I like this, and resonate with the same thoughts. I do wonder when it comes to work though if the answer isn’t doing less but maybe breaking through in some way. I don’t know what it looks like but I do have the feeling LLMs are here to stay.
Or maybe it’s just keeping them in the work box - if someone wants to pay me to use LLMs and generate code, so be it. But keeping them away from hobbies, plans, art. Noble maybe, but then again there are a lot of projects I’m unlikely to do if I can’t find some way to make the level of effort required fit in with my lifestyle. With young kids, side project time is so incredibly limited.
Sometimes I feel like the main thing I’m learning from the AI wave is how modern life has a way of becoming more frustrating as more technology enters the picture. There’s all sorts of good in it, sure. But I do feel like so many more people are disgruntled by new tech compared to years past. I don’t think our cave man dopaminergic system is well suited for dealing with the expectations or availability of modern productivity and information.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I was hoping others might relate to this experience in some way.
I wonder about the transcendence take as well. I think a lot of us are strapped into this ride regardless. If there’s a fresh new paradigm awaiting, I hope it’s a good one.
But my main observation is mostly personal: I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. When efficiency isn’t paramount, I’m often not clear on when to take the shortcut versus when to do the work.
> I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.”
Yeah, I think this is the issue more than anything having to do with LLMs. It’s also why I stopped switching to the latest JS library du jour many years ago. The one I had worked fine. I don’t need to learn React because it just came out after learning fourteen other paradigms / frameworks.
> Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress.
Yup.
> If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better.
Agreed.
> But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process.
Disagree, but it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it. Is the interesting part the RE / discovery? Or do you just want to control your car from Home Assistant?
That is, once you’ve RE’d a React native app, you don’t really learn anything new by doing it again. I have no problem with an LLM helping me with that.
But if I want to learn to RE a binary or app? Then I’ll do that!
I'm not sure "keep AI out of hobbies" quite works either. With young kids, reducing the activation energy can be the difference between doing a project and never doing it at all.
One thing I have been doing to avoid the feeling of starting 100 projects and finishing none, is to work on one big ambitious project. That way I don't have a bunch of half finished projects staring at me, each accusing me of abandoning them and competing for my attention. There is always one big project that I return to and continue to invest in.
> Equipped with tools that could theoretically make me a faster, more capable builder, I felt a strong urge to maximize my use of the tools by applying them to the task of… maximizing my use of the tools. It’s reflexive in the worst way, a productivity ouroboros.
I'm cautious on the dependency part too. Do I have a bunch of tools now that help me and wouldn't exist without an agent writing them for me? Sure. Will I be able to fix them once their codebase will eventually need maintenance? Most likely not. So I'll better still have access to some decent model then!
Also, especially in work, it undermines skills and experience you then just lack. That also will only be fine as long as you are doing the work somewhere where they provide/allow use of LLMs.
Not really a requirement, if you did fine without the tools before you would do fine again. The difference is you would know which ones are worth manually maintaining
This post really resonated with me - I’ve been having similar thoughts recently.
That’s why I found the final paragraph to be a bit of a shock - “ More important: it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now.”
What? How? This doesn’t follow from the rest of the post at all. Maybe your new less frenetic and more human scale AI usage would be a good subject for the next post.
I find it interesting that so many of my friends resonate with this. I… don’t, really.
I only ever have 2-4 opencode/claude tabs open at once. And I use them for consistent tasks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep track otherwise. I have an “email reviewer” terminal, and a “doc maker” terminal, and 1-2 “coding” terminals.
But I don’t start a half dozen things simultaneously (which is ironic, because I have ADHD). I don’t feel the need to maximize my efficiency with AI. I also don’t lament the ideas / things I start but don’t finish; that has been my life, lol - see the aforementioned ADHD. So why should I start caring about my half-finished projects now, just because I sunk some tokens into them?
I spent an entire day the other day trying to use an LLM to help me automate something manual and tedious, and it was a failure. Did nothing but waste time in the end. Perhaps it’s those experiences (of which I’ve had plenty) that help me realize the limitations?
I don’t feel like it should make me more productive; it does, because I can offload random tasks that I do not have to be the one to do (“find the function where this happens” or “find all the laundromats in the cities I’m going to”) but I use it for research like that, and not so much “do my taxes for me.”
That’s why I paid a guy to do my taxes. I don’t feel this “need” for sending everything into AI. And just because I can use it to do anything myself… why should I?
There are two caveats:
1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without AI.
2) I find myself using it as a crutch sometimes for simple things like sending a message to a colleague. I don’t like that, and have been trying to avoid it. I’ve spent all my life writing naturally, and I don’t need someone to proofread my chats. That’s a habit I am tossing, in general.
Perhaps it is the ADHD that actually helps me focus; that is, perhaps the coping mechanisms built for managing my countless disparate thoughts also work for managing multiple disparate agents? Just thinking out loud.
I'm in a similar situation is you are, having ADHD, and my observations have been similar. I've been more hestiant to use AI at all for a while at the beginning but even now I only ever use it for one thing at a time. It helps me tremendously with the things I want to have done but not do - find out who clutters my home directory, build a small DMS plugin for local models, stuff like that. But even if I work on a bigger task and idea, it's mostly one thing I use it for at a time.
Maybe you're right in the fact that the coping mechanism help with that. Maybe using LLMs is similar in that it is easy to lose focus for neurotypicals so having lived with that we know how to handle it. Or maybe it's just us, who knows.
I don’t know, there may be something to this. I shared this post with another ADHD friend of mine and he also resonated with your and my experience, not the OP’s.
Now I want to do a study!
I wonder if the extremely fast dopamine hits of LLM use trigger the same sort of dopaminergic response that ADHD does when faced with a stimulus? If so, are we simply better at dealing with those swings, since we’ve literally dealt with them our entire lives?
I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD but this comment hits home. I also struggle to juggle multiple tasks and I’ve had to build a lot of personal strategies to be productive at my job. Otherwise I’d stay scatterbrained and never get anything done.
Things like drawing small defined boundaries, understanding where and how to delegate, and forcing myself to “hyperfocus” on 1-2 tasks at once. My strategy with building revolves around offloading mental context as fast as possible and into sequential, modular pieces. It’s made me a much better systems thinker. However, because of that I also don’t really see the point in running more than 1-2 coding agents at once. Others I work with don’t relate and are trying to parallelize as much as they can.
Part of me is concerned that this way of thinking isn’t compatible with the new wave of agentic SWE and these skills will become outdated. Or maybe it’s actually all converging back and is more valuable than ever.
I honestly think it’s the latter. OP’s post is literally evidence of that. The “open twelve agents” is not only unsustainable (and leads to burnout) but fundamentally incompatible with building robust software. Sure, you can have agents fight it out, but at what mental (and actual cash) cost, and to what benefit?
I have not found myself less productive than my peers, but I have found myself less scattered across a bunch of different things. I do not think this is worse.
Also, consider reading about and/or getting tested for ADHD. You may not have it, of course, but I was diagnosed at 33 and it changed my life. Not because of medication (though I did that for about a year and a half, with success) but for a dozen other reasons, including being able to accept parts of myself rather than fight them, recognize (and reinforce) the coping mechanisms I’d built, recognize the ways in which it made me literally better than other people at certain things (some refer to ADHD being a “superpower” which it can definitely feel like at times), etc.
If you haven’t read Mark Suster’s posts about his experience with ADHD, read them - there are 3. If it resonates, consider talking to someone.
My email is in my profile; I’m happy to chat if you ever want. :)
25 comments
Or maybe it’s just keeping them in the work box - if someone wants to pay me to use LLMs and generate code, so be it. But keeping them away from hobbies, plans, art. Noble maybe, but then again there are a lot of projects I’m unlikely to do if I can’t find some way to make the level of effort required fit in with my lifestyle. With young kids, side project time is so incredibly limited.
Sometimes I feel like the main thing I’m learning from the AI wave is how modern life has a way of becoming more frustrating as more technology enters the picture. There’s all sorts of good in it, sure. But I do feel like so many more people are disgruntled by new tech compared to years past. I don’t think our cave man dopaminergic system is well suited for dealing with the expectations or availability of modern productivity and information.
I wonder about the transcendence take as well. I think a lot of us are strapped into this ride regardless. If there’s a fresh new paradigm awaiting, I hope it’s a good one.
But my main observation is mostly personal: I get taken in a lot by technology waves, hoping things will get better, but I haven’t ever crisply defined “better.” Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress. If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better. But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process. When efficiency isn’t paramount, I’m often not clear on when to take the shortcut versus when to do the work.
Yeah, I think this is the issue more than anything having to do with LLMs. It’s also why I stopped switching to the latest JS library du jour many years ago. The one I had worked fine. I don’t need to learn React because it just came out after learning fourteen other paradigms / frameworks.
> Or my criteria has been too loose and I conflate novelty with progress.
Yup.
> If advanced models eventually accelerate science and medicine so that more people can lead healthy fulfilling lives, that sounds a lot better.
Agreed.
> But if a model helps me use an undocumented API of a random IoT device tomorrow, I don’t think anything is much better, and I didn’t even get much out of the process.
Disagree, but it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it. Is the interesting part the RE / discovery? Or do you just want to control your car from Home Assistant?
That is, once you’ve RE’d a React native app, you don’t really learn anything new by doing it again. I have no problem with an LLM helping me with that.
But if I want to learn to RE a binary or app? Then I’ll do that!
Just because you can doesn’t mean you must, even if everyone else is.
This reflects my impression of working with LLM as well.
More flour more water. More water more flour.
Also, especially in work, it undermines skills and experience you then just lack. That also will only be fine as long as you are doing the work somewhere where they provide/allow use of LLMs.
Not really a requirement, if you did fine without the tools before you would do fine again. The difference is you would know which ones are worth manually maintaining
That’s why I found the final paragraph to be a bit of a shock - “ More important: it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now.”
What? How? This doesn’t follow from the rest of the post at all. Maybe your new less frenetic and more human scale AI usage would be a good subject for the next post.
That was my read, anyway.
That is, stepping away from the laptop is what has given them back some free time and brain space.
I only ever have 2-4 opencode/claude tabs open at once. And I use them for consistent tasks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep track otherwise. I have an “email reviewer” terminal, and a “doc maker” terminal, and 1-2 “coding” terminals.
But I don’t start a half dozen things simultaneously (which is ironic, because I have ADHD). I don’t feel the need to maximize my efficiency with AI. I also don’t lament the ideas / things I start but don’t finish; that has been my life, lol - see the aforementioned ADHD. So why should I start caring about my half-finished projects now, just because I sunk some tokens into them?
I spent an entire day the other day trying to use an LLM to help me automate something manual and tedious, and it was a failure. Did nothing but waste time in the end. Perhaps it’s those experiences (of which I’ve had plenty) that help me realize the limitations?
I don’t feel like it should make me more productive; it does, because I can offload random tasks that I do not have to be the one to do (“find the function where this happens” or “find all the laundromats in the cities I’m going to”) but I use it for research like that, and not so much “do my taxes for me.”
That’s why I paid a guy to do my taxes. I don’t feel this “need” for sending everything into AI. And just because I can use it to do anything myself… why should I?
There are two caveats:
1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without AI.
2) I find myself using it as a crutch sometimes for simple things like sending a message to a colleague. I don’t like that, and have been trying to avoid it. I’ve spent all my life writing naturally, and I don’t need someone to proofread my chats. That’s a habit I am tossing, in general.
Perhaps it is the ADHD that actually helps me focus; that is, perhaps the coping mechanisms built for managing my countless disparate thoughts also work for managing multiple disparate agents? Just thinking out loud.
Maybe you're right in the fact that the coping mechanism help with that. Maybe using LLMs is similar in that it is easy to lose focus for neurotypicals so having lived with that we know how to handle it. Or maybe it's just us, who knows.
Now I want to do a study!
I wonder if the extremely fast dopamine hits of LLM use trigger the same sort of dopaminergic response that ADHD does when faced with a stimulus? If so, are we simply better at dealing with those swings, since we’ve literally dealt with them our entire lives?
Things like drawing small defined boundaries, understanding where and how to delegate, and forcing myself to “hyperfocus” on 1-2 tasks at once. My strategy with building revolves around offloading mental context as fast as possible and into sequential, modular pieces. It’s made me a much better systems thinker. However, because of that I also don’t really see the point in running more than 1-2 coding agents at once. Others I work with don’t relate and are trying to parallelize as much as they can.
Part of me is concerned that this way of thinking isn’t compatible with the new wave of agentic SWE and these skills will become outdated. Or maybe it’s actually all converging back and is more valuable than ever.
I have not found myself less productive than my peers, but I have found myself less scattered across a bunch of different things. I do not think this is worse.
Also, consider reading about and/or getting tested for ADHD. You may not have it, of course, but I was diagnosed at 33 and it changed my life. Not because of medication (though I did that for about a year and a half, with success) but for a dozen other reasons, including being able to accept parts of myself rather than fight them, recognize (and reinforce) the coping mechanisms I’d built, recognize the ways in which it made me literally better than other people at certain things (some refer to ADHD being a “superpower” which it can definitely feel like at times), etc.
If you haven’t read Mark Suster’s posts about his experience with ADHD, read them - there are 3. If it resonates, consider talking to someone.
My email is in my profile; I’m happy to chat if you ever want. :)