AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?(evilmartians.com)

23 points by vinnyglennon 3 hours ago | 5 comments

tracker1 40 minutes ago |

My only thought is take your time to actually review what the LLM/Agent generates... ensure that you understand and can follow it. Give feedback and iterate as necessary. I've used this analogy a lot, but it's really a lot like managing remote development teams in a lot of ways... and even though you can also use agents for planning, it becomes a critical step as part of the communication loop when you aren't sharing a physical space.

I emphatically do not use multiple agents at a time... I monitor what the agent I'm working with is doing, stop it if it's going down the wrong path and give feedback along the way... don't be afraid to git reset a set of changes, then tell the agent you did so and why. Spend more time on structure and design up front, it will save you a lot of headaches later.

Beyond this, I've found the "5 hour window" that anthropic gives to be pretty helpful... when I've expended my allotment for the window, odds are, I've done enough for the day even. Read, work on something else, etc... know when it's a good time to stop for a day... it's easy to over-work yourself... it takes discipline to actually break for lunch, or the day. For that matter, step away from your desk for lunch and plan to take at least an hour if you can.

You can still deliver a crap ton of value beyond what you individually could do with an agent... but there needs to be a human in the loop for anything that people depend on for their money or livelihood.

musha68k 10 minutes ago | |

It definitely takes discipline to take breaks and say no. Zeitgeist though: less is more is dead? Up to us to make that call or not.

>but there needs to be a human in the loop for anything that people depend on for their money or livelihood

My main issue with fully autonomous systems is the lack of skin in the game. AI assisted should be the way going forward if only for that reason; like an autopilot mode and other automatisms help pilots relax and focus on steering themselves and passengers to safety.

musha68k 42 minutes ago |

I bet we'll find out the hard way that going slow is the power move, especially for builders; yet I feel as if I can't slow down myself. Burning out through the early years (still) of a longer industry / societal shift is likely at some point.

Reminds me a bit of how LLMs don't "understand" but still can and are nonetheless increasingly forecasting correctly - even in the abstract.

I understand; most likely forecast (!) this correctly, yet I'm not following my own derivations because of FOMO for subsidized tokens etc.

Rational yet stupid? What is intelligence even... I guess I need to have my sweet hyper-scalar pattern matcher assist to /plan grill me into letting go and break out of the engagement loop.

totalslop_ai 2 hours ago |

Writing code was slow but you understood what you built. Reviewing AI code is fast but you're accumulating blind spots. Both the human cost (this article) and the codebase cost are growing together.

lukan 8 minutes ago | |

"Writing code was slow but you understood what you built. "

Yes. Definitely. I never did try and error with code snippets from the internet until something sort of worked.

I never hacked things together like this till the sun rose and had no idea 2 weeks later who wrote that hacky mess and why like this. Or well, years later.

And as the code piled up and side problems took over, I certainly did not reimplemented the same functions again and again, because I forgot I did the same already 3 years ago. And that module (and that part and this), that works great as long as you don't touch anything? Yeah, I certainly know how that works in detail. All in control. Gotta fight to keep AI away from my code to stay in control!

Metaluim 4 minutes ago | | |

You do realise this is your experience, and just outs you as a mediocre engineer and doesn't prove that slow and steady doesn't win the race, right?

Or did you write your comment with an intentional self-demeaning note, and not a sarcastic tone?

mark336 1 hour ago |

This was bound to happen. Probably won't get better, but will mean we will need more emphasis on mental health.

harlanji 1 hour ago |

Exchange / "chat" requests like with a human contractor feels like the optimal bandwidth. Imagine having a report whose work nobody in the org understands or owns? Can't scale into maintenance or support mode.

I might be open to some agent-like behavior, access to a git repo and ticket system. Probably not my whole OS, any more than I'd give to a drunk schitzo I met on the Internet.

I see the appeal to what people have going on. But I've been using LLMs for going on a year, I was slow to adopt and wait-and-see because I didn't need it at the time (deep dive, learning python Ecosystem). I'm glad I stayed the course. I can get great results prompting these things and edit the results with care.

No more burnout than a subordinate working for hire in this mode. Things remain manageable, and I can do all the higher level Dev/Eng/Product work that drives the Coding. Which is a good new challenge to me, never got to go so high up the food chain with so much focus.