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The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

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Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#51

Post by hparadiz »

mrkeen wrote: post #46
jmward01 wrote: post #25

Wow. To me the point of code has always been the crazy ideas and playing around. I love to create just for me and every once in a while for others is ok too. If you only think of code as 'a tool to build useful things' and everything else as wasted then sure, this is the philosophy for you. However, creating a bunch of random not going to follow up on it but I explored and played moments seems like a plus and not a n…

OP paid a machine to have those moments instead of him.

As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow?

Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#52

Post by spudlyo »

> It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends.

You make this sound like a bad thing. ADHD isn't always about attention deficit, although it is right there in the name. It's more about attention dysregulation. For those of us prone to hyperfocus, working with AI can provide the kinds of stimulation we crave. I can hardly remember a time when I've felt more engaged with my work, more productive, and more badass.

I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined. At the end of the day I have the satisfaction of browsing the pretty, readable, DRY, maintainable code we end up with after rounds of refactoring and back and forth. I have always employed linters and code formatters, and this is no different, and my standards are still the same. I yell at the clanker about code duplication, hard-coded assumptions, tightly coupled logic, and in the end, while I don't understand the details of every algorithm, I really understand what we've built and the architecture we've designed.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#53

Post by JoshTriplett »

hparadiz wrote: post #51
mrkeen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP paid a machine to have those moments instead of him.

As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.

> As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow?

Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#54

Post by godot »

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #47

Author sounds like they are missing meaning in what they do. If they had a life mission, AI is just an aid in accomplishing that mission, and they wouldn't get sidetracked by all the unfulfilling projects (modulus the ADHD, that has its own bearing on the experience using AI, and is the most interesting part of this post to me). Perhaps at a population scale AI inhibits people from finding fulfillment. But on an anec…

I agree with this. AI is a tool and amplifier. If one is already disciplined and strong-minded and has clear meaning and purpose in their life, AI is a very powerful aid in accomplishing missions. But I'm afraid most people in the world are not like that, too.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#55

Post by augment_me »

linsomniac wrote: post #36

I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use. In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".

I feel like the whole blog and the point can be reversed. If your bottlenecks are meetings and emails, and you make an agent take notes and summarize things for you, you gained focus to work on what you find meaningful.

> He explains that this happens because knowledge work often relies on “pseudo productivity,” where visible busyness is treated as a proxy for real value. Digital tools reinforce this by making people look active: sending more messages, producing more drafts, attending more meetings, and generating more work artifacts. To avoid the trap, he recommends measuring real outcomes, identifying the true bottlenecks in one’s work, and separating deep work from shallow work so that digital tools support meaningful progress instead of consuming attention.

---

Like, you are just as well make the argument that if you replace the pseudo-work, you end up with 8 hours of deep work for things that bring you value.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#56

Post by bluegatty »

The point about interruptions is valid.

'Waiting for AI to finish' - even if it's only 1 minute segments, is real, especially if we are delegating. (Maybe I'm interrupted right now!)

But this - it's not the fault of the tool that you're not focused on building something useful, long lasting or material.

That's an entirely different question - and I think if you look into most people's 'experiment' folders, that tendency was always there. Just more code now.

That's on us.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#57

Post by FabHK »

YesBox wrote: post #43
Jordan-117 wrote: post #24

> In recent times, at least once per month someone sends a screenshot for an awesome tool they are working on. I'm like whoa, that's really something and the sender is obviously proud and enthusiastic. I try not to ask, but am always thinking "and where will you market it?" What a strange perspective. His dismissal of the long list of projects at the top is also odd. What's wrong with making something cool and functi…

Some people, if not most, will at some point look back (and forward) in their life and wonder if they made anything out of it. And what they are really asking is "how much of an impact on others have I made?" YMMV

and marketing something is the answer?

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#58

Post by hparadiz »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #53
hparadiz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Ya'll need to stop with this cope. It's not a good look.

> As opposed to the old days when people would just blindly copy/paste random shit from Stackoverflow? Many of the people who are complaining about AI vibecoding today also didn't blindly copy/paste from StackOverflow in the past.

I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#59

Post by cheschire »

spudlyo wrote: post #52

> It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. You make this sound like a bad thing. ADHD isn't always about attention deficit, although it is right there in the name. It's more about attention dysregulation. For those of us prone to hyperfocus, working with AI can provide the kinds of stimulation we crave. I can hardly remember a time when I've felt mor…

Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a conversation and halfway through a sentence I need to whip out AI to scratch the mental itch so I can continue with the conversation.

But prior to this I would rabbit hole. I would try desperately to remember some nuance, or I would not be able to move off a point until I got the validation I was looking for.

The worst is when speaking a foreign language and I hit some complex word in my native language that isn't present in my foreign lexicon. My brain just halts. It wants THAT word or phrase, not a 3 minute detour describing a whole concept.

AI has empowered me to move past these unnecessarily difficult speed bumps in my thinking.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#60

Post by icauroboros »

sudosteph wrote: post #48

Only mentioning this because the OP did - but for me (also ADHD) it's kind of the opposite. I'm finishing side projects for the first time ever because I can actually get them working before I get bored of them. My projects are more infra-leaning, and not all of them get much use, but some do. Others let me explore certain ideas and then sometimes serve as a reference point later when I run into something that remind…

I feel the same. I not sure if I have ADHD, but I always have 2 mode of focusing on something, first one is shot burst of focus and other one is real locked in mode where I forgot to eat or drink water. While second one is much better at delivering value it mostly activated on management/strategy games that I love :D But with AI assisted coding now I can really work on my side project while having first focus mode. Im just writing or designing the parts I excited about, and then I let AI to handle boring task.
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