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No Coding Before 10am

michaelxbloch.substack.com

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: No Coding Before 10am

#21
> Code is context, not a library. Data is the real interface.

I don't *yet* subscribe to the idea of "code is context for AI, not an interface for a human", but I have to admit that the idea sounds feasible. I have many examples of small-to-mid size apps (local use only) where I pretty much didn't even look at the code beyond checking that it doesn't do anything finicky. There, the code doesn't mater because I know that I can always regenerate it from my specs, POC-s, etc. I agree that the paradigm changes completely if you look at code as something temporary that can be thrown away and re-created when the specification changes. I don't know where this leads to and if this is good or not for our industry, but the fact is - it is feasible.

I would never use this paradigm for anything related to production, though. Nope. Never. Not in the foreseeable future anyway.

> Everyone uses their own IDE, prompting style, and workflow.

In my experience with recent models this is still not a good idea: it quickly leads to messy code where neither AI nor human can do anything anymore. Consistency is key. (And abstractions/layers/isolation everywhere, as usual).

IDE - of course. But, at the very least, I would suggest using the same foundation model across the code base, .agent/ dirs with plenty of project documents, reusable prompts, etc.

--

P.S. Still not sure what does the 10AM rule bring, though...

Re: No Coding Before 10am

#23
post #19

"Agents should work overnight, on commutes, in meetings, asynchronously." If I read stuff like that, I wonder what the F they are doing. Agents work overnight? On what? Stuck in some loop, trying to figure out how to solve a bug by trial and error because the agent isn't capable of finding the right solution? Nothing good will come out of that. When the agent clearly isn't capable of solving an issue in a reasonable…

[flagged]

Re: No Coding Before 10am

#25
post #19

"Agents should work overnight, on commutes, in meetings, asynchronously." If I read stuff like that, I wonder what the F they are doing. Agents work overnight? On what? Stuck in some loop, trying to figure out how to solve a bug by trial and error because the agent isn't capable of finding the right solution? Nothing good will come out of that. When the agent clearly isn't capable of solving an issue in a reasonable…

To be fair, for major features 30m to an hour isn’t out of this world. Browser testing is critical at this point but it _really_ slows down the AI in the last 15% of the process.

I can see overnight for a prototype of a completely new project with a detailed SPEC.md and a project requirements file that it eats up as it goes.

Re: No Coding Before 10am

#27
post #19

"Agents should work overnight, on commutes, in meetings, asynchronously." If I read stuff like that, I wonder what the F they are doing. Agents work overnight? On what? Stuck in some loop, trying to figure out how to solve a bug by trial and error because the agent isn't capable of finding the right solution? Nothing good will come out of that. When the agent clearly isn't capable of solving an issue in a reasonable…

Everyone here (including me) agrees on how dumb this idea is, yet I know C level people who would love it.

I wonder how our comments will age in a few years.

Edit: to add

> Review the output, not the code. Don't read every line an agent writes

This can't be a serious project. It must be a greenfield startup that's just starting.

Re: No Coding Before 10am

#29
Anyone else find reading things like this slightly exhausting?

I'm very much pro AI for coding there are clearly significant capabilities there but I'm still getting my head around how to best utilise it.

Posts like these make it sound like ruthlessly optimizing your workflow letting no possible efficiency go every single day is the only way to work now. This has always been possible and generally not a good idea to focus on exclusively. There's always been processes to optimise and automate and always a balance as to which to pursue.

Personally I am incorporating AI into my daily work but not getting too bogged down by it. I read about some of the latest ideas and techniques and choose carefully which I employ. Sometimes I'll try and AI workflow and then abandon it. I recently connected Claude up to draw.io with an MCP, it had some good capabilities but for the specific task I wanted it wasn't really getting it so doing it manually was the better choice to achieve what I wanted in good time.

The models themselves and coding harnesses are also evolving quickly complex workflows people may put together can quickly become pointless.

More haste, less speed as they say!

Re: No Coding Before 10am

#30

> If 10x more tokens saves a day, spend the tokens. The bottleneck is human decision-making time, not compute cost. This seems entirely backwards. Why spend money to optimize something that _isn't_ the bottleneck?

The day being referred to is the human’s time, not the AI’s time. That sentence is saying substitute the cheap, abundant resource for the expensive, bottlenecked resource.
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