Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?

Hamuko

My boss is demanding me to use AI but hasn’t started demanding me to run parallel agents or anything like that, so I’m managing to keep things under control. Who knows how long it’ll take before they start doing that or just fire me outright. I feel pretty checked out anyway. I do remind myself every day that “it’s just a job” and I shouldn’t care about it. I think I’m more worried about AI ruining my leisure time too and has me check out of life entirely.

allexsendev

I use AI to correct AI :D Yea I know, sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. Claude Web works differently than Claude Code. I use Claude Web/Chat for briefs, general overview of the project outside of code/app, for planning and handing off the work to Code, that includes prompts. Code is tasked to output a detailed view of what it found, run measurements and tests (designed both by me and Chat) and report findings back. That is fed back to Chat and I get a rough summary. Errors are categorized by their blast-radius and so on. Eventually I do a deep dive of what changed, how well it's handling, how much it's struggling, token usage, time spent per review/test and so on. (btw, Code is tasked to run an independent review via contextless agent on the codebase, that easily costs me another 20-30 mins and ~200K tokens on my current project, each run). It still makes architectural issues, tries bandaiding and patching instead of properly designing, overvaluing/devaluing certain cases and misallocating where most of the focus should be, but that's relatively easier to spot and propose a fix for than doing a line by line code review. Codebase quality is ensured through mapping the flow and the output space and having a hard-pinned tests Code can't modify to green its answers, + the independent reviewer I mentioned above. It's not as fun as going in by hand on deep technical problems, sure. But AI usage is less about fun and more about output speed, so use it for what it is for ig? :D

dude250711

> We need to keep track of many things happening in parallel... That your workplace, not "AI era".

ChaitanyaSai

When we get good at something, it results in flow state, but it also means that was mechanizable in a way and now AI is taking that away. So we are always grappling with the new and effortful. And the context switching, jeez. We need entirely new visualizations of work flow that recognizes we are now doing more, and in parallel. Wonder if this is how air traffic control people feel.

elorant

I’m tired of exuberant hardware prices so that companies can shove AI down our throats on subpar products that work way worse than they did before.

rvz

> Although AI lets us do much more, More of what? I see many here using AI to build more of the same things in another language such as rewrites and then claiming that they are "productive", which is the problem of many engineers here. Not that much risk taking if all what everyone is doing is just full blown rewrites and then abandoning it in a couple of months later and just wasting tokens for free. If the result is to vibe code something for free and it makes no money and has no users then it is a waste of time.

fabioborellini

Yes, the worst (or just longest) pieces of slop tire me out. When I leave work I usually cannot read or spell properly. The texts I read in the afternoon make much more sense in the next day. I'm making typos I could never ever imagine making. There's just too much to review and ignore.

RicoElectrico

I am tired, even if I don't use AI too much for my day job designing HW, mostly for disposable scripts if at all. The utter lack of stability in the market, not even 5 years out, is sad. That is even though I have savings to weather the storm and no major liabilities. AI is a boon for learning, but the result will heavily depend on mental capability of the user; having a depression-induced brainrot doesn't help though. And, in the last year clankers have started coming for us EEs. The reality is that many people are more fucked than I am, but I can't stop the bad thoughts.

martypitt

It's weird times. I feel incredibly productive. I'm building in an afternoon what would've taken weeks. I spend all my time in either MR's reviewing code, or a terminal prompting. I've moved from being a coder, to being a product-engineer-architect. I love coding -- LOVE it. But the role has morphed. And, I actually really like the new role. I love being product centric, and caring about architecture -- it suits me wel.. The code Claude produces is often clean, but terribly archictected. So I'm spending a lot of time reviewing in detail. But the anxienty - OMG the anxiety. I work on multple features (generally 4-5 work streams) concurrently, so am constantly context switching. I worry about how much time I'm spending on each task. Am I doing enough code review? Too much? Too little? What about click-through testing? Our test coverage has never been higher - should I be able to just merge these features? Wasn't that always the promise of TDD - merging with confidence? But, it feels like a risk. And, I'm moving really really fast - but I assume my competitors are too. So that drives me to move faster. Automate more. Use claude in more places. Which brings more anxiety - am I cutting too many corners? Is this all gonna crumble on me? Also, is everything I'm working on going to become irrelevant? Will customers buy this product, or vibe code it? Do we even have a moat? Anxiety. More anxiety. My investors are reading stuff constantly too. They're pinging me with market updates, emerging players, shifting landscapes. More anxiety. Also - productivity tools - look - internet influencer X is now producing a gajillion lines of code a second -- are we doing that? Are we token maxing? Are we feature maxing? Are we building the right number of internal tools? Are we automating enough? Should I evaluate the market for this new tool, or just smash something out with claude? More features. Burn more tokens. Ship ship ship. Having to explain to investors why we're not going as fast as those guys, and building enterprise products requires care and dedication -- that takes time. Time I should be shipping, coding, featuring, tokenizing. More anxiety. I'm exhausted. Anyway, gotta go - herdr has pinged me four times during writing this reply. Gotta ship.

victorbuilds

Over 40 here, and I’m having the opposite experience. Honestly, I think experience is part of why. Years of projects teach you what to ignore: which generated code actually needs a careful review, which decisions matter, and when to stop. I don’t run many things in parallel. I’d rather do one thing well than babysit five agents. It also helps that a lot of my AI use is on my own side projects, where I set the pace. That makes it fun instead of draining. Maybe the tiredness has less to do with AI itself and more to do with being pushed to maximize throughput?

phoronixrly

I am tired of the fact that even my hobbies have now been taken over by LLM-wielding imbeciles. Nothing better than going through LLM output your whole work day only to tune in to your favourite community after work to see an absolute idiot throw a slop grenade and refuse to accept that the LLM served him bullshit...

ankurdhama

Remember to take breaks, this is applicable before and after AI.

ccapndave

I use a sort of kanban board so I have a column of the backlog of things to do, a column of tasks agents are actively working on and a column of things that need review. The agents put summaries of what they did in each task and I can write my own comments there too. It’s not perfect, but it definitely helps me with context switching because I can open a task, quickly scan it to see what is going on and then open an agent with the task as its context to continue working on it.

prathje

My entire life, I have found meaning in solving problems with code. With AI, this is no longer competitive. Now I develop more than ever and am more productive than ever, but it still doesn't feel as rewarding. I would like to go back.

philipp-gayret

I think it's a very exciting time and I am enthusiastic about it. What I tried to do is automate as much as possible of that decision-making, guidance and taste. Having said that, it is significantly more context switching, my solution so far is to have agents run longer autonomously, less interruptions is less switching. Prerequisite is that you must build a system first that lets you automate that, which is often very personal; most tools don't particularly apply.

Retr0id

> read enormous amounts of generated text This is something I avoid at all costs. If it's someone else's slop I just won't read it, and if it's "my" slop I prefer to interactively ask questions about it rather than reading a wall of text.

fghorow

I am old enough to be retired -- career spent as a research geophysicist. I have about 2-3 scientific projects/papers/codebases left in me before I go be a hermit in a cave somewhere. LLMs appear to be able help me get through that. I'll take the help. BUT JEEZ! Dealing with "Rain Man"[1] LLMs week-in and week-out is wildly annoying, frustrating, and anger inducing. If they all would just STOP sounding so authoritative when spewing nonsense! [1] After the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie of the same name. "Ah but you know I'm an excellent d̴r̴i̴v̴e̴r̴ programmer."

ghoshbishakh

I am vey tired. I maintain Pinggy - my first bootstrapped startup and building Lumirank , my next one. But every day is a struggle of coping up with what is new and what 20 more competitors that corpped up yesterday are up to. Millions of lines of codes being written every day, I can not merge without knowing the overall architecture and flow. But I can't rest. Everyone is running. Sometimes I feel please someone give me a job where I can work 12 hours a day - but the rest of the 12 hours I don't need to think about what will happen tomorrow.. It will still be less stressful.

ilitirit

I'm just extremely tired of non-technical people trying to tell me how to do my job, what the state-of-the-art is, that I can implement their non-existent specs faster, or that software development is just about the ideas not implementation because we have swarms of clankers available.

jorisboris

I'm building a dashboard for a client. I realised how easy it is for me to build the dash. But how hard it is to sit down for 1 hour, look at the pages, scroll through them as if I am my client, notice inconsistencies, notice where the numbers don't make sense. Sitting down, and actually checking and comparing and thinking were already hard before AI, and they became a lot harder.