alt Hacker News> I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding
I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice.
In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnover so the owners asked me to be a waiter for a little while. The first couple months I found the small talk and the need to always be "on" absolutely exhausting, but overtime I found my routine and it became less exhausting. I definitely loved being a delivery driver far more, but eventually I did hit a point where I didn't feel completely drained after every shift of waiting tables.
I can't help but think coding with LLMs will follow a similar pattern. I don't think I'll ever like it more than writing the code myself, but I have to believe at some point I'll have done it enough that it doesn't feel completely draining.
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I think what will eventually help is something I call AI-discipline. LLMs are a tool, not more, no less. Just like we now recognize unbridled use of mobile phones to be a mental health issue, causing some to strictly limit their use, I think we will eventually recognize that the best use of LLMs is found by being judicious and intentional.
When I first started dabbling in the use of LLMs for coding, I almost went overboard trying to build all kinds of tools to maximize their use: parallel autonomous worktree-based agents, secure sandboxing for agents to do as they like, etc.
I now find it much more effective to use LLMs in a target and minimalist manner. I still architecturally important and tricky code by hand, using LLMs to do several review passes. When I do write code with LLMs, I almost never allow them to do it without me in the loop, approving every single edit. I limit the number of simultaneous sessions I manage to at most 3 or 4. Sometimes, I take a break of a few days from using LLMs (and ofter from writing any code at all), and just think and update the specs of the project(s) I'm working on at a high level, to ensure I not doing busy-work in the wrong direction.
I don't think I'm missing anything by this approach. If anything, I think I am more productive.
Thanks for the story. I also spent time as a delivery driver at an italian restaurant. It was a blast in the sense that i look back at that slice of life with pride and becoming. Never got the chance to be a waiter, but definitely they were characters and worked hard for their money. Also the cooking staff. What a hoot.
I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for, and when there was a bug, you simply sat down and fixed the bug.
With the rise of open source, there started to be more black-box compositing, you grabbed some big libraries like Django or NumPy and honestly just hoped there weren't any bugs, but if there were, you could plausibly step through the debugger and figure out what was going wrong and file a bug report.
Now, the LLMs are generating so many orders of magnitude more code than any human could ever have the chance to debug, you're basically just firing this stuff out like a firehose on a house fire, giving it as much control as you can muster but really just trusting the raw power of the thing to get the job done. And, bafflingly, it works pretty well, except in those cases where it doesn't, so you can't stop using the tool but you can't really ever get comfortable with it either.