[springtimesun]

I am feeling very tired. Since I’ve started working with LLMs my output as a solo dev has easily gone up 20x. I’m closing client projects including ones that previously would have been far too ambitious to take on alone. Long running codebases are getting features that have dragged out for months or been sitting in the planning stages for even longer. And overall quality is way up now with more complete (and honestly better) test coverage.

I’m building personal projects at a prodigious pace. In a role reversal I treat the agents like I’m one of my clients (albeit a more technical one who gives them architectural direction) and they are me. I’m using the apps and tooling they make every day. I’ve cancelled SaaS subs for tools I’ve built myself.

I watch the tool calls and realize I should be better at core command line tools so I have a study plan to catch up (just a little bit a day). I’m revisiting long standing config that I dropped in to vim and tmux way back when I started and didn’t know anything.

I guess in theory I could hold my productivity to previous levels and read more. But it doesn’t feel like that’s possible. It feels like we are in one of those sea changes where the promise is less work, but the reality is increased productivity and expectations (the Industrial Revolution feels like the right parallel to reach for). Increased expectations happen in small ways and large. The agents are so good at polishing data presentations that I always send cleaned up visually impactful reports that would have taken significant time in the past just as a matter of course now.

But, I’m tired. I’ve spent the Fable on subscription window sprinting through as much work as I can before it goes API only. (As an aside, I don’t understand how everyone is using so many tokens. I’m sleeping very little and running as much code as I can through fable and I can barely touch a 20x max plan limit.) I keep telling myself I will slow down when it comes off, now it’s extended to the 12th and my window just reset, a few more days to keep knocking out backlog items. I feel like I have to keep the robots busy overnight so when I wake up I can immediately sit down to review. I give directions to agents on my phone which feels wild to me.

[hraxz]

The industrial revolution made life better at mass scale but it certainly didn't make life better for the hand loom weaver who had previously went from working at home by hand to higher output but working hard all day in a factory.

From the outside, this all sounds like my father who worked as a mechanic at a flour mill.

His job was mostly watching the machine do the work and then fixing the machine when it broke down. 90% of the time it ran fine.

Going from working by hand to watching the machine would seem really boring and I guess I can understand the AI hate on here from that perspective.

[historianistic]

I think people miss something fundamental this argument-by-analysis comparing LLMs to 1770s textile automation

(which why on earth would be applicable? yet this argument is thrown around begging the question [meaning assuming its own validity, begging to be questioned, not suggesting further downstream investigation])

Namely: there was a massive shift from household manufacture in the Indian subcontinent - then home to an estimated quarter of economic activity on earth - to Britain.

Industrialization was about out competing a geopolitical rival of the UK: Mughal India. It succeeded because the Crown adopted policy sabotaging Indian production, not because the capital intensiveness was inherently better. It was merely necessary for England to even aspire to outproduce a country with 20x its own population.

Industrialization was never about the sheer efficiency of the new industrial productive system. That wouldn't have tipped the scales in a matter of one or two decades. In fact, quite the opposite: the incredibly short timescale in this massive geographic shift in economic output necessitated an approach which was costlier, and socially and environmentally damaging.

The machine won out because it was the only way to get the job done. It was a way worse experience for everyone involved. Just look at the British elite's tenure: its 100 years of zenith pale in comparison to the Mughal third of a millennium ride. And now the center of gravity for global industry is shifting back to Asia despite the extremely heavy price paid by Atlantic society and the global environment for the anomaly state which is now waning.

[cpt_sobel]

I have a friend who is a confessed LLM-addict and has told me pretty much everything you mentioned (you might be my friend!), I just have a question I want to ask that I never do to him: Why do you feel the need to churn out so many "personal projects" if they burn you out that much? I think we can all agree on the exhaustiveness of reviewing tons of AI-generated code in our $JOB$ - then why extend this unpleasant situation to your whole day?

[jug]

Addiction due to the dopamine hits of occasional struggle and then churning out apps that work: https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-coding-is-addictive-engineers-are-...

[springtimesun]

I doubt it, but maybe :)

RE personal projects specifically: addiction is an interesting angle. It feels more like anxiety though, that this thing is going to be taken away and this will be a brief and glorious window when I had the means and opportunity to make all the things I wanted, but never had time for. It’s also exhausting to have a bunch of stuff that you want to do piling up for years.

Could just be a personal thing though. I had kids shortly after I started freelancing. I’m the primary caregiver for them and my partner has always worked insanity hours so just keeping our lives together is a full time job. Every billable hour had to be squeezed from a stone. Maybe I’m trying to make up for lost time.

[archagon]

Maybe it's a good thing to only do those things you can find (or make) the time for.

When the rug gets pulled, what are you going to do with this giant pile of unfinished and unmaintained projects?

[bluefirebrand]

> addiction is an interesting angle. It feels more like anxiety though

I would guess that anxiety and withdrawals are very similar

[sph]

So the choice is squeezing every ounce of productivity out of me I didn’t even know I had before, burning myself out faster for likely the same amount of money (I doubt you are earning 20x) and not even having the pleasure of coding but just having to argue with a stupid machine that doesn’t even have the decency to get tired or frustrated, yet always falls short of the mark

OR

just keep coding by hand, thinking things in front of a whiteboard when it gets complicated, burning myself out slowly at a more humane pace as we have done for 50+ years of software engineering.

Why is this even a choice? I mean, serious question, do you people have a little bit of self-respect? I am expecting the excuse of “but my boss expects me to use AI”. It is clear most of you have not experienced true burnout, because it’s going to be a world of pain when it hits. Stop turning yourself into machines. You are not.

[springtimesun]

You’re right I’m not earning 20x more. I recently nearly doubled my rate for new clients and raised existing up by 50%. That’s not enough to offset the efficiency gains in the long run because I will bill fewer hours per client, but right now I’m making more (as said I’m billing a lot of hours). Isn’t that always how it is though with new tech? The power loom operator wasn’t ever going to make 1000x what they made hand looming. A modest increase is I think all workers can expect. The important caveat being only those that survive the destructive reorganization of the field can expect it.

I’m not sure where you work, but I have to compete for every contract (and then to keep them). Hand coding everything isn’t an option anymore or won’t be for much longer. And I don’t even think it’s just freelancers who will be affected. As a solo dev I feel like I’ve been given super powers, but if I worked at a hundred head software house, I’d be looking left and right to see which 30 of us were going to be left when the dust settles.

Not to trivialize your point. I agree we aren’t machines and we should reject being thought of or treated as one. But the reality of software dev IMO has already moved. All reactions are likely over reactions, but I don’t think the swing back is going to land anywhere near where it was.

[globular-toast]

Classic signs of addiction.

[shdh]

How much of that code are you reading

[springtimesun]

For personal projects, it depends on how important they are. My time tracking and invoicing software, all of it. The app that archives and serves my podcast library, none (it’s written in a language I have never worked with).

For client work, a similar split. Simple UI fixes, I give it a scan. A feature that will have to be supported indefinitely, I’ll spend a few days on it making sure I really understand it. It’s not really a fair comparison though because by the time I get to a serious review I’ve already done multiple iterative sessions planning and architecting with the LLM then approved each commit as it has gone in.

I’m conflicted though. For sure I don’t have as good a grasp of my own codebase as I did when I wrote every line. I think I’m ok with that though.