We should be more tired than the model

Posted by tosh 3 hours ago

We should be more tired than the model(vickiboykis.com)

75 points | 73 commentspage 2

yondys 3 hours ago|

Lately I've been thinking about this a lot. I've slightly shifted my use of Claude from implementing tool to scaffold generator for me to actually do the hard parts. It's frustrating at first, because the impulse always is "I could get Claude to do this in minutes", but that's just the brain trying to spare some energy.

I've found that it's much more rewarding to use LLMs as an aid to deep work instead of a substitute for it, and it's even helped me feel more optimistic about my place in this field after a couple of days of getting used to the mental friction again.

the_other 2 hours ago|

This sounds like something I'd enjoy. Do you have a blog post or guide on your approach?

tolerance 2 hours ago||

Not a programmer, but I'm beginning to discover a rhythm similar to the author's that doesn't save time and effort as much as it fragments and redistributes them both.

Being conscious of what type of memory you're working in (or need to engage) may be the trick to building rhythm or flow, or whatever. Depending on the case the LLM may not even be necessary. Use something else.

The trap could be in trying to depend on and work with a model the same way we would work by ourselves, as the author describes, letting every type of memory unconsciously operate.

helloplanets 3 hours ago||

> particularly because its UX affordances are reminiscent of a slot machine’s: you pull the lever, you get a reward (a solution to your coding problem.)

I hope the field moves out of the TUI with prompt + pull the lever paradigm soon‚ when it comes to agentic programming. And the Markdown paradigm too, tbh.

There hasn't been anything that really sticks yet for a shift to happen.

trklausss 3 hours ago||

This is how I treated LLMs from the beginning, maybe because of my impostor syndrome of not knowing if my understanding of _anything_ is correct, and going down the rabbit hole of the concepts that are presented there...

Now the question to the round: in your opinion, are LLMs ok to learn in this way? At least on the theoretical side of things?

yondys 2 hours ago|

Not the author, but one way you could mitigate some of the LLMs problems while learning (authoritatively stating wrong facts, reward hacking, ...) is to have it give you testable code exercises to teach you facts. So you can get the benefits of the LLM AND deterministically verify its claims. I've been trying this lately and recovering some of the lost joy of learning CS nowadays.

cautiouscat 3 hours ago||

I agree with the article, though I will say with an agentic workflow I feel more tired at the end of it than I would doing it by hand. Maybe it’s the constant reading and digging in the generated code, or the constant context switching while waiting for it to think/generate. Or it’s both.

mock-possum 2 hours ago|

I’ve been noticing the same thing. I’m getting roughly 2-3x more done, but I’m also at least 1.5x more exhausted at the end of the day.

wolttam 2 hours ago||

“Using the agent after trying for 20 minutes”

This made me chuckle a bit.

There’s no point in fooling ourselves about our own skill retention if this is the case.

sixtyj 2 hours ago||

OP’s approach is one in a thousand.

Imho most of professional coders trade their time for oblivion.

The problem is that you really don’t remember anything about the code. It is not your creation.

It’s like a monkey in front of a slot machine, just pulling the lever and waiting to see if it hits the jackpot.

At the end of the day, it remembers that it pulled the lever. And how many times it won :)

Agentic-based coding with /goal and multiple agents coding together is another level…

But the issue remain imho - if there is an error, who is going to repair it?

coldtea 2 hours ago|

>The problem is that you really don’t remember anything about the code. It is not your creation.

The next problem is few care about that, at any level: coders, managers, execs. Just want their feature churn.

The even worse problem (or maybe, a positive) is that most of that code and the products powered by it aren't needed either.

dweekly 2 hours ago||

For human in the loop to be effective, the human needs to actually be performing some substantive action, giving real guidance and critique and pushback. If the human only ever accepts the default plans then not only is there no understanding but the agent should learn to stop asking. It is not learning anything from the human, after all.

One thing that I look at is pushback rate: what percentage of the agent's proposals are rejected or critiqued? If it's below 5% I have found I have gotten too credulous and I am no longer closely following. Danger! If it's above 50%, I have clearly not given the agents sufficient context to perform the task and need to update my harness and instructions.

Who watches the watchers? I can imagine a guard dog process that halts the session to yell at the human if it detects complacency: if the human is providing too few tokens per minute of new context relevant to the task.

zawaideh 3 hours ago||

All of these posts are a replay of what Marx wrote about machinery and alienation from work and intensification of the workday.

fny 1 hour ago|

I encourage you to crack open a dependency tree for any project and ask: how many of these do I understand? Then open one and ask: do you really understand whats happening? How much of the code there do you even use?

The experience will feel uncannily similar to AI generated code. So treat slop the same way. Give it a good, well tested API, and file an issue or PR when something breaks.

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