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Comment by dinkumthinkum | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else see this as dystopian? Someone is unironically writing about how exhausted they are and up at night thinking about how they can be a better good-boy at prompting the LLM and reminding us how we shouldn't cope by blaming the AI or its supposed limitations (context size, etc). This is not a dig at the author. It just seems crazy that this is an unironic post. It's like we are gleefully running to the "Laughterhouse" and each reminding our smiling fellow passengers not to be annoyed at the driver if he isn't getting us there fast enough, without realizing the Slaughterhouse (yes, I am stealing the reference).

Another way you can read this is as a new cult member that his chiding himself whenever he might have an intrusive thought that Dear Leader may not be perfect, after all.

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Oh, entirely. But the hype cycle is such that if you find a legitimate criticism or run into the hard limits of human cognition (there are real limits to multitasking), a lot of people blame themselves.

My pet theory is we haven't figured out what the best way to use these tools are, or even seen all the options yet. But that's a bigger topic for another day.

With the trend going towards devs coordinating multiple agents at once, I am very curious to see how cognitive load increases due to the multitasking. We know multitasking reduces productivity and increases the likelihood of mistakes. Cal Newport talked about how important is to engage in "deep work." We're going in the opposite direction.

Yup, and we arr wasting our weekends worried about keeping pace in an imagined red queen's race. Another similar post today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388646

Yeah I thought the same thing. Kinda eerie reading all that about prompts when not that long ago it would all pertain to actual coding.

Is it not LLM-generated? Or at this point are they just mimicking LLM writing if they ever do it manually?

Not at all.

I mean, how often do we feel the same thing about the compiler?

I don't feel this? When my code breaks, I'm more likely to get frustrated with myself.

The only time I've felt something akin to this with a compiler is when I was learning Rust. But that went away after a week or two.

What the compiler will do is highly predictable. What an LLM will produce considerably less so. That is the problem.

Never? I can rely on the compiler to pretty much do the same thing every time. If I broke some rule, it points out where and what it is.

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