I find working more asynchronous with the agents help. I've disabled the in-your-face agent-is-done/need-input notifications [1]. I work across a few different tasks at my own pace. It works quite well, and when/if I find a rhythm to it, it's absolutely less intense than normal programming.
You might think that the "constant" task switching is draining, but I don't switch that frequently. Often I keep the main focus on one task and use the waiting time to draft some related ideas/thoughts/next prompt. Or browse through the code for light review/understanding. It also helps to have one big/complex task and a few simpler things concurrently. And since the number of details required to keep "loaded" in your head per task is fewer, switching has less cost I think. You can also "reload" much quicker by simply chatting with the agent for a minute or two, if some detail have faded.
I think a key thing is to NOT chase after keeping the agents running at max efficiency. It's ok to let them be idle while you finish up what your doing. (perhaps bad of KV cache efficiency though - I'm not sure how long they keep the cache)
(And obviously you should run the agent in a sandbox to limit how many approvals you need to consider)
[1] I use the urgent-window hint to get a subtle hint of which workspace contain an agent ready for input.
This resonates deeply. At heyvid we're constantly prompting LLMs for video scripts, metadata, thumbnails — and the inconsistency is genuinely draining. Some days it's magic, other days you spend 45 minutes coaxing a model into something a junior copywriter would nail in 5. I've started thinking of it less like using a tool and more like managing a brilliant but unpredictable contractor. You learn their quirks, you keep notes, you celebrate the wins. Doesn't make it less exhausting, but at least it reframes the frustration.
I 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 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
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 (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.
I've found writing the code massively helps your understanding of the problem and what you actually need or want. Most times I go into a task with a certain idea of how it should work, and then reevaluate having started. While an LLM will just do what you ask without questing, leaving you with none of the learnings you would have gained having done it. The LLM certainly didn't learn or remember anything from it.
In some cases, yes. But I’ve been doing this awhile now and there is a lot of code that has to be written that I will not learn anything from. And now, I have a choice to not write it.
Right when you're coding with LLM it's not you asking the LLM questions, it's LLM asking you questions, about what to build, how should it work exactly, should it do this or that under what conditions. Because the LLM does the coding, it's you have to do more thinking. :-)
And when you make the decisions it is you who is responsible for them. Whereas if you just do the coding the decisions about the code are left largely to you nobody much sees them, only how they affect the outcome. Whereas now the LLM is in that role, responsible only for what the code does not how it does it.
If you care at code quality of course it is exhausting. It's supposed to be. Now there is more code for you to assure quality in the same length of time.
I imagine code reviewing is a very different sort of skill than coding.
When you vibe code (assuming you're reading teh code that is written for you) you become a coder reviewer... I suspect you're learning a new skill.
The way I've tried to deal with it is by forcing the LLM to write code that is clear, well-factored and easy to review i.e. continually forcing it to do the opposite of what it wants to do. I've had good outcomes but they're hard-won.
The result is that I could say that it was code that I myself approved of. I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't read all of it, when you just let them go the results are so awful. If you're letting them go and reviewing at the end, like a post-programming review phase, I don't even know if that's a skill that can be mastered while the LLMs are still this bad. Can you really master Where's Waldo? Everything's a mess, but you're just looking for the part of the mess that has the bug?
I'm not reviewing after I ask it to write some entire thing. I'm getting it to accomplish a minimal function, then layering features on top. If I don't understand where something is happening, or I see it's happening in too many places, I have to read the code in order to tell it how to refactor the code. I might have to write stubs in order to show it what I want to happen. The reading happens as the programming is happening.
I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent.
But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Reviewing this junk has become exhausting.
I don’t want to read your code if you haven’t bothered to read it yourselves. My stance is: reviewing this junk is far more exhausting. Coding is actually the fun part.
I always wonder where HNers worked or work; we do ERP and troubleshooting on legacy systems for medium to large corps; PRs by humans were always pretty random and barely looked at as well, even though the human wrote it (copy/pasted from SO and changed it somewhat); if you ask what it does they cannot tell you. This is not an exception, this is the norm as far as I can see outside HN. People who talk a lot, don't understand anything and write code that is almost alien. LLMs, for us, are a huge step up. There is a 40 nested if with a loop to prevent it from failing on a missing case in a critical Shell (the company) ERP system. LLMs would not do that. It is a nightmare but makes us a lot of money for keeping things like that running.
I currently work at one of the biggest tech companies. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve worked at scrappy startups, unicorns, and medium size companies.
I’ve certainly seen my share of what I call slot driven development where a developer just throws things at the wall until something mostly works. And plenty if cut and paste development.
But it’s far from the majority. It’s usually the same few developers at a company doing it, while the people who know what they’re doing furiously work to keep things from falling apart.
If the majority of devs were doing this nothing would work. My worry is that AI lets the bad devs produce this kind of work on a massive scale that overwhelms the good devs ability to fight back or to even comprehend the system.
Tech companies. How about massive non software tech companies. I don't know where it is not the norm and I have been in very many of them as supplier for the past 30 years. Tech companies are a bit different as they usually have leadership that prioritizes these things.
I would hope that most people who are technically competent enough to be on HN are technically competent enough to quit orgs with coding standards that bad. Or, they're masochists who have taken on the chamllenge of working to fix them
I wonder if it's more or less tiring to work with LLMs in YOLO/--dangerously-skip-permissions mode.
I 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.
It looks like Stockholm syndrome or a traditional abusive relationship 100 years ago where the woman tries to figure out how to best prompt her husband to do something.
You know you can leave abusive relationships. Ditch the clanker and free your mind.
Most people reading this have probably had the experience of wasting hours debugging when exhausted, only to find it was a silly issue you’ve seen multiple times, or maybe you solve it in a few minutes the next morning.
Working with an agent coding all day can be exhilarating but also exhausting - maybe it’s because consequential decisions are packed more tightly together. And yes cognition still matters for now.
I wanna say that it is indeed a “skill issue” when it comes to debugging and getting the agent in your editor of choice to move forward. Sometimes it takes an instruction to step back and evaluate the current state and others it’s about establishing the test cases.
I 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.
In 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.
LLMs do not actually make anything better for anyone. You have to constantly correct them. It's like having a junior coder under your wing that never learns from its mistakes. I can't imagine anyone actually feeling productive using one to work.
I don't know what to think about comments like this. So many of them come from accounts that are days or at most weeks old. I don't know if this is astroturfing, or you really are just a new account and this is your experience.
As somebody who has been coding for just shy of 40 years and has gone through the actual pain on learning to run a high level and productive dev team, your experience does not match mine. Even great devs will forget some of the basics and make mistakes and I wish every junior (hell even seniors) were as effective as the LLMs are turning out to be. Put the LLM in the hands of a seasoned engineer who also has the skills to manage projects and mentor junior devs and you have a powerful accelerator. I'm seeing the outcome of that every day on my team. The velocity is up AND the quality is up.
This is not my experience on a team of experienced SWEs working on a product worth 100m/year.
Agents are a great search engine for a codebase and really nice for debugging but anytime we have it write feature code it makes too many mistakes. We end up spending more time tuning the process than it takes to just write the code AND you are trading human context with agent context that gets wiped.
I can't speak for you specifically, it's just a trend I'm seeing and unfortunately your 2 day old account falls into that bucket. There's a lot of people who have a lot to lose or who are very afraid of what LLMs will do. There's plenty of incentive to do this.
I would be curious to see if I'm just imaging this or it really is a trend.
No to be fair I do see what he's saying. I see a major difference between the more expensive models and the cheaper ones. The cheaper (usually default) ones make mistakes all the damn time. You can be as clear as day with them and they simply don't have the context window or specs to make accurate, well reasoned desicions and it is a bit like having a terrible junior work alongside you, fresh out of university.
Of course. Any scenario where you are expected to deliver results using non-deterministic tooling is going to be painful and exhausting. Imagine driving a car that might dive one way or the other of its own accord, with controls that frequently changed how they worked. At the end of any decently sized journey you would be an emotional wreck - perhaps even an actual wreck.
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.
Oh, entirely. But the hype cycle is such that people like this are blaming themselves for legitimate issues with the workflow design or hard limits on human cognition.
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.
You might think that the "constant" task switching is draining, but I don't switch that frequently. Often I keep the main focus on one task and use the waiting time to draft some related ideas/thoughts/next prompt. Or browse through the code for light review/understanding. It also helps to have one big/complex task and a few simpler things concurrently. And since the number of details required to keep "loaded" in your head per task is fewer, switching has less cost I think. You can also "reload" much quicker by simply chatting with the agent for a minute or two, if some detail have faded.
I think a key thing is to NOT chase after keeping the agents running at max efficiency. It's ok to let them be idle while you finish up what your doing. (perhaps bad of KV cache efficiency though - I'm not sure how long they keep the cache)
(And obviously you should run the agent in a sandbox to limit how many approvals you need to consider)
[1] I use the urgent-window hint to get a subtle hint of which workspace contain an agent ready for input.
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 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
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.
And when you make the decisions it is you who is responsible for them. Whereas if you just do the coding the decisions about the code are left largely to you nobody much sees them, only how they affect the outcome. Whereas now the LLM is in that role, responsible only for what the code does not how it does it.
The result is that I could say that it was code that I myself approved of. I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't read all of it, when you just let them go the results are so awful. If you're letting them go and reviewing at the end, like a post-programming review phase, I don't even know if that's a skill that can be mastered while the LLMs are still this bad. Can you really master Where's Waldo? Everything's a mess, but you're just looking for the part of the mess that has the bug?
I'm not reviewing after I ask it to write some entire thing. I'm getting it to accomplish a minimal function, then layering features on top. If I don't understand where something is happening, or I see it's happening in too many places, I have to read the code in order to tell it how to refactor the code. I might have to write stubs in order to show it what I want to happen. The reading happens as the programming is happening.
But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Reviewing this junk has become exhausting.
I don’t want to read your code if you haven’t bothered to read it yourselves. My stance is: reviewing this junk is far more exhausting. Coding is actually the fun part.
I’ve certainly seen my share of what I call slot driven development where a developer just throws things at the wall until something mostly works. And plenty if cut and paste development.
But it’s far from the majority. It’s usually the same few developers at a company doing it, while the people who know what they’re doing furiously work to keep things from falling apart.
If the majority of devs were doing this nothing would work. My worry is that AI lets the bad devs produce this kind of work on a massive scale that overwhelms the good devs ability to fight back or to even comprehend the system.
I 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.
same thing happened with crypto - the underlying technology is cool but the community is what makes it so hated
You know you can leave abusive relationships. Ditch the clanker and free your mind.
Working with an agent coding all day can be exhilarating but also exhausting - maybe it’s because consequential decisions are packed more tightly together. And yes cognition still matters for now.
I 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.
As somebody who has been coding for just shy of 40 years and has gone through the actual pain on learning to run a high level and productive dev team, your experience does not match mine. Even great devs will forget some of the basics and make mistakes and I wish every junior (hell even seniors) were as effective as the LLMs are turning out to be. Put the LLM in the hands of a seasoned engineer who also has the skills to manage projects and mentor junior devs and you have a powerful accelerator. I'm seeing the outcome of that every day on my team. The velocity is up AND the quality is up.
This is not my experience on a team of experienced SWEs working on a product worth 100m/year.
Agents are a great search engine for a codebase and really nice for debugging but anytime we have it write feature code it makes too many mistakes. We end up spending more time tuning the process than it takes to just write the code AND you are trading human context with agent context that gets wiped.
I would be curious to see if I'm just imaging this or it really is a trend.
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.
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.
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.