Giving yourself time to be idle and let a problem marinate is often where the breakthroughs and good ideas come from. If taste and human judgment are what separate useful AI output from slop, we need to give our brains time to cook instead of constantly bouncing between agents.
We need No AI Hours everyday. We need this kind of time every day to clear our minds, reflect on what AI has brought us, and consider whether it's necessary to address the issue of technical debt.
100%. Making it a whole day makes it easier to sell and stick to, that's it. It's just brutal to have a whole day when you need to focus and not just mindlessly prompt.
I just cleaned my cats litter box and that was cooler than AI.
I have no idea how people can spend 40 hours a week interacting with those sycophantic random number generators, its like having the most annoying linkedin influencer you can imagine DM'ing you all day.
I would actually really recommend people who are using coding agents full time to make AI brakes for your weekend projects. Think of it like a small break to take the time to reconnect to the code and keep your brain muscles intact, a bit like a professional cyclist going for a casual ride in the forest to experience what they don’t experience anymore in their professional life.
I see where you're coming from, but I can't help being reminded of my youth when teachers would admonish me "YoU wOn'T aLwaAYs haVe A CalCulator in yOuR poCKet!"
Now the entire world has a calculator in their pocket, and all that wrote memorization not only made me hate math as a child, it was a giant waste of time.
I suspect that one day we'll look back on advice like no-AI Fridays exactly as modern readers would react to "Punch-card only Tuesdays" in a modern enterprise.
More like: take some time without your phone. Something I assume everybody here would agree is a sane thing to do.
Not using a calculator as a kid for math is pretty important, because the goal is to develop intuition. Same for software, playing music, learning a language. You have to keep some level of friction to develop and keep your intuition
> Now the entire world has a calculator in their pocket, and all that wrote memorization not only made me hate math as a child, it was a giant waste of time.
I dunno, I think this example kind of works in the opposite direction. If we're talking about memorising tables of logarithms or something, then yeah that was a complete waste of time. But a lot of the stuff kids would like to skip because calculators can do it is the absolute basics. IMO it is still important to have a solid grasp of arithmetic, useful to have enough trigonometry that you intuitively understand where it can be useful, and so on. (Much more so if you want to leave open the possibility of studying further mathematics.) And for people to whom these things don't come naturally, you really need to drill it a bit in order to develop the conceptual understanding.
I don't know exactly where this does and doesn't apply to programming/CS, though. I would like to think that a lot of the fundamentals will remain useful, but maybe that will only be true for a few specialised workers and self-motivated hobbyists.
How much rote memorization did it take to harm you? the addition of 1 digit numbers is kind of mandatory to function in everyday life, the multiplication table is at most (8*9)/2 36 facts.
hah. try go hiking for couple days in mountains. no cellular, no charging, flaky gps, vhf/uhf radio don't work and your only hope is that you are prepared enough to survive getting out of there .
I don't even about sailing 100+nm off shore.
people assume every point of earth is somewhy equivalent to their porch.
Not entirely sure what point you're trying to make, so maybe this is not relevant to it, but, in 2026, satellite emergency support makes it seem irresponsible to not take your iPhone if you value your life or have other people in your life who would miss you if you were gone.
in 2023 I had a pretty nice night ~4km from a town in Montenegro. I could even see it from the mountain I was at and still had to sleep under a bush because I was not prepared enough. Thanks to thousands years of history they have ancient outlets for mountain springs so you can have drinkable water in most unexpected places while walking down from a misadventure.
Imagine that happening ~20km off civilization. Unprepared one will just die, iphone+satellites or no.
How many hours of very intentional travel did it take you to find someplace on earth where you could find yourself in that situation?
I have no intention of doing that. I'm not an explorer. I don't own a boat that is both big enough to travel that far, but small enough not to have satellite internet. I own approximately zero pith helmets and know zero sherpas.
As someone who has made a career by having unique insights into solutions for software problems, I can confidently says it's not the same as the calculator. AI is bad at gathering context from an in-person customer meeting, linking their experience to fundamental structural problem with the data model and formulating a solution. You know how you know to make that insight? You have to have read and internalized the code. The easiest way to do that is by having written it yourself by hand or direct instruction to the AI. This exact scenario has played out for me more times than I can count, and it's why I find so little value in using AI.
I find it interesting when people say, “I need time away from the AI to think.” I use AI for development but I would not say I’ve offloaded my thinking to AI. AI is great for pushing text but I haven’t found its system design skills to be that good.
To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
I felt the same until I actually tried to stop for a week or so. And I could feel the constant temptation and anxiety of not having the coding agents as a sort of safety net. Taking a clean brake made me realize how much I was losing my skills and connection to the actual implementation, not just the high level pieces of it. I also didn’t realize at the time how much of my design thinking is done while working on code, and all the constant small decisions that are actually impactful
Oh man, I help host a monthly AI meetup called AI Friday: https://aifri.day
My heart sank when I saw this post. I thought we’d created enemies!
No conflict here, though. An important part of using AI well is learning when not to use it.
A few weeks ago, I realized that with all these agents running and all the things I could be working on, I was spending my days managing shallow pings instead of going deep.
I have AI agents managing SEO and ad spend. I used to spend a little time every day reading what each had to say. Now each gives me one detailed report per week, with links to the underlying reports and specific things I need to look at. I block 90 minutes for each one, on different days, and use that time to read, think, and decide what to do next. It’s helped a lot.
Great initiative. I was expecting something like this to happen. I think a good addition to the website can be success stories people share from this approach. Sending a link this to a manager is not very convincing, but managers respond very well to social proof.
At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken.
Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their own professors) who can't answer the most basic of questions that I would have expected of sometimes even first year CS students in the days before AI was a thing, which is why I encourage them to build projects without it.
Personally, I'm starting to think that in university and education systems, all projects should now be done in class and in computer labs/monitored study halls because we can't trust anyone to not use AI anymore.
I got out of tech about 5 years ago, before AI really took off. I still do a lot of personal projects and now never use AI. I tried it a bit (only free plans) but noticed how much it caused me to no longer be able to think through a solution myself. I thought I was learning a lot from it but for some reason whatever I learned from it didn't stick. So now I'm no longer using it at all. I do realize that this is very specific to my situation of course.
I really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think".
I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying.
I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc).
With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month.
I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time.
I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods.
I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done.
2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie.
I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators.
I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.
Big difference is when you use a calculator or other tools, you still have to interpret and know what to enter.
With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that.
We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator.
AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it.
In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
I appreciate your reply and framing, but it strikes me as a spirited opposition to delegation. Or at least a strong assertion that AI use is similar to managing an organization.
The reins metaphor is also interesting and cuts both ways: riders don’t expect to do the walking themselves, and setting direction is not the same as doing (even understanding, or being able to do) the work.
> Hear hear. I do not understand the people who bemoan the loss of slide rules and books of trig tables in the era of graphing calculators.
Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox?
Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother?
I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place.
Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning.
When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement.
What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement?
A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK.
What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down-
- Widget sales report
Why?
- To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing
Why?
- So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way?
Why?
- So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society
Why?
- So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit
Etc...
OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals?
The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling thay you get from cooperating and competing with other people.
When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.
I believe you. I'm just telling my own personal experience. What works for you doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? But also: I'm purely doing things for my own pleasure now, so whatever I enjoy more is what I'm free to do. Again though, that's just me.
I would absolutely believe people on the spectrum with hyperfocus-oriented ADHD (such as myself) might knock things out of the park with coding agents while everyone else is befuddled by their bizarre behavior. But then, I don't get the slow pace and fake drama of reality TV and professional wrestling, yet so many others do. Similarly, starting with British serial dramas like Survivors and Blake's Seven in the 80s, I really enjoy serialized dramas with an intricately constructed world. We are not all alike inside IMO, but that's 100% a good thing too.
"When you have ADHD, the problem isn’t that you lack attention, it’s that you struggle to control your attention — to put your attention where you want it to go rather than having it go where it wants to go. Hyperfocus is a natural consequence of that lack of control."
Lived it. Made it work for me professionally in the end. Do not not need pointy hair edicts telling me how to do career development.
As odd as it sounds this is correct. Hyper focus is a huge problem with ADHD. You forget to eat and get worse sleep because you're so focused on 1 problem.
This often means that you pay attention to nothing else around you or what's actually important which is where the deficit is.
Sounds like you're just defining ADHD to mean whatever you want it to mean. Thankfully we didn't have TikTok to diagnose hyperfocusers like Einstein with a brain disease, or we never would have got general relativity.
I highly suggest you read about the subject. This isn't the fringe science you're implying. It's a big reason I was diagnosed by my doctor. And it's often treated quite well by taking ADHD medications.
“While the estimated 8 million adults in the USA affected by attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might find it nearly impossible to sit still in a lecture hall or excruciatingly challenging to focus on writing a term paper, these same individuals might find themselves spending hours at a time composing a new song, tinkering with their car, writing computer code, or watching television (Kessler et al., 2006). The term “hyperfocus” (HF) has been used to characterize this state of heightened, focused attention that individuals with ADHD frequently report (Brown, 2005; Conner, 1994; Ozel-Kizil et al., 2016).”[1]
This isn't UGC. I know a lot of studios from my filmmaking and 30% of my customers are spending thousands of dollars a month. It's got really good word of mouth and 89% M3 retention.
There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft.
It's also completely open source (the desktop app and the server).
There's another variant of ArtCraft that works with other subscriptions (Runway, Higgs, OpenArt, Comfy, etc.) that I'm testing with some artists: https://artcraftx.com
Artists are fine tuning their own workflows on top of my own source software and then sharing their variants of ArtCraft.
I'm building OpenSourceRouter.com (soon) that will be an open source OpenRouter/FAL/RunPod/Featherless fine tunes. It already powers ArtCraft and is 90% complete to launch. Maybe in the future compute will be fully portable and you can just login to services with compute.
I'm also building a collaborative space for AI artists to share workflows, refs, fine tunes, network, and collaboratively build. This side of the business is already here and growing and I haven't built the infra for it yet. It's currently in Discord and an assortment of other places.
I'm going to make ArtCraft work with local models too. Comfy is not comfortable, and an all-rust/native, heavily opinionated product with lots of love from filmmakers and artists can do a better job than node graphs IMO.
I really care about these tools and I'm doing all of this from a place of passion. I'm not a mercenary trying to get rich quick. I'm here for the mission of empowering artists (and I count myself - this is a tool for me.)
It's growing really fast and I'm talking to bigger and bigger folks. It's kind of wild.
"Soul-less slop for people who don't understand art nor craft".
Cutting corners no doubt has appeal to some people in the industry making things, but this says nothing about the appeal to audiences that are supposedly going to want to pay to watch entire movies containing this nonsense. The end result shown in this video and on your website https://getartcraft.com/ just doesn't look good, at all.
> There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft.
Which ones? Like the internet itself, if movies start filling up with more and more slop, it's just going to be another instance of enshitification.
Yes, *you* are able to leverage your previous expertise *that you spent years accumulating with your own mind* to productivitymaxx to the extreme and work on all the things. AI is awesome for people who know what they're doing. This is well-documented.
What is _also_ true is that people think less to a lot less when they defer work to AI. For those who are getting into this industry or learning new things (i.e. the people that you will eventually NOT hire for your growing business that you MIGHT have hired in the past), that is an absolutely terrible thing to have happen. This is _also_ well documented. Your success does not refute that.
You were probably exposed to a wide range of art, music, culture and ideas growing up.
I think there is a whole generation of people who were so culturally starved during their formative years they can only see a blank canvas as a useless white square.
"Who is going to buy a painting of a white square?"
Others have already talked to you about the significance of your anecdata and your faintly dismissive tone, but there's something else in your comment that tickled me and that no one addressed:
> 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
Who do you think was responsible for that dystopia? It wasn't those people you mentioned, who built the 70% of the old internet. The enshittification started when the people whose passion in life is to make money caught the scent of money-making potential the internet had.
But then, how did those people actually accomplish the enshittification we're dealing with now? The answer is: with the enthusiastic help of the True Believers. Crypto is the best example. Just recall how many devs were convinced that the blockchain was going to revolutionize everything. And I mean devs. Not snake-oil peddlers in suits, not LinkedIn influencers, none of the usual posse of posers, but people who actually wrote code and were reasonably good at that.
And that's not the only example, just the best one. I've been there myself. Back when OOP, UML, capital-A Agile, CMMi, and MDA (Model Driven Architecture) were the Hot New Thing, I was one of the True Believers, following the trends and proselytizing my colleagues.
Every bit of the dystopia you lament was pushed by the combination of ambitious MBAs and True Believer devs.
And the reason I bring this up is because you're one of those True Believers now. It's easy to fall into that trap. All you need is to have enough good experiences with the Hot New Thing to suppress your critical thinking and believe that this will Make Everything Great Again.
The same kind of people who profited off the tech dystopia you saw are now ushering a new, worse tech dystopia that you're turning a blind eye to. Your belief that this new tech will somehow balance and even counteract what those people did to the internet you loved is not based in facts. It's faith.
Difference between taking your own notes and skimming someone else's.
I have found in the last year I "get more done" but I learn less. Whats even worse is if I burn though my token quota I am less likely(and less able) to "switch to manual". LLMs make an ocean of decisions and assumptions very quickly and if you don't slow it down very intentionally (and lose the promise of the AI providers are pitching) you will quickly not have a good idea of how systems work.
There was a well known phenomenon people called ‘tutorial hell’ where when learning to program you could understand all the code from tutorials, but when it came time to actually create your own solutions for stuff you got stuck. I think AI is basically enabling eternal tutorial hell, you never actually need to break out of it anymore.
This has happened to me with Rust. I read the book, did the interactive tutorials and then started on a small project and couldn’t really code anything!
This is familiar territory for me as I prefer to do a breadth first survey of something I’m trying to learn before digging in to an actual project with depth to make all the mistakes and blunders that make you actually good at something.
AI can still be a huge help here. I don’t really use AI to write the actual code. I will be tooting along, in the flow state, and then bang off a question or request like “how would you write this block of code” “how does this API work?”, and then just take what it says under advisement.
I find as soon as I start accepting what the AI says without critical thinking or just hitting the “apply block” button, it’s time to take a break. I use CoPilot and I barely touch 40% token spend per month and to me it’s the best way to work, I am always engaged, have a full mental model of what I’m working on, and have someone pushing back and criticizing what I’m writing. This gets you out of tutorial hell, but keeps you motivated because you’re not always staring at a blank code window wondering where to start.
I've been doing this on my latest personal project. What I've realised I missed the most is feeling in the zone or in a "flow" state as some call it. It really feels amazing. Coding agents take that away from you. I really think we need some coding agent implementation which takes less agency away from programmers and helps people be in the flow even more.
For my project I use Gemini/Google's AI mode to great effect. Quick answers to be reminded about syntax, and to get help when stuck. It actually enhances the flow state. Plus it's all free.
I don't think it has to do with sound. Some sounds can disrupt it, of course. I can work well in a noisy cafe as long as I'm not listening to any particular conversation. Although oftentimes, if I'm alone, I talk to myself out loud while I'm coding ("no, not that, it should go here... where's that header? stupid typo...")
We used to call it "seeing through the code". The moment when you're no longer looking at text on a page, you're seeing what it does as you scroll through it.
What you need most, to get to that place, is to simply spend a lot of time writing and reading code until it becomes second nature. Something like 10,000 hours.
Once you've done that, reading an LLM's code is trivial. But letting it write most of the code, without reviewing it line by line, causes rapid brain atrophy. Because to really be in the zone, you need to keep everything relevant in your head. Which means it has to be in there in the first place.
That makes sense. I wonder how much the sound itself matters versus it simply becoming part of the ritual that tells your brain "now we’re working"
I used to listen to classical music, rap or hip hop, but lately I’ve moved toward those long focus playlists on YouTube and things like Brain.fm. They seem to help me, so I was curious whether other people deliberately use something to get into that state or whether it just happens through the work itself.
the flow state isn't something that is triggered by music. It can help maybe, but it's not a pre-requisite.
It's something common to a lot of creative fields, that moment where u enter a sort of hyper-focused state where the line between you and the code blurs and you operate at peak efficiency.
It quite literally feels like overclocking your brain. I miss it a lot.
You don’t need to use anything. You just need to enjoy what you are doing. This is often related to dopamine. Being in flow state for hours on end while programming is bliss and fun for me.
If you don’t enjoy programming keep trying, have the language or api docs open and do not use generative AI. Generative AI just gets you outcomes. An artist paints because they like painting, not because they like a pile of painted pictures.
I’m not a programmer, life choices took me in another direction, but I’m starting to understand the addictive part of building things and immediately seeing them come to life.
With AI coding it suddenly feels like there are so many possibilities. My biggest problem now is almost the opposite: trying not to chase every idea and keeping myself focused on building one thing. There’s definitely a dopamine hit in seeing visible progress regularly :)
Eh, experiences will vary. For me, my zone is conducting things, not typing. Firing something off in twelve tabs and coming back later is precisely how my brain works.
> Firing something off in twelve tabs and coming back later
As someone who gets "in the zone" like the person you're replying to, I just don't get how this could possibly be the same thing. "Coming back later" doesn't make any sense when you're in that state. Stopping and waiting is a killer. You're just constantly doing things without necessarily consciously thinking about it.
Do you mean you're switching continually between the twelve sessions? Or literally "coming back" in a different sort of operating mode?
The closest thing to it for me using AI tools is specifically not running multiple "agents" but making targeted changes over and over and over but with a 10x+ increase in typing-vs-change ratio. (This also rules out things like Opus let alone Fable as they're just too slow and do too much at once.)
You mentioned "coming back later" but being in the zone. That's the part I want to understand. So this metaphor isn't helping cause the conductor is constantly working, constantly seeing the output. Not coming back later.
Based on what you’re describing as “your zone”, I would assume you have never experienced the flow state others are talking about. Flow state comes with long stretches of deep, focused work, without context switches or interruptions. This is fundamentally incompatible with what you’re claiming to be “your zone”.
Before AI, the only way I could get in the flow was by isolating myself from everything to avoid direct distractions (phone, emails, IM...) or indirect (having something else on my mind).
It was something I was able to achieve only a few times a year.
It did felt incredible.
As soon I was getting stuck on something tedious, I had to resort to a web search and it broke the flow.
With AI, I can achieve this state every weekend for personal projects, and every day I'm WFH or when I'm alone in my corner of the office.
I start with a list of goals/tasks, put X agents at work (I prefer working on multiple projects in parallel, with only one task per project) and while they're doing their stuff, I'm thinking about the next steps, filling the backlog, catching issues needing rework...
I don't get stuck: either the agent we'll offer a workaround, or I'll push it in the backlog.
Most often, the solution comes to me while I'm not in front of my computer.
I can focus on the big picture, the actual problems that I'm trying to solve.
Yesterday I did exactly this: started at 8am, leaving my desk just to fill my water bottle or empty my bladder... and it's only because a friend came to my place at 8pm that I stopped. I thought I was at it for only two hours...
I hate how this comment can make me look as an AI preacher; but I'm not trying to convince anyone to stop doing anything they're doing because I found the ultimate solution. No.
I'm just describing how I'm enjoying _doing stuff_ on the computer more than I ever did in the ~30 years I've been doing it.
For my personal “project” I’ve been using chatgpt to teach me from math (linear algebra) to quantum computing - asked it to create a big list of prompts optimal for single threads, for me to learn with Socratic method.
I plan to write my notes as a blog for each thread in my own words.
I think this is a good use of AI for personal goals, it’s the best learning experience for me so far. I’ve never been able to focus on lecture videos
In my experience, students were actually pretty good about understanding this for themselves, at least in a security course I ran a survey in[0]. Unfortunately I didn’t get a statistically significant sample size (10/~60).
Another caveat is this was a graduate course, so I would expect more maturity and integrity on average than an undergrad course. But anecdotally I thought it was an interesting result.
That reminds me of "coding" in my Roaring Spring No.20165. Which is to say, my notebook. It was great for when I didn't have access to a computer. I remember the feeling of how cool it looked along side cartoons of monsters and cars crashing into the paper's edge.
After many decades of coding, probably 1M+ LOC, for real, I am purposely doing most of my work through coding agents to understand their capabilities. No stupid demand that I take a day off from AI is remotely helpful here.
But broadly:
1. AI gets you to that MVP 80% dopamine rush and then takes all that dopamine away if you lean into doing the last 20% with it. But if you try to do the last 20% yourself, you will experience the joy of agentic coding style and you will lose the ability to even produce dopamine. I use these things to build PoCs, not products.
2. The haters mostly have no idea how amazing getting to that 80% really is as a technological achievement and they are mostly stuck at Stochastic Parrot. And 3 days of the ungimped Fable demonstrated to me most of that remaining 20% is achievable, but not with gimping and/or production optimizations by the frontier labs.
3. If you want to see the promise and the limits of coding agents, you have to try to build something with them. But if you hate AI, you've already made up your mind and no amount of evidence will sway you, so don't bother.
4. These things are hideously power inefficient. And Moore's Law is out of steam. While we could stand up renewable and nuclear to power this, there are factions that hate one or the other more than they hate AI so good luck with that.
5. The San Francisco AGI cult is 100% unhelpful and the C-suite linkedin lunatics who take them seriously are even worse.
I'm reading a book written in the 90s but set in the 1980s where one of the assertions was that America is incompatible with technocracy. Prophetic methinks.
I don't think this is true at all. If you don't have AI then either you build what you need to build and learn how to do it along the way, or you build nothing and learn nothing. There is no option to build something but learn nothing, but that's the default outcome with AI. To learn how to build something AI built for you, you need to build it again on your own, which I dare say very few AI users are doing for nontrivial projects.
Universities are the type of place you would automatically expect to teach the fundamentals. They do it in every other subject. You should have "coding like a caveman" back to back with "coding like a spaceman". You can make the hand coded class have two 1.5hr in-person labs each week. With an AI class along side of it. Don't wait on either skill, both need to start freshman year.
First year AI is teach assistive coding using llms with open source models. Setup a workbench llm for each student to have with an openweight model on it. Teach different ways of getting good results and go over setting up the whole environment yourself.
The next year do a 4hr lab in a lab room with office chairs, variable height desks, and model it off an open office. No special dress code, but name tags and people will talk to each other with the openness of dialog at a good workplace. This even gives the TA usable experience. You could introduce different structures with leads or co-equals or any useful team structure.
People need to be taught in-person working skills because companies don't want to hire people without experience. This also helps someone be able to interview for a work from home job.
My old workplace did the opposite: we had All AI Fridays where you had carte blanche to build out AI tooling or just work on AI stuff as long as it's vaguely related to your job.
"Not too much AI" or "Just enough AI" also, if you feel the need for a No AI Friday it could mean you also need to just use less AI, or try to only use it for the correct things so you don't lose visibility, for example don't let it make decisions for you, have it present the decisions.
Choosing from a set of decisions the agent presents you might feel like you are making a decision, but you’ll never make the one that wasn’t presented.
seeing the decision point is exactly what allows you to prevent bad foundational decisions, you are of course able to see beyond any pre-canned choices
I’m not going to go that far (you do you), but reading the source code seems like a great way to remain in touch with the implementation. On my hobby project, I do a lot of reading code, asking the AI pointed questions about how things work, and asking it to clean up messes.
So you’re left with the least interesting tasks? Not trying to be too snarky, or too much of a luddite, but that would be a killer for me, motivationally.
Maybe we just disagree about what's fun? Some people like to build things by hand and other people enjoy working with power tools.
I'm having a great time building personal web apps with exactly the features I want, and I also enjoy refactoring the source code to get closer to how I would ideally write it. I can use a coding agent to do both. What's not to like?
I stopped editing source code by hand as a self-imposed limitation to see how far I could go by prodding AI to do things my way, and it turns out it's pretty far, so I'm sticking with it.
Which isn't to say that writing code by hand can't be fun, too, under the right circumstances.
This will be the pattern only the "privileged" workers will be able to afford.
Not using AI is similar to giving employees 20% of their time for any non-sprint work.
This privilege of No AI usage a day will lower the productivity, and rarely any companies will allow it (if they track your usage, which I am sure they do)
> Privileged workers are the ones who's employers are paying for AI while still keeping them employed in the first place.
I used "time" as privilege, not as AI as it's given as premise in the article.
You didn't even attempt to decode my comment with the article content in the first place.
> The end goal of every AI initiative is to lower headcount, if your employer is forcing AI usage you are digging your own grave
The "trend" nowadays shows other ways.
And also Jevons paradoxe in the works.
The more you use AI, the more work will spawn.
I understood your original comment just fine, I just thought that the point you were making was stupid.
By "trend nowadays" I assume you're just choosing not to count the 700k layoffs in tech sector since 2022?
Show me all of the new products Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc have "spawned" since force feeding AI to their remaining staff. 100 different permutations for sycophantic AI models and fact simulators don't count.
> Show me all of the new products Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc have "spawned" since force feeding AI to their remaining staff. 100 different permutations for sycophantic AI models and fact simulators don't count.
For that, I agree with you that shit's not really improved other than the facts that my internal (one of the big ones I won't disclose where) ones got too many bloats (the issue is maintenance now because people created too many things without understanding what they created)
Sounds good. They're encouraging others to join in but it'd be great to hear if this actually has an impact so far and how its worked out for HTMX. I imagine there are some interesting anecdotes about what actually happens when teams do this.
[Edit] just seen that OP is pitching this rather than practicing it. I wonder if any team actually do have a practice like this...
Nobody should be in a position where they need to clear something like this with their boss. Now, I'm certain people are but that just means those of us with seniority and in leadership have failed those people.
> You can use No AI Fridays to assess what's actually happening and retrospect on the choices the AI made for you.
This should happen daily.....
Let me make a better suggestion.
Pick a difficult/foreign topic that will force you to grow. Learn it with a book and in an "API agnostic" way. For example, it's better to learn about concurrency than goroutines. Feel free to use AI as your teacher or even student, but practice with your own brain.
> Study after study shows that using LLMs can cause you to accumulate cognitive debt, make you less engaged with your work, negatively impact your critical thinking abilities, and hamper your skill formation.
False
I've learned more, I am more engaged, it has positively impacted my critical thinking abilities and has increased my skill formation
> ...cause you to accumulate cognitive debt, make you less engaged with your work, negatively impact your critical thinking abilities, and hamper your skill formation.
My employer gifted me all that years before LLMs were released.
I don't know about Fridays but I like spending some significant amount of time full-vibing then some significant amount of time full-manual, coming to terms with what has been done-but-not-pushed, figuring out how I want the code to actually work and look, with roughly zero regard to how much transformation or starting-anew it will take from what has been vibed - easy come, easy go. Then once I really know what exactly I want, either transform the vibed code into it, or delete and start over (maybe manually, maybe prompting).
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 18.8 ms ] threadI’d make a joke about there not being a word for the reverse of plagiarism, except there is one: lying.
Giving yourself time to be idle and let a problem marinate is often where the breakthroughs and good ideas come from. If taste and human judgment are what separate useful AI output from slop, we need to give our brains time to cook instead of constantly bouncing between agents.
I also support No GenAI every day ending in a Y, but I support this, too.
TODO: insert something about open source, beer, free beer, someone else's beer, trading beer, subgenius, slack etc etc
I have no idea how people can spend 40 hours a week interacting with those sycophantic random number generators, its like having the most annoying linkedin influencer you can imagine DM'ing you all day.
Now the entire world has a calculator in their pocket, and all that wrote memorization not only made me hate math as a child, it was a giant waste of time.
I suspect that one day we'll look back on advice like no-AI Fridays exactly as modern readers would react to "Punch-card only Tuesdays" in a modern enterprise.
Not using a calculator as a kid for math is pretty important, because the goal is to develop intuition. Same for software, playing music, learning a language. You have to keep some level of friction to develop and keep your intuition
I dunno, I think this example kind of works in the opposite direction. If we're talking about memorising tables of logarithms or something, then yeah that was a complete waste of time. But a lot of the stuff kids would like to skip because calculators can do it is the absolute basics. IMO it is still important to have a solid grasp of arithmetic, useful to have enough trigonometry that you intuitively understand where it can be useful, and so on. (Much more so if you want to leave open the possibility of studying further mathematics.) And for people to whom these things don't come naturally, you really need to drill it a bit in order to develop the conceptual understanding.
I don't know exactly where this does and doesn't apply to programming/CS, though. I would like to think that a lot of the fundamentals will remain useful, but maybe that will only be true for a few specialised workers and self-motivated hobbyists.
I don't even about sailing 100+nm off shore.
people assume every point of earth is somewhy equivalent to their porch.
in 2023 I had a pretty nice night ~4km from a town in Montenegro. I could even see it from the mountain I was at and still had to sleep under a bush because I was not prepared enough. Thanks to thousands years of history they have ancient outlets for mountain springs so you can have drinkable water in most unexpected places while walking down from a misadventure.
Imagine that happening ~20km off civilization. Unprepared one will just die, iphone+satellites or no.
I have no intention of doing that. I'm not an explorer. I don't own a boat that is both big enough to travel that far, but small enough not to have satellite internet. I own approximately zero pith helmets and know zero sherpas.
To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
My heart sank when I saw this post. I thought we’d created enemies!
No conflict here, though. An important part of using AI well is learning when not to use it.
A few weeks ago, I realized that with all these agents running and all the things I could be working on, I was spending my days managing shallow pings instead of going deep.
I have AI agents managing SEO and ad spend. I used to spend a little time every day reading what each had to say. Now each gives me one detailed report per week, with links to the underlying reports and specific things I need to look at. I block 90 minutes for each one, on different days, and use that time to read, think, and decide what to do next. It’s helped a lot.
Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their own professors) who can't answer the most basic of questions that I would have expected of sometimes even first year CS students in the days before AI was a thing, which is why I encourage them to build projects without it.
Personally, I'm starting to think that in university and education systems, all projects should now be done in class and in computer labs/monitored study halls because we can't trust anyone to not use AI anymore.
I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying.
I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc).
With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month.
I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time.
I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods.
I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done.
2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie.
I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.
With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that.
We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator.
AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it.
In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
The reins metaphor is also interesting and cuts both ways: riders don’t expect to do the walking themselves, and setting direction is not the same as doing (even understanding, or being able to do) the work.
Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox?
Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother?
I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place.
Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning.
When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement.
What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement?
A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK.
What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down-
- Widget sales report
Why?
- To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing
Why?
- So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way?
Why?
- So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society
Why?
- So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit
Etc...
OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals?
The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling thay you get from cooperating and competing with other people.
When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.
But when you sit down at an awesome synth and start jamming, do you care whether the firmware was written by a real live human?
It's forest/trees.
Yes. Very much so.
I want to play an instrument that was thoughtfully designed and created at every level by someone with deep knowledge and passion.
I want hand crafted waveforms that someone spent endless hours with a headphone making just right, and they were damn proud of it.
I want to see videos of the person who did it and how. What inspired the sound, how it evolved.
I want the human experience.
"When you have ADHD, the problem isn’t that you lack attention, it’s that you struggle to control your attention — to put your attention where you want it to go rather than having it go where it wants to go. Hyperfocus is a natural consequence of that lack of control."
Lived it. Made it work for me professionally in the end. Do not not need pointy hair edicts telling me how to do career development.
This often means that you pay attention to nothing else around you or what's actually important which is where the deficit is.
https://youtu.be/kzvQMdg66Go (Now with full animation control, not just blocking and posing.)
This isn't UGC. I know a lot of studios from my filmmaking and 30% of my customers are spending thousands of dollars a month. It's got really good word of mouth and 89% M3 retention.
There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft.
It's also completely open source (the desktop app and the server).
There's another variant of ArtCraft that works with other subscriptions (Runway, Higgs, OpenArt, Comfy, etc.) that I'm testing with some artists: https://artcraftx.com
Artists are fine tuning their own workflows on top of my own source software and then sharing their variants of ArtCraft.
I'm building OpenSourceRouter.com (soon) that will be an open source OpenRouter/FAL/RunPod/Featherless fine tunes. It already powers ArtCraft and is 90% complete to launch. Maybe in the future compute will be fully portable and you can just login to services with compute.
I'm also building a collaborative space for AI artists to share workflows, refs, fine tunes, network, and collaboratively build. This side of the business is already here and growing and I haven't built the infra for it yet. It's currently in Discord and an assortment of other places.
I'm going to make ArtCraft work with local models too. Comfy is not comfortable, and an all-rust/native, heavily opinionated product with lots of love from filmmakers and artists can do a better job than node graphs IMO.
I really care about these tools and I'm doing all of this from a place of passion. I'm not a mercenary trying to get rich quick. I'm here for the mission of empowering artists (and I count myself - this is a tool for me.)
It's growing really fast and I'm talking to bigger and bigger folks. It's kind of wild.
"Soul-less slop for people who don't understand art nor craft".
Cutting corners no doubt has appeal to some people in the industry making things, but this says nothing about the appeal to audiences that are supposedly going to want to pay to watch entire movies containing this nonsense. The end result shown in this video and on your website https://getartcraft.com/ just doesn't look good, at all.
> There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft.
Which ones? Like the internet itself, if movies start filling up with more and more slop, it's just going to be another instance of enshitification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500019
I mean, you do you I guess..
I have several films coming out in theaters that use ArtCraft.
I'm working on anime reboots of several popular series from the 80's and 90's. Full licensing and original authors on board.
I'm talking to several major bands, huge directors, and tons of people in the space.
I promise I care more about film than you do. I spend so much energy on it that it consumes me.
Yes, *you* are able to leverage your previous expertise *that you spent years accumulating with your own mind* to productivitymaxx to the extreme and work on all the things. AI is awesome for people who know what they're doing. This is well-documented.
What is _also_ true is that people think less to a lot less when they defer work to AI. For those who are getting into this industry or learning new things (i.e. the people that you will eventually NOT hire for your growing business that you MIGHT have hired in the past), that is an absolutely terrible thing to have happen. This is _also_ well documented. Your success does not refute that.
I think there is a whole generation of people who were so culturally starved during their formative years they can only see a blank canvas as a useless white square.
"Who is going to buy a painting of a white square?"
> 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
Who do you think was responsible for that dystopia? It wasn't those people you mentioned, who built the 70% of the old internet. The enshittification started when the people whose passion in life is to make money caught the scent of money-making potential the internet had.
But then, how did those people actually accomplish the enshittification we're dealing with now? The answer is: with the enthusiastic help of the True Believers. Crypto is the best example. Just recall how many devs were convinced that the blockchain was going to revolutionize everything. And I mean devs. Not snake-oil peddlers in suits, not LinkedIn influencers, none of the usual posse of posers, but people who actually wrote code and were reasonably good at that.
And that's not the only example, just the best one. I've been there myself. Back when OOP, UML, capital-A Agile, CMMi, and MDA (Model Driven Architecture) were the Hot New Thing, I was one of the True Believers, following the trends and proselytizing my colleagues.
Every bit of the dystopia you lament was pushed by the combination of ambitious MBAs and True Believer devs.
And the reason I bring this up is because you're one of those True Believers now. It's easy to fall into that trap. All you need is to have enough good experiences with the Hot New Thing to suppress your critical thinking and believe that this will Make Everything Great Again.
The same kind of people who profited off the tech dystopia you saw are now ushering a new, worse tech dystopia that you're turning a blind eye to. Your belief that this new tech will somehow balance and even counteract what those people did to the internet you loved is not based in facts. It's faith.
I have found in the last year I "get more done" but I learn less. Whats even worse is if I burn though my token quota I am less likely(and less able) to "switch to manual". LLMs make an ocean of decisions and assumptions very quickly and if you don't slow it down very intentionally (and lose the promise of the AI providers are pitching) you will quickly not have a good idea of how systems work.
This is familiar territory for me as I prefer to do a breadth first survey of something I’m trying to learn before digging in to an actual project with depth to make all the mistakes and blunders that make you actually good at something.
AI can still be a huge help here. I don’t really use AI to write the actual code. I will be tooting along, in the flow state, and then bang off a question or request like “how would you write this block of code” “how does this API work?”, and then just take what it says under advisement.
I find as soon as I start accepting what the AI says without critical thinking or just hitting the “apply block” button, it’s time to take a break. I use CoPilot and I barely touch 40% token spend per month and to me it’s the best way to work, I am always engaged, have a full mental model of what I’m working on, and have someone pushing back and criticizing what I’m writing. This gets you out of tutorial hell, but keeps you motivated because you’re not always staring at a blank code window wondering where to start.
For my project I use Gemini/Google's AI mode to great effect. Quick answers to be reminded about syntax, and to get help when stuck. It actually enhances the flow state. Plus it's all free.
We used to call it "seeing through the code". The moment when you're no longer looking at text on a page, you're seeing what it does as you scroll through it.
What you need most, to get to that place, is to simply spend a lot of time writing and reading code until it becomes second nature. Something like 10,000 hours.
Once you've done that, reading an LLM's code is trivial. But letting it write most of the code, without reviewing it line by line, causes rapid brain atrophy. Because to really be in the zone, you need to keep everything relevant in your head. Which means it has to be in there in the first place.
I used to listen to classical music, rap or hip hop, but lately I’ve moved toward those long focus playlists on YouTube and things like Brain.fm. They seem to help me, so I was curious whether other people deliberately use something to get into that state or whether it just happens through the work itself.
It's something common to a lot of creative fields, that moment where u enter a sort of hyper-focused state where the line between you and the code blurs and you operate at peak efficiency.
It quite literally feels like overclocking your brain. I miss it a lot.
You said you miss that state a lot. What changed? Is it related to using AI more when coding or something else?
If you don’t enjoy programming keep trying, have the language or api docs open and do not use generative AI. Generative AI just gets you outcomes. An artist paints because they like painting, not because they like a pile of painted pictures.
With AI coding it suddenly feels like there are so many possibilities. My biggest problem now is almost the opposite: trying not to chase every idea and keeping myself focused on building one thing. There’s definitely a dopamine hit in seeing visible progress regularly :)
As someone who gets "in the zone" like the person you're replying to, I just don't get how this could possibly be the same thing. "Coming back later" doesn't make any sense when you're in that state. Stopping and waiting is a killer. You're just constantly doing things without necessarily consciously thinking about it.
Do you mean you're switching continually between the twelve sessions? Or literally "coming back" in a different sort of operating mode?
The closest thing to it for me using AI tools is specifically not running multiple "agents" but making targeted changes over and over and over but with a 10x+ increase in typing-vs-change ratio. (This also rules out things like Opus let alone Fable as they're just too slow and do too much at once.)
I point at the violins. I gesture the drums upwards. Sometimes I make a big broad gesture that encompasses the entire orchestra.
My agents are tasked, in part, with explaining the context with mockups and examples I can poke at for each job.
Before AI, the only way I could get in the flow was by isolating myself from everything to avoid direct distractions (phone, emails, IM...) or indirect (having something else on my mind). It was something I was able to achieve only a few times a year. It did felt incredible. As soon I was getting stuck on something tedious, I had to resort to a web search and it broke the flow.
With AI, I can achieve this state every weekend for personal projects, and every day I'm WFH or when I'm alone in my corner of the office. I start with a list of goals/tasks, put X agents at work (I prefer working on multiple projects in parallel, with only one task per project) and while they're doing their stuff, I'm thinking about the next steps, filling the backlog, catching issues needing rework... I don't get stuck: either the agent we'll offer a workaround, or I'll push it in the backlog. Most often, the solution comes to me while I'm not in front of my computer. I can focus on the big picture, the actual problems that I'm trying to solve. Yesterday I did exactly this: started at 8am, leaving my desk just to fill my water bottle or empty my bladder... and it's only because a friend came to my place at 8pm that I stopped. I thought I was at it for only two hours...
I hate how this comment can make me look as an AI preacher; but I'm not trying to convince anyone to stop doing anything they're doing because I found the ultimate solution. No. I'm just describing how I'm enjoying _doing stuff_ on the computer more than I ever did in the ~30 years I've been doing it.
Another caveat is this was a graduate course, so I would expect more maturity and integrity on average than an undergrad course. But anecdotally I thought it was an interesting result.
[0] https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-05-17-learning-focused...
But broadly:
1. AI gets you to that MVP 80% dopamine rush and then takes all that dopamine away if you lean into doing the last 20% with it. But if you try to do the last 20% yourself, you will experience the joy of agentic coding style and you will lose the ability to even produce dopamine. I use these things to build PoCs, not products.
2. The haters mostly have no idea how amazing getting to that 80% really is as a technological achievement and they are mostly stuck at Stochastic Parrot. And 3 days of the ungimped Fable demonstrated to me most of that remaining 20% is achievable, but not with gimping and/or production optimizations by the frontier labs.
3. If you want to see the promise and the limits of coding agents, you have to try to build something with them. But if you hate AI, you've already made up your mind and no amount of evidence will sway you, so don't bother.
4. These things are hideously power inefficient. And Moore's Law is out of steam. While we could stand up renewable and nuclear to power this, there are factions that hate one or the other more than they hate AI so good luck with that.
5. The San Francisco AGI cult is 100% unhelpful and the C-suite linkedin lunatics who take them seriously are even worse.
I'm reading a book written in the 90s but set in the 1980s where one of the assertions was that America is incompatible with technocracy. Prophetic methinks.
It’s when we put arbitrarily impossible deadlines that AI users learn nothing
First year AI is teach assistive coding using llms with open source models. Setup a workbench llm for each student to have with an openweight model on it. Teach different ways of getting good results and go over setting up the whole environment yourself.
The next year do a 4hr lab in a lab room with office chairs, variable height desks, and model it off an open office. No special dress code, but name tags and people will talk to each other with the openness of dialog at a good workplace. This even gives the TA usable experience. You could introduce different structures with leads or co-equals or any useful team structure.
People need to be taught in-person working skills because companies don't want to hire people without experience. This also helps someone be able to interview for a work from home job.
I'm having a great time building personal web apps with exactly the features I want, and I also enjoy refactoring the source code to get closer to how I would ideally write it. I can use a coding agent to do both. What's not to like?
I stopped editing source code by hand as a self-imposed limitation to see how far I could go by prodding AI to do things my way, and it turns out it's pretty far, so I'm sticking with it.
Which isn't to say that writing code by hand can't be fun, too, under the right circumstances.
Reading code is way less enjoyable than writing it
Not using AI is similar to giving employees 20% of their time for any non-sprint work.
This privilege of No AI usage a day will lower the productivity, and rarely any companies will allow it (if they track your usage, which I am sure they do)
The end goal of every AI initiative is to lower headcount, if your employer is forcing AI usage you are digging your own grave.
I used "time" as privilege, not as AI as it's given as premise in the article. You didn't even attempt to decode my comment with the article content in the first place.
> The end goal of every AI initiative is to lower headcount, if your employer is forcing AI usage you are digging your own grave
The "trend" nowadays shows other ways.
And also Jevons paradoxe in the works. The more you use AI, the more work will spawn.
---
you are just trying to pick a fight
@TRACK: DarmokTanagra
By "trend nowadays" I assume you're just choosing not to count the 700k layoffs in tech sector since 2022?
Show me all of the new products Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc have "spawned" since force feeding AI to their remaining staff. 100 different permutations for sycophantic AI models and fact simulators don't count.
For that, I agree with you that shit's not really improved other than the facts that my internal (one of the big ones I won't disclose where) ones got too many bloats (the issue is maintenance now because people created too many things without understanding what they created)
[Edit] just seen that OP is pitching this rather than practicing it. I wonder if any team actually do have a practice like this...
This should happen daily.....
Let me make a better suggestion.
Pick a difficult/foreign topic that will force you to grow. Learn it with a book and in an "API agnostic" way. For example, it's better to learn about concurrency than goroutines. Feel free to use AI as your teacher or even student, but practice with your own brain.
> Study after study shows that using LLMs can cause you to accumulate cognitive debt, make you less engaged with your work, negatively impact your critical thinking abilities, and hamper your skill formation.
False
I've learned more, I am more engaged, it has positively impacted my critical thinking abilities and has increased my skill formation
For me it's AI 24/7 even on sundays
My employer gifted me all that years before LLMs were released.