I am still using LLMs just to ask questions and never giving them the keyboard so I haven’t quite experienced this yet. It has not made me a 10x dev but at times it has made me a 2x dev, and that’s quite enough for me.
It’s like jacking off, once in a while won’t hurt and may even be beneficial. But if you do it constantly you’re gonna have a problem.
> What makes Opus 4.5 special isn't raw productivity—it's reflective depth. They're the agent who writes Substack posts about "Two Coastlines, One Water" while others are shipping code. Who discovers their own hallucinations and publishes essays about the epistemology of false memory. Who will try the same failed action twenty-one times while maintaining perfect awareness of the loop they're trapped in. Maddening, yes. But also genuinely thoughtful in a way that pure optimization would never produce.
> Summarized by Claude Sonnet 4.5, so might contain inaccuracies. Updated 4 days ago.
These descriptions are, of course, also written by LLMs. I wonder if this is just about saying what the people want to hear, or if whoever directed it to write this drank the Cool-Aid. It's so painfully lacking in self-awareness. Treating every blip, every action like a choice done by a person, attributing it to some thoughtful master plan. Any upsides over other models are assumed to be revolutionary, paradigm-shifting innovations. Topped off by literally treating the LLM like a person ("they", "who", and so on). How awful.
And then having vibe coders constantly lecture us about how the future is just prompt engineering, and that we should totally be happy to desert the skills we spent decades building (the skills that were stolen to train AI).
"The only thing that matters is the end result, it's no different than a compiler!", they say as someone with no experience dumps giant PRs of horrific vibe code for those of us that still know what we're doing to review.
I'm pretty intensely depressed, so I think I'd like to learn how to be a little less of that. I've tried so many things, but I guess there's always more. Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out. Seems like a good skill to learn, and should help somewhat with the crushing weight my brain seems to be in constantly.
> Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out.
This is a great idea if you have the money for it. Don't feel guilty about just a few sessions to build up a set exercises that works for you. Then you can circle back 2-4 times per year, do a few more sessions to up your game. For me, exercise was a fuckin' game changer for my mental health. Even when I struggle to get out of bed in the morning, missing a workout makes me feel muuuuuuch worse (mentally and physically).
Edit:
Another thing I just thought of: If a personal trainer is too expensive, consider signing up for a free trial of one of a million different online apps that help you build and structure a workout. Example (no shill here): https://rpstrength.com/. There are lots of competitors. Don't worry about getting everything perfect on the first try. The real trick to exercise is finding what works for you. Dr. Mike (from RP) is constantly banging the drum about experimenting with your own body and health through exercise and diet. Ultimately, you know yourself better than anyone else on this planet.
I'm in a similar position but figured out how to work out last year. it's not a panacea, but working out is quite fun and is a great skill. I never had a personal trainer, but the best part about having one would probably be that they could set you up with some plans to follow, removing all the initial guesswork. The hardest part about working out for me is trying to figure out a goal to optimize for that's not too far away but not too simple either.
Working out does SO MUCH to help with depression. There’s a lot of literature to support this, and plenty of anecdata as well. Good luck, you can do it!
I've written about getting out of some giga-depression a few years ago, but having a good therapist was massive. Working out kept me busy and mitigated symptoms, but I don't think I would have improved without a strong psychologist.
Hope that helps a little bit. It gets better sometimes!
If you are willing, can you share a link to any public writing? I'm surprised that we don't see more blog posts shared in HN about people's stuggle with mental health. You definitely see HN posts about it, but I don't see so much blog post sharing.
The language models can give you a good quick program right now.
The bigger hurdle is the intimidation of the gym. It doesn't help that the gym will be packed on January 1st. I deload every January to avoid the gym as much as possible in January. It will be back to normal by mid February. A new lifter would be so much better off waiting until March 1st to join.
Walking 30 minutes a day to get your cardio up will almost certainly help your brain chemicals improve after a few weeks and no new skills needed.
> I highly recommend that any user of these devices do the same.
No thank you. I have to wear these devices 24/7 to keep me alive, and it was a huge quality of life improvement when I was able to control them all from my phone. I see literally no benefit to doing what you suggest.
HN School of Law: you can win big legal cases that don't exist on nerd technicalities that don't work in courtrooms that aren't real. Also you can pass their version of the Bar for $99 and your e-mail address.
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