I think I have LLM burnout

Nature of LLM burnout

• Many describe a shift from “building things” to “design → prompt → review → babysit,” which feels like managing an unreliable junior or “bullshit artist” at scale.
• Burnout comes less from using LLMs personally and more from reviewing endless AI‑generated code, docs, and plans from others.
• People report cognitive fatigue, zoning out, even mild physical symptoms (dizziness, nausea, “psychic damage”) from reading so much similar LLM prose.

Quality, testing, and verification burden

• Core complaint: generation is cheap; verification is not. Review and QA become the main bottlenecks.
• Some lean heavily on exhaustive tests, strong typing, and end‑to‑end checks to constrain agents, but note that AI‑generated tests can also be wrong, vacuous, or fragile.
• Many say they can’t reliably review LLM code faster than they can write it, unless they accept sloppier quality.

Team dynamics and “slop”

• Common pattern: weak or non‑programmers use LLMs to produce large volumes of barely‑understood code or docs, then offload review to others.
• This “slop at scale” affects senior engineers most, who feel responsible for preventing the codebase or documentation from degrading.
• Some organizations reportedly mandate LLM use and even track token usage, creating perverse incentives to generate more artifacts than can be responsibly checked.

Style fatigue and “botspeak”

• Strong aversion to LLM default tone: hypey, repetitive phrases, emojis, clichés, overuse of certain words, and dense jargon.
• People note that models develop recognizable idiolects; reading them all day feels like “fast food language.”
• Some mitigate this with strict style guides (no emojis, banned phrases, specific voices), but hallucinations and shallow reasoning remain.

Productivity, expectations, and addiction

• Individual output can jump 10–20×, enabling solo devs to ship ambitious projects and many side projects.
• That same boost drives pressure: always “one more task,” always another agent to spin up, difficulty stopping work.
• Several compare this to the industrial revolution or assembly lines: more throughput, but more monotony and higher expectations.

Career and identity

• A substantial contingent says LLM‑centric work has made them question programming as a career or abandon coding as a hobby.
• Those who love the process and craft of programming often feel especially alienated; those who are more product‑focused tend to embrace the tools.