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No AI Fridays

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Re: No AI Fridays

#101

Post by noduerme »

KingOfMyRoom wrote: post #88
dom96 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

What do you use to be in the zone? music in the background? What type? Or silence or something else?

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.

Re: No AI Fridays

#102

Post by jckrichabdkejdb »

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…

[dead]

Re: No AI Fridays

#103

Post by coldtea »

kstenerud wrote: post #92

Reminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to continue using assembly, lest our "real" skills atrophy from too much cushy C development. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to keep our scope and probe skills sharp, and read and u…

>Reminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory.

And they were right. People used in interpreted and GC ones lost most if not all the ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory.

Today's bloated "1GB RAM for a small form app" apps are the results of this.

>You don't need to "keep practicing" in order to maintain your understanding.

You 100% need to.

Re: No AI Fridays

#104

Post by Razengan »

burner54828182 wrote: post #100
kstenerud wrote: post #92

Reminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to continue using assembly, lest our "real" skills atrophy from too much cushy C development. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to keep our scope and probe skills sharp, and read and u…

Apples and oranges

Reminds of the time when we had to plant our own apple trees instead of buying them from the market, and to get up early at 1 AM to milk the oranges instead of just buying juice

Re: No AI Fridays

#105

Post by kstenerud »

Razengan wrote: post #104
burner54828182 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges

Reminds of the time when we had to plant our own apple trees instead of buying them from the market, and to get up early at 1 AM to milk the oranges instead of just buying juice

Barefoot.

In the snow.

Uphill.

Both ways.

Re: No AI Fridays

#106

Post by lstodd »

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…

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.

Re: No AI Fridays

#107

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

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.

This reads like a satire comment.

Re: No AI Fridays

#108

Post by yttt »

dom96 wrote: post #71
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.…

[dead]

Re: No AI Fridays

#109

Post by DarmokTanagra »

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?

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.

Re: No AI Fridays

#110

Post by brabel »

I am currently on an obsessive coding spree on my side projects where I only use AI to ask questions like I used to do on Stack Overflow. At work it’s nearly 100% AI because quite honestly the AI is more thorough and faster than humanly possible. I don’t get my coding itch scratched at work anymore, so my off work coding has become a necessity for me. At first it felt pointless, I know I could just write a prompt and get the code written in a minute. But now, as the blog post says, I feel my ability degrading and doing things by hand has become really important for me to try to stop that. The question however is whether the new generation of devs will need to be able to write and review code by hand or AI will just do it so much better than humans that it will make no sense to do that, and what the humans will need to focus on instead. I fear this thinking that humans must understand the code and keep the AI from making a mess may be a relic of our pre AI brains, and soon if not now already it’s quite the opposite.
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