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The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

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Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#221

Post by bwfan123 »

leedrake5 wrote: post #200
bwfan123 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> friction = focus, focus = product AI tools have put friction where it should be - by eliminating incidental friction. By incidental friction I mean, things that were really not ambiguous, but were made so due to lack of access to resources. As an example, if i needed to navigate, I used a paper map. There was friction in pulling out a map, planning a route etc. This took time. With digital mapping apps this sort of…

This distinction between ambiguous and incidental friction is brilliant. Was just talking about it with my wife because your specific example of a map has been a running debate between us. I just pick the least cost path via the algorithm to the point where I have poor spatial awareness. My father in law insists on using paper maps because he wants to know where everything is to be helpful. For me, the ease of the al…

> That is my biggest worry, particularly for students and early career folks

Agree, and I have the same worry, and so did the OP to the point that he considers canceling his AI subscription. Most of have to first get through the incidental friction to be able to arrive at expertise to address ambiguity.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#222

Post by vlod »

demorro wrote: post #213

Does anyone in these comments not have ADHD? Seems like neurodivergence is so common now we might as well think it typical, and be perfectly happy condemning tools and systems that don't work well with it.

You assume you can be neurodivergent and have to be ADHD as well.

I don't believe I have ADHD, but I've come to realize my brain is wired 'differently'.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#223

Post by fragmede »

lelanthran wrote: post #219
deadbabe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, that working on lots of little random code projects makes you fall into some kind of local minimum of overall joy and satisfaction. You are robbing yourself of the motivation of focusing on something truly substantial, that is still just a hobby, but the end result will leave you far more proud and fulfilled. At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you mig…

> At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too". The big difference is, prior to LLMs, that you spent no m…

Those other projects certainly weren't actually totally free, and if that's youd issue, just use the free version of ChatGPT.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#224

Post by jmux »

leedrake5 wrote: post #200
bwfan123 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> friction = focus, focus = product AI tools have put friction where it should be - by eliminating incidental friction. By incidental friction I mean, things that were really not ambiguous, but were made so due to lack of access to resources. As an example, if i needed to navigate, I used a paper map. There was friction in pulling out a map, planning a route etc. This took time. With digital mapping apps this sort of…

This distinction between ambiguous and incidental friction is brilliant. Was just talking about it with my wife because your specific example of a map has been a running debate between us. I just pick the least cost path via the algorithm to the point where I have poor spatial awareness. My father in law insists on using paper maps because he wants to know where everything is to be helpful. For me, the ease of the al…

In the past I found that I had poor spacial awareness - a few months ago I started using navigation apps solely in the “north up” orientation. this is much less intuitive when navigating, but forces me to think spatially about where i am and I’ve found has helped me retain much more spatial context about my environment.

I’m much more able to navigate without the map than I was before I started this experiment - and it’s had the added benefit of giving me the ability to know what part of the 101 I’m on solely by the angle and shape of the nearest exit.

I hope eventually AI gets to a point where I can split the difference between ambiguous and incidental friction like this, although tbh I’m not really sure what that would look like.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#225

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #142
FuckButtons wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you are learning something, just the thing you’re learning has an even shorter usable lifespan than programming languages, namely you’re learning what works to get useful responses from ai agents. Whether or not that has value to you is a different matter, but it’s worth bearing in mind something is being learned, even if it’s not engineering or programming.

> namely you’re learning what works to get useful responses from ai agents. Having worked a lot with AI agents, I don't agree. AI agents are amazing at producing response and results that look correct as long as you don't look too closely. Even when I try to write extremely detailed specs and test harnesses, even Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on max will find creative new ways to write code that breaks under real use cases. D…

[deleted]

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#226

Post by gitaarik »

ianm218 wrote: post #196
gitaarik wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like how bikes are like crack to people that are always out and about to do useless errands? Yeah I think we should protect these people from accessing these technologies, because they clearly can't handle it!

Is someone advocating for banning AI because a guy with ADHD wastes his time? This post seems to just to be about knowing oneself and putting yourself in the right environment not creating a nanny state or something

Well I didn't say exactly "banning" either.

I have the feeling a lot of people are advocating to at least (try to) boycott AI, and downplay it, make people feel guilty about it's usage. It's vaccines vs no vaccines all over again. So binary.

Maybe we should maybe some kind of license, like driving license, but for AI. So only people qualified to use it safely and sanely can legally use it.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#227

Post by linsomniac »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #135
linsomniac wrote: post #36

I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use. In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".

Has it been part of a longer term shift or just something for the past few weeks? What will happen once all the rough edges are filed down?

I've been using the AIs heavily for ~3 years, but really about Feb/Mar I feel like they really ticked up in quality. For about the last 6-12 months I've been using them to file off the really rough edges ("build a CLI tool that implements commands to simplify this workflow"). The last 2-3 months my tooling has felt really competent, and so it was only really the last month where I felt like I could reasonably start having it automate the more subtle stuff.

>What will happen once all the rough edges are filed down?

You're new around here? ;-) Or maybe I'm just old and jaded, and feel like there's always infinite more work to do. My boss, the CTO, has said "if you are getting twice your pre-AI work done in half the time, the rest of the time is yours." Unfortunately that statement came after "I'm not sure how the CEO feels about this but..."

My company has 25 years of tech debt built up, and the AI tooling has allowed us to make amazing headway on that, but I'm ~5 years from retirement, even working 10X I'm not expecting we can catch up in that time.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#228

Post by skydhash »

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #168
chamomeal wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the bifurcation is between people who want to write code and people who want to have the end product of the code I think most developers are both! Depends on the task. Sometimes I want the result, sometimes I want the process. Also sometimes, if I want the process, it’s because it’s something I want to have intimate knowledge of. There’s a practical benefit to writing stuff yourself, even if most of the tim…

We should brace ourselves to find less and less satisfaction from the process as we become more comfortable embracing AI. At least, that's what the first chapter in the evolution of the AI-assisted software developer role has taught me.

I'll only trust that if you're the one being oncall for that product. Or at least is directly responsible if it ever fails.

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#229

Post by [deleted] »

hparadiz wrote: post #187
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really low effort man. You can do better than "You're not paying enough to be as good as me" followed by "oh...well you haven't paid this month."

When I encounter people who don't use these tools it feels more like talking to someone without a computer who is trying to convince you that you don't need one back in the 90s. Or someone being like "the internet is useless" back in 1995. I mean early days it was kinda like that. The early internet for normies was almost entirely useless. The change has been so rapid that I think a lot of people are having a hard ti…

[deleted]

Re: The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

#230

Post by LocalExt »

hliyan wrote: post #161

I can provide a data point for what the article calls pseudo productivity: I extensively use LLMs as semantic search engines or expert systems (but not as agents). Recently I asked one how to consume a Google Pub/Sub topic using Python (context: I come from an C++/Java/JS background with some Python knowledge). The LLM gave me a good intro and some code. As it usually happens, I had a few follow up questions/clarific…

You are good with that 20 mins :) I wrote a maxscript for 3Dmax to speed up some tasks, and i got stuck in coding. Then I asked the AI for debug, then to write a snippet, etc...I lost 3-4 days. At the end I found a developer on Fiverr who fixed my script for $20 :)
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