LLM Whiplash

Work piles up and you feel overwhelmed. You’ve augmented your capabilities with LLMs which allows you to move faster; however, every action has an equal and opposite reaction: When you’re flying at 5x speed, the wall comes at you five times faster.

The other week I managed to smash out a bunch of work. Features were flowing and the work was scoped well. But as soon as things didn’t quite go to plan; as soon as a task required manual supervision and hand-holding the entire pipeline halted. Suddenly, I was back to my original speed, but without the mental momentum to sustain it. It’s a jarring feeling I wasn’t prepared for, and it left me depleted.

So how do you stay a “5x engineer” without hitting these walls? Should we just work fewer days? Am I just using my brain for harder problems now?

I wonder if those simple, flow-state coding tasks were actually good for us; easy wins that kept our state of mind balanced. If LLM agents take over the “easy” stuff, are we just left with a workday consisting of higher intensity mental load tasks?

I clearly have a lot of questions that can only be answered with time.