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No AI Fridays

noaifridays.com

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71–80 of 223 posts

Re: No AI Fridays

#71

Post by dom96 »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: No AI Fridays

#72

Post by misiti3780 »

scrollaway wrote: post #24
sdcfgy wrote: post #9

Got no AI 7 days here. I sold my token budget to other staff and spent the money on beer.

I guess alcoholism is cooler than using AI to do things nowadays, is that your stance?

so if you drink beer, you're automatically an alcoholic - I bet you're fun to hang out with

Re: No AI Fridays

#73

Post by eudamoniac »

echelon wrote: post #45
wkjagt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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 w…

What is this 5M business?

Re: No AI Fridays

#74

Post by mcdow »

i inadvertently do this at work anyway. i burn through my monthly token budget on boring-but-valuable tasks, and then i spend the rest of the month doing stuff by hand.

Re: No AI Fridays

#75

Post by retsibsi »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #57
dgellow wrote: post #10

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 re…

> 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.

Re: No AI Fridays

#76

Post by praveer13 »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #19

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…

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

Re: No AI Fridays

#77

Post by Waterluvian »

When I was 9 or 10 I flew somewhere with my family for the first time. On landing, the pilot bounced the plane off the runway. While taxiing he came on the intercom and apologized for the "slightly rough" landing, explaining that they usually use some autopilot to land/smooth the landing and that to keep qualified they have to do it manually every so often.

So anyways, I fully embrace and support the idea of bouncing your code off the compiler every Friday. It's what I do and I can really tell those skills need practice even after just a week.

Re: No AI Fridays

#78

Post by wonnage »

neuroticnews25 wrote: post #63

>write code with your own hands How is this supposed to work? Like emulate an agent with my brain and write down the output?

Do not recommend. There’s this stupid hard limit every day which takes like 8 hours to reset no matter how many tokens you used

Re: No AI Fridays

#79

Post by stavros »

Waterluvian wrote: post #77

When I was 9 or 10 I flew somewhere with my family for the first time. On landing, the pilot bounced the plane off the runway. While taxiing he came on the intercom and apologized for the "slightly rough" landing, explaining that they usually use some autopilot to land/smooth the landing and that to keep qualified they have to do it manually every so often. So anyways, I fully embrace and support the idea of bouncing…

Apparently they didn't do it manually often enough, huh.

Re: No AI Fridays

#80

Post by tokai »

>study after study shows

And its four preprints and one published one with an extremely weak experiment.

But seriously who offloads decision-making to LLMs? Thats the main thing they can't do proper.

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