But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.

I noticed this because I use LLMs quite often as a note taker, research assistant and reference collector when I'm doing ideation, domain mapping and knowledge acquisition. In those kinds of sessions, if I issue purely directive instructions, the LLM's output quality will begin to drop quite quickly. And if adopt a tone of conversational engagement, the LLMs output quality remains high. As the article states, this can be a burdensome distraction which creates additional cognitive load. It's basically a non-economic cost to using LLMs in these contexts.

Reading research on this, it's fundamental to the nature of LLMs and can't simply be prompted away or easily fixed in fine-tuning. It's an artifact of attention dilution and contextual satiation. If I include semantic richness, structural variety, domain-specific terminology and explicit reasoning steps, it provides higher-entropy tokens to the model's attention mechanism which shifts the weight calculations toward richer areas of the model's latent space. By ingesting a composite of human's collective linguistic structures, it seems like models inherited some of our quirks and sensitivities too.

This allows me to make more repeatable processes, not be tied down to vendor implementations of workflows and mix and match models for cost and efficacy.

There is nothing that ties you to talking with the text generator black box, and for most of my use cases it’s a negative.

These all seem the same to me? None of them are an "extension of my body"; they're tools I use.

> With LLMs, you mostly just get more of the same: more code, more tests, more excuses.

You get more specs, more plans, more code, more tests. If you're getting excuses, something's wrong.

> Is it worth the social brainwork?

There isn't any social brainwork. I'm using natural language to build things, not engaging in social discourse.

> LLMs ask us to talk to them, but rarely reward that effort in kind.

Nor should they! They're not people, but they're designed to reach goals. If you set a goal (explicitly or implicitly) that you want a social conversation, they'll try to satisfy (and do poorly).

I still say "please" and "thank you" frequently, but I'm starting to embrace the fact that the LLM doesn't care about grunt work, doesn't care about rework, doesn't care about nitpicking, doesn't have a preference in general. It needs very little more than for me to be completely clear in my instructions.

I think we are still on the early days of LLMs. Right now, using them productively requires deliberate thought and an acute knowledge of their limitations. As the author says, it’s easy to get angry at a model, or to foolishly let it nudge you towards more code and more tests — even when that is suboptimal.

To a certain extent, models keep getting better and better at discerning our intentions and providing value. Yet I am not sure whether we will reach a point where using them successfully no longer causes the kind of fatigue that it does today.

There's no one around me who does programming. There are hardly any programmers in my town.

The upside is that most programming-related tasks in my town end up going through me. The downside is that there's not much work to begin with, and I can't talk about the things I'm actually interested in.

I'd like to stay in touch with friends who are interested in programming or academia, but since I didn't go to a good university, it seems like I haven't had much of a connection with them

The way I have worked so far is to look for ways I can influence the model's "thinking" and then add that to my main AGENTS.md. I try to steer it towards a thought process that mirrors or exceeds my own. I find it a fun challenge. I think this stuff becomes less necessary in a year or so as these sorts of tweaks become part of the shipped product from the model makers.

Oh, the horror, having to type to a system that will do your job for you while you sit in an air conditioned office in a comfortable chair listening to a podcast while you work.

so I don't get exhausted. If you write complete sentences and say please to the clankers, you're definitely gonna waste energy.

I agree they are too slow though, especially when they "Think" for so long and then say "something went wrong" after 30s.

LLM: "I've just refactored your code base. Would you like me to also fully document it?"

op: "you're so needy!!!"

Might be a subjective opinion, but this is how writing code always felt to me, even pre-LLMs. An ongoing inner conversation where I try to convince the text on the screen to match the text in my head. It never really felt like tool use in the sense of manual labor.

https://lobste.rs/s/csgzki/exhaustion_talking_tool

As an aside, it's nice to see that Lobsters has remained a quiet success. As much as I love HN and the work Dan's done to keep it how it is, I welcome to variety. There are vanishingly few places for polite and earnest discussion online these days.

Introverts are first line of serious addicts.

ADHD developers are next.

Procrastinators are after that.

It's the opposite. Many people find it exhausting to interact with humans, and do so only because they are required to.

Humans often don't understand what you are saying or asking, and they may not know exactly what steps they need to take to find the answer. They get tired. They might get their pride hurt. They might get angry or frustrated. They might judge you because your question is silly or just wrong.

LLMs, for all their faults, have none of these issues. I'm not saying I'd rather talk to LLMs all day every day, but when trying to get shit done, they really can be the superior coworker, especially if you're an introvert and suffer from social-battery-drainage issues.