The answers are in the footnote, switching to frontend is the way.
AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
11–20 of 262 posts
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#12I don't listen to music while doing code reviews either. It also happens to be my least favourite part of the job. The LLM agents just make it feel like I'm constantly code reviewing and I don't think it makes me more productive overall.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#13My theory as a none scientist is that you need a different part of the brain to think about AI prompts compared to coding yourself. Or maybe that whatever though process you need for coding intersects with the part that enjoys listening to music. And because of that intersection you can't focus on both at the same time.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#14What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?
Whenever I need some sort of quick data pipeline to modify some sort of file into another format, or do some batch transformation, or transform some sort of interface description into another syntax, or things like that, that would normally require me to craft a grep, awk, tr, etc pipeline, I can normally simply paste a sample of the data and with a human language description get what I need. If it’s not working well I can break up the steps in smaller steps.
In my experience, it seems the people who have bad results have been trying to get the AI to do the reasoning. I feel like if I do the reasoning, I can offload menial tasks to the AI, and little annoying things that would take one or two hours start to take a few minutes.
That very quickly adds up to some real savings.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#15What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?
I’m building a moderately complex system with FastAPI + PG + Prefect executing stuff on Cloud Run, and so long as I invest in getting the architecture and specs right, it’s really a dream how much of the heavy lifting and grunt work I can leave to Claude Code. And thank god I don’t have to manage Alembic by myself.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#16I’d probably drop GenAI before I dropped the music that allows me to focus. Also, at this stage of my career, I mainly code for fun, and blasting music across the house is part of it.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#17It definitely changed how I get into flow state for me. But music still works, if not even better when coding with AI (listening to: techno, electro, edm). Generally my flow is to sit down, make a small plan of what I will work on, fire off 2 agents to work on different parts of the code that are lower hanging fruits (takes 2-10 mins for them to complete). Then while this is busy, map out some bigger tasks.
Agents finish, I queue them up with new low hanging fruits, while I architect the much bigger tasks, then fire that off -> Review smaller tasks. It really is a dance, but flow is much easier achieved when I do get into it; hours really just melt together. The important thing to do is to put my phone away, and block all and any social media or sites I frequent, because its easy to get distracted when agents aren just producing code and you're sitting on the sidelines.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#18I've never bothered listening to music while coding. If I'm in the zone, it's entirely extraneous and I don't even hear it.
At my first job in Silicon Valley, I used to code right on the production floor totally oblivious to what was going on.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#19> For frontend code and my side projects, AI coding seems to be even more effective and actually reduces the cognitive load, winning in all dimensions.
Can we see this frontend code? For research purposes, of course.
Re: AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore
#20What kind of projects are people doing that are feeling the increased velocity?
I'm slowed down (but perhaps sped up overall due to lower rewrites/maintenance costs) on important bits because the space of possibilities/capabilities is expanded, and I'm choosing to make use of that for some load bearing pieces that need to be durable and high quality (along the metrics that I care about). It takes extra time to search that space properly rather than accept the first thing that compiles and passes tests. So arguably equal or even lower velocity, but definitely improved results compared to what I used to be capable of, and I'm making that trade-off consciously for certain bits. However that's the current state of affairs, who knows what it'll look like in 1-2 years.