of value. I'm just regurgitating some version of the LLM's solution back to my coworkers during stand-ups. And so, if anyone really pressed me on the details, I would have a hard time coming up with anything. For this latest release on a project that I've worked on for most of a year and given demos for in the past, we unleashed AI. I'm genuinely nervous to give an upcoming customer demo for this release because I don't really feel like I understand the changes were shipping.

At first, I thought it was just a problem I was experiencing alone. But then I started hearing others express very similar sentiments. At least one person mentioned that they chose to work on hobby projects without LLMs, precisely because they wanted to recapture that joy they lost from their career. Even though I've finally started knocking out quite a few ideas from the backlog that had accumulated over the years, it's hard to really reach that same level of satisfaction.

Is there a balance point where I can stay on top of the backlog while feeling like my brain hasn't fallen out of my head?

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 1 child comment

[–] thejml@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago

I'm a manager over 5 infra devs, I've been pretty strongly against AI since the beginning, but the company has pushed it hard and gave us a "all you can use, see what you can do with it" mandate. It's hard to push back, so the best I can do is add team wide guardrails. Some things I've noticed:

Pros:
- we're able to work on more things simultaneously.
- deployment velocity is way faster
- team members have become less siloed and more full stack
- people are able use AI to do more in depth analysis 
- more new issues found and ticketed

Cons:
- less personal ownership 
- more time spent pushing back on AI answers (or not and going down time wasting rabbit holes)
- more pressure to do more and invent the "next big thing" instead of focusing on what we already know needs doing
- first step of problem solving is to ask Claude, not actually think about the issue or why it's happening 
- less true understanding of how things work together or with different pieces actually do
- more duplication of work
- more "Well Claude said" instead of "I found that"
- less "how do I solve ___" instead "How can I get Claude to solve ___"
- way more huge comments in code, but not readable or human understandable comments. Same with documentation and PR/Commit messages.

And personally, I feel a lot less motivated and like I now have to manage 5 people and 20 extra entry-level/intern level people. I feel pressured by those around me and above me to do more and I have less time... and I feel way less respected, challenged, appreciated, and get no positive dopamine hit from solving issues or getting things done.

AI is likely one of the biggest brain-drain's ever to hit the industry and it has sapped all of the enjoyment out of my job.

As much as I want to use AI to move my home lab projects forward, I want to enjoy it... and vibe coding my hobby is a great way to make it no longer my hobby, just like it sapped all of the love out of my job. So the lab sits there because I'm mentally drained at the end of the day, and pissed off at the political and technological directions of my hobby.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent