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

> We need to keep track of many things happening in parallel...

That your workplace, not "AI era".

> 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.

I'm just so tired of the narrative.

It didn't really bother me during the altcoin/nft scam era, other than from time to time trying to explain at a normie that they were mostly scams, you know the concept that if you want to sell an asset for X you have to find somebody willing to buy.

But at least you could simply ignore all the mentally ill megalomaniacs that were like duude this is the future

This time instead it's so pervasive that you can simply not excape the narrative and simply concentrate on the good stuff about the technology. It's the narrative, the pressure, the whole global situation, not AI in general

Yes, feeling this 100%

In true drinking the kool-aid style, I've attempted to solve this problem with an LLM!

I have a skill which aggregates what I've been working on over the last day (from slack, calendar, mail etc. MCP) and writes a notion journal entry for me. It runs in the evening when I've finished and is ready the next morning when I start. It helps with the context switching - reminding me of deadlines or what I was in the middle of before I left.

> 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.

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.

instead of working 4-5 days per week i work 1-2 intense ones.

rest i use to think

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.

I find the hype exhausting. Especially the pseudo intellectual essays that pop up in my Twitter feed every time I accidentally open the app.

The actual using of AI, though, doesn’t tire me much. But I mostly use it for answering specific types of questions that I’d otherwise need to spend a lot of time researching.

> so my boss does not fire me

That't the key. Not AI.

i didnt realize how much the mechanical act of typing on a keyboard was cognitively load-bearing for me.

that 'dead time' was when my mind was doing background processing, so when i reached another decision point, i was mentally prepared. It wasn't actually dead.

and now, working with agents, i feel much much more tired because that background processing cant happen

> I am pretty sure most of you are experiencing the same as me, but: Have you found ways of using AI without increasing mental overload?

I would recommend you to try using FIM/line completion rather than the agent approach. Using FIM it makes me (feel) productive while still being in control. Oftentimes when writing code for production, documentation etc. the agent approach feels like a wash to me - sometimes it saves time, sometimes it wastes time. With FIM the gain/quality is more consistent.

I don’t think it’s just fatigue, it’s more like emotional exhaustion and depression where everything seems to be going smoothly, but then, in a given moment, you realize that it’s all just complete nonsense.

I hate it and I know it'll get worse

Not personally. What I am tired of is the internet's current approach of treating every discussion (of anything) with pure outrage without considering any nuance.

It's completely destroying genuine conversations about the pros and cons of AI when people will just forever parrot that everything is slop

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...

The AI era just started. So no, but I would like if we weren't in such a capitalist hellscape where you practically have to eat other people to survive. The world now is grim because of who is leading. Stupid, rich sociopaths have worked really hard to make sure democracy doesn't work properly, crying about "fake news" and lying until the fourth estate is dead. We are in an era of criminal leadership more than ever. I am worried that the potential for massive species-level tragedy is building up, and we're not addressing real problems like resource scarcity and human caused mass extinctions and so on. There is a really bad future ahead when our supposed leaders say "drill baby drill", gut institutions doing positive work, go to war, and support genocide.

Yes. Everyone is forcing AI everywhere and nobody uses AI well.

AI is a net negative in terms of mental health.

It also creeps into hobbies, especially video games where it's absolutely ruined the decomp/recomp scene. AI slop recomps are a cancer on what used to be an incredible revolution in coding.

I've been enjoying it, forgive me for torturing an economics metaphor but most of the AI hype has been on the "sell" side, people can create lots of MRs and noise and potential outages. I've been working on the "buy" side building eval frameworks for all steps in our workflow so we can actually measure agent output instead of just saying "look cycle time was cut in half!" while churning out slop.

> I am pretty sure most of you are experiencing the same as me, but: Have you found ways of using AI without increasing mental overload?

Yeah. Quitting before this shit eats me alive. I'm in an EE degree program now. Better three years of study while everyone else gets to deal with the bananaware and the bullshit, and let's see then once the seas have calmed.

Until then, I actively try to avoid engaging with Slop Generator regurgitations and call it out whenever I see someone not disclosing they used a Slop Generator.

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.

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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?

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No, love AI. Greatest thing that ever happened. Very tired of the haters though, they ruin everything.