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Programmers need to start meditating

jacob.gold

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Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#11

Post by david-gpu »

jahala wrote: post #8

Meditation - «getting used to» A most elementary form of meditation, is getting used to placing your attention on a sensation and keeping it anchored there - even when other sensations or thoughts arise. Following the breath- place your awareness, your attention, on the sensation of air passing through your nostrils. Count one inbreath and outbreath cycle as «1», and count until 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how…

Thank you. I like the comparison of "meditation" with "sport": it is not all the same, even if there are commonalities between some disciplines.

It is rare to see laypeople discuss some of the different types and which one may be best suited for a particular goal.

If the goal is simply relieving stress, performing some sport outdoors —especially team sports— is probably more effective than any meditation, for most people.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#12

Post by galaxyLogic »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #6

I noticed how relaxing and meditative programming can be. It might sound that after day job basically solving other people pronlems I sit down late at noght to just write code for hours on end. But I really enjoy it. Using LLM’s to generate the code ruins it. I have also done meditation, but I struggle to keep it up for long. I think you should really do it consistently to get majority of effects. Coding, exercising,…

My favorite metaphor for programming is playing chess. Your opponent in programming is the complexity, you don't see its moves before the coding and design progress, before you make your choices/moves. You solve a problem by writing some code but that causes new problems down the line you didn't know existed before you made your choice of writing some specific code. or choosing a specific design.

Chess-players too are in a very "meditative" state when they play, and they enjoy it, I assume because it let's them focus on the game and forget about everything else.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#13

Post by bragh »

senfiaj wrote: post #9
ehnto wrote: post #3

I have certainly noticed my stress skyrocket in this new mode of working. I was used to getting a lot done very quickly, with intense pockets of work followed downtime. Now it feels more like a steady stream of medium stress, and there is no opportunity to stop or drop the thread. I must admit, if this is the new way of doing software development (eg: not actually programming but working with LLMs) I am not going to…

Yeah, same thoughts. And this industry is becoming so volatile, I'm not sure what will happen tomorrow. I mean it's highly unlikely that AI will replace developers at least in the next 10 years, but I'm not sure what will "software developer" become. Certain people love to work with details. If AI is taking away this joy, I'll rather retire as early as possible from this volatile industry.

Maybe we just aren't far enough in the vibe coding side of things and there are still too many people in the industry who still pay attention to details, so no major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding. So the people who pay attention to details are still carrying their organizations, but I do wonder how long it is going to be sustainable.

When it comes to joy killers because of AI, then it is dismal how plagiarism (going by the definition of "presenting someone else's work without attribution") suddenly became widely accepted. When I see long lists of bullet points with interspersed bold text, I know that it is something the sender did not write or bother reviewing. Absolute cherry on top when in the end of that text you see the typical LLM suggestion that you can ask for more information, which the sender didn't even bother removing.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#14

Post by globalnode »

jahala wrote: post #8

Meditation - «getting used to» A most elementary form of meditation, is getting used to placing your attention on a sensation and keeping it anchored there - even when other sensations or thoughts arise. Following the breath- place your awareness, your attention, on the sensation of air passing through your nostrils. Count one inbreath and outbreath cycle as «1», and count until 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how…

thanks

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#15

Post by sph »

You say programming used to be a meditative activity.

Then why get overwhelmed by LLMs and meditate to calm down, when you can just write the code yourself at a healthier pace? Tools are supposed to be designed around humans, it’s not the human that has to adapt to the machine.

In any case, meditating with an end to destress or to reach higher levels of productivity is missing the point of meditation.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#16

Post by ajb »

This isn't the worst article, and it's triggered a decent amount of discussion (despite being very short). However, I really dislike "What you're doing wrong/failing to do" titles. They are intended to trigger anxiety, which is manipulative and (in this case) precisely contradicts the concern the author is purporting to have for the rest of us.

On the subject: some people find meditation very helpful, others find it a net negative, or useless, or impossible to do. So a categorical "you should do this" isn't correct or particularly helpful. Try it, if it works for you, great; but don't put it about that people who aren't doing it are being negligent in some way.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#19

Post by varjag »

sph wrote: post #15

You say programming used to be a meditative activity. Then why get overwhelmed by LLMs and meditate to calm down, when you can just write the code yourself at a healthier pace? Tools are supposed to be designed around humans, it’s not the human that has to adapt to the machine. In any case, meditating with an end to destress or to reach higher levels of productivity is missing the point of meditation.

It's fine for your pet projects. But for most of professional programming it's no longer feasible as you'll be at a small fraction of your machine assisted performance.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#20

Post by gb2d_hn »

senfiaj wrote: post #10

>> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...

I feel like it depends on the task, and that's why people seem to disagree on this. Think about a manager managing 5 devs. If he is working on planning and managing work for his dev team, we don't say he is task switching, he's just taking a management role where he takes a high level view of the task at hand and then delegates the deep dive. Where it differs for devs is that we could in theory run multiple agents concurrently, but frequently, currently, we have to dive in and give the agents significant steers and this pulls us in to the detail. The same will happen for managers. The variables are the complexity of the task, the capability of the agent and the number of tasks. There are lots of scenarios where devs can run multiple tasks without too much mental overload, but I think what is hard is that we don't know when an agent will underperform on a task and we will get pulled back into developer mode. Maybe it's a case of running for as long as you can in manager mode and then accept that when one agent needs help, you have to single task with that agent (I think this is what makes us feel like we are the bottleneck, and that's where the feeling of stress creeps in). I thought about this a lot while working on https://www.agentkanban.io which I use to help me partition agent chats by task, run separate worktrees etc
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