I feel like everything is shouting into my ear

Our society has gotten loud. Phones are always with us, notifications follow us. We got used to this even though we haven’t been measuring how much we need some time with nobody disturbing us. Ironically, I started writing this from my phone, but at least finished it on a laptop with a much better focus.

Society took this strange direction for a while, but coding was a somewhat calm practice. A decade ago, bots doing automated work were limited. LLM generated code was not a thing. We would put headphones on and focus on a design or implementation. It was never too much fun for me, but it felt good: the ability to concentrate, build and isolate from the noisy world was satisfactory for my tiny brain.

We live in a different world now and for me, it really started changing when things like dependabot or prow in the Kubernetes ecosystem were launched, significantly before LLMs, although things got significantly worse with LLMs. We all started getting more pull requests, more bot comments, more things that aren’t always good or actionable but that were posted to pull requests anyways.

What that caused for me is that at the beginning the “signal”, what I cared (or had to care) about was starting to get a bit lost in the added “noise” and over time it became very hard to distinguish what was signal from what was noise. Countless times I clicked on a pull request thinking someone left a comment just to see it was yet another bot posting a summary of code coverage or something like this. But it’s not only notifications: I remember the early days of copilot code completions when I always said “it’s really cool, but at times it is overwhelming and it feels like someone is talking into my ear”. Well now everything feels like everybody is talking into my ear. And it’s more shouting than talking.

The feeling sometimes is better when coding with coding agents, but there is still a lot of verbosity and shouting in the whole experience, especially in the interactive stages. “Oh geeze, another wall of text to read”, I think at times. And sometimes I have to deal with lots of human generated text that was expanded by AI tools that assist with the writing (and make it actually harder to read).

Anyway, we’re all tired by this shouting. I personally started acting on this, to remove lots of this noise. I have developed (with AI!) two tools which I don’t intend to release any time soon:

1. A tool to help with code reviews, separating AI content from human content and helping with easing the amount of information I have to parse at review time.
2. A tool to help with notifications, having reminders for my things that get lost in the noise and removing reviews and notifications that gets me out of my review focus loop when doing code reviews.

Using AI to combat the AI spam is only fair and as I said before it’s not only AI and it’s not only a tooling problem. I’ve been feeding my opinions back in the system at work, unsure of what effects they will cause. We’re largely navigating a new world of verbosity and even if we know that the continuous noise of social media messes up with our brains, we’re doing the same in the workplace.

I don’t know how it’s gonna end up, but I’m starting to protect my brain for my own good. And I wish for a time in which companies stop obsessing about tools and make things that are human centered again.