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Programmers need to start meditating

jacob.gold

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Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#21

Post by sph »

varjag wrote: post #19
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.

My performance in writing code was never once the problem. I don’t get why I should increase the amount of output by depending on a third party tool to do my thinking to whom I have to explain my very abstract thought process in words.

The point of being an experienced programmer is thinking in data structures and transformations, not in prose. Why would I introduce all that friction?

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#22

Post by stalfie »

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.

10 years is a long time. 10 years ago the Transformer architecture didn't exist. I would call it moderately unlikely at best. At the very least, I would say it's likely that development will require an entirely different skillet 10 years from now.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#24

Post by inigyou »

bragh wrote: post #13
senfiaj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

> major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding

Didn't Azure, AWS and Cloudflare crash a few times in the second half of 2025 because of vibe coding?

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#25

Post by inigyou »

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…

Why 21?

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#26

Post by witx »

varjag wrote: post #19
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.

If you think performance relates to speed and amount of code per unit of time yes. If you're more grounded with the reality of software engineering then no

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#27

Post by mstaoru »

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…

So you can place your attention on a single session of Claude Code, count to 21, and switch to another? :)

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#28

Post by witx »

> 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. After working full-time like this for ~8 months, one thing I’m sure of is that this way of working involves much less time spent in a flow state.

What an utter piece of BS. AI goons really like to smell their own crap

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#29

Post by hannofcart »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #18

For anyone interested in Vipasanna mediation in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw: https://sirimangalo.org/text/how-to-meditate/

As someone brought up in a Hindu household (with Brahmin orthodoxy at that and all the casteism that came with it) and having learnt to shun all of that culture, and the religious indoctrination, here's the essence of mindfulness meditation that I was taught that I still practice and find useful.

1. Sit somewhere comfortable. Sitting "cross legged" or with your "back straight" as the guide linked to above advocates is not necessary. A comfortable chair/couch is fine.

2. The room should preferably be quiet. Though if you have the privilege of access to an outdoor courtyard that's quiet other than birdsong and chirp of insects, you'll probably enjoy it more. But a quiet room is good enough.

3. Phase 1: Set a timer on your watch/phone for 5 mins. Close your eyes. And let your mind wander. Doesn't matter what your mind drifts towards.

4. Phase 2: Restart the 5 min timer. Now, try quieten your mind of thoughts and focus instead on just your breathing. Be gentle with yourself. Your mind will wander again and that's fine. Just gently nudge it back to your breathing.

That's pretty much it. Slowly, over months try and increase Phase 2 from 5 to 10 mins.

When I described this to my partner, I used the analogy of treating your mind like a curious eager pup. In the first phase, cutting of external stimulus of sight by closing your eyes is like having the pup with you in a closed room.

In phase 2, you gently hold the puppy near you and get it to quiet down and stay still.

She mentioned that this analogy helped her a lot.

Honestly, this is pretty much the gist of it. I suspect that you will likely get most of the benefits of advanced meditative techniques with just the 2 simple steps from above. YMMV.

Be patient though. Getting to a fully calm state of mind takes months of practice.

Re: Programmers need to start meditating

#30

Post by jdw64 »

Personally, I feel that as an individual, it's the right time to complete a program, but as a team, it's become harder.

It's true that the proportion of founders has increased both in the US and in my country, Korea.

And unlike the old days, it feels like what's needed now isn't so much deep, concentrated programming knowledge in one area, but rather broad knowledge across many fields. The claim that "productivity has increased" really only applies to freelancers. In fact, there's been a noticeable increase in freelance outsourcing requests that would be hard to handle without AI, lots of short deadline gigs compared to before. And of course, that makes it harder to charge appropriately.

For teams, on the other hand, you still need things like code reviews and team decision making.

As an individual, I've practically become someone who just writes up a gate, lets AI handle the code, checks that the core domain doesn't break, watches the gate's rules, and pulls the lever.

The reason team work slows down is mainly because Agile methodologies and code review processes are still human centric and consensus driven, and human cognitive speed itself becomes the bottleneck.

So I can understand a lot of the arguments that come up in the comments. The important thing is that most people tend to only see their own situation and their own context, which makes it hard for them to understand others.

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