The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.
I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.
* setting aside whether this is currently possible, or whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.
> The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.
That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.
The most challenging thing I'm finding about working with LLM-based tools is the reduction in enjoyment. I'm in this business because I love it, and I'm worried about that going forward.
For the longest time, IT workers were 'protected' from Marx's alienation of labor by the rarity of your skill, but now it's coming for you/us, too. Claude Code is to programmers what textile machines were to textile workers.
>In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labour power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labour and the wages paid to him for the labour.
Less often discussed is Marx's view of social alienation in this context: i.e., workers used to take pride in who they are based on their occupation. 'I am the best blacksmith in town.'
Automation destroyed that for workers, and it'll come for you/us, too.
Exactly, maybe "prompt engineering" is really a skill, but the reward for getting better at this is just pumping out more features at a low skill grade. What's excited about this ? Unless I want to spend all my time building minimum viable product.
>The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers.
This is precisely the question that scares me now. It is always so satisfying when a revolution occurs to hold hands and hug each other in the streets and shout "death to the old order". But what happens the next morning? Will we capture this monumental gain for labor or will we cede it to capital? My money is on the latter. Why wouldn't it be? Did they let us go home early when the punch card looms weaved months worth of hand work in a day? No, they made us work twice as hard for half the pay.
Short-term, automated tech debt creation will yield gains.
Long term the craftsperson writing excellent code will win. It is now easier than ever to write excellent code, for those that are able to choose their pace.
> The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers. The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.
That's why we should be against it but hey, we can provide more value to shareholders!
> The excitement of getting a day's work done in an hour* (for example) is likely to fade once the expectation is to produce 8 of such old-days output per day.
It's not really about excitement or enjoyment of work.
It's the fear about the __8x output__ being considered as __8x productivity__.
The increase in `output/productivity` factor has various negative implications. I would not say everything out loud. But the wise can read between the lines.
> The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment may feel less welcome when it becomes the new baseline and the expectation of employers / customers
This is what happens with big technological advancements. Technology that enables productivity won’t free people time, but only set higher expectations of getting more work done in a day.
If there are 8 days per day worth of work to be done (which I doubt), why wouldn’t you want to have it done ASAP? You’re going to have to do it eventually, so why not just do it now? Doesn’t make sense. You act like they’re just making up new work for you to do when previously there wouldn’t have been any.
> The tradeoff of higher velocity for less enjoyment
I'm enjoying exactly what the author describes, so it's different strokes for different folks.
I always found the "code monkey" aspect of software development utterly boring and tedious, and have spent a lot of my career automating that away with various kinds of code generators, DSLs, and so on. \
Using an LLM as a general-purpose automated code monkey is a near-ideal scenario for me, and I enjoy the work more. It's especially useful for languages like Go or Java where repetitive boilerplate is endemic.
I also find it helps with procrastination, because I can just ask an LLM to start something for me and get over the initial hump.
> whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.
Even if the developer is keeping the quality of the LLM generated code high (by constant close reading of the output, rejecting low quality work and steering with prompts) does this mean the project as a whole is improving? I have my doubts! I'm also skeptical that this developer has increased their velocity as much as they believe, IMHO this has long been a difficult thing to measure.
Overall, is this even a good thing? With this increase in output, I suspect we'll need to apply more pressure to people requesting features to ensure those requests are high quality. When each feature takes half the time to implement, I bet it's easy to agree to more features without spending as much time evaluating their worth.
For me, on small personal projects, I can get a project to a point in about 4 hours where previous to new AI tools it would’ve taken about 40. At work, there is a huge difference due to the complexity of the code base and services. Using agents to code for me in these cases as 100% been the loop of iterating on something so often, I would’ve been better off with a more hands on approach, essentially just reviewing PRs written by AI.
It's not. And people are realizing that, which is causing them to bring back and reinvent aspects of software engineering to AI coding to make it more tolerable. People once questioned whether AI will replace all programming languages with natural language interfaces, it now looks like programming languages will be reinvented in the context of AI to make their natural language interface more tool-like.
It's a change in mindset. AI is like having your own junior developer. If you've never had direct reports before where you have to give them detailed instruction and validate their code then you're right, it might end up more exhausting than just doing the work yourself.
In my experience, listening to music engages the creative part of your brain and severely limits what you can do, but this is not readily apparent.
If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of my brain was busy listening to music.
From the post, it sounds like the author discovered the same thing: if you use AI to perform menial tasks (like coding), all that is left is thinking creatively, and you can't do that while listening to music.
There is no “creative part of the brain” and even if there was listening to music would have nothing to do with it.
You may be experiencing getting to different understanding of sth when you switch context. Similar to when you are stack it may be better to go for a walk than keep your head on top of a piece of paper or screen. I have had many of my breakthroughs while taking a shit in the toilet in the midst of working. Others experience similar with showers and whatever.
Afaik most ppl listen to music during certain tasks because it helps focusing. Esp when working in a busy office it really helps me to listen to certain kinds of predictable music to keep me from getting distracted. It creates a sort of entrainment that helps with attention.
Some people find music itself distracting, I myself find some kinds of music distracting, or during certain types of tasks. Then it obviously it does not fill its purpose.
I describe it slightly differently. Similar to what the author described, I'll first plan and solve the problem in my head, lay out a broad action plan, and then put on music to implement it.
But, for me the music serves something akin to clocks in microcontrollers (and even CPUs), it provides a flow that my brain syncs to. I'm not even paying attention to the music itself, but it stops me from getting distracted and focus on the task at hand.
I just think it's distracting. I get caught up listening to the lyrics and kind of mentally singing along, stuff like that which disrupts my thought and distracts from what I actually want to be thinking about.
I think this is individual, I have the same problem in social settings - if I'm having a conversation and a song I like is playing in the background I some times stop listening to the conversation and focus on the music instead, unintentionally.
My solution is to listen to music without vocals when I need to focus. I've had phases where I listen to classical music, electronic stuff, and lately I've been using an app I found called brain.fm which I think just plays AI generated lo-fi or whatever and there's some binaural beats thing going on as well that's supposed to enhance focus, creativity etc. I like it but some times I go back to regular music just because I miss listening to something I actually like.
> discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal
In my experience, there is no good shortcut to this realization. Doing it wrong first is part of the journey. You might as well enjoy the necessary mistakes along the way. The third time’s the charm!
I'm sorry but that's nonsense. Listening to music is not a creative process, it does not at all take away creativity from somewhere else.
I've never, ever, ever once in 40 years of coding listened to music while coding and later found the code "unnecessary" or anything of the sort.
I engage in many creative pursuits outside of coding, always while listening to music, and I can confidently say that music has never once interfered in the process or limited the result in any way.
I don't think that's down to music per se, but a more generalized thing. Software developers love being in a flow state, some of them pursue it all the time (...guilty) and get frustrated when their job changes (e.g. moving towards management) so they spend less time in that flow state.
But also, this can create waste, in that people write the Best Code Ever in their flow state (while listening music or not), but... it wasn't necessary in the first place and the time spent was a waste. This can waste anything from an hour to six months of work (honestly, I had a "CTO" once who led a team of three dozen people or so who actually went into his batcave at home for six months to write a C# framework of sorts that the whole company should use. He then quit and became self-employed so the company had to re-hire him to make sense of the framework he wrote. I'm sure he enjoyed it very much though.)
This was actually studied at some point (at least 15-20 decades ago, as I remember learning about this in college): they gave the same programming problem to a bunch of developers and had some listen to music while they did the task while others worked in silence. There was no real difference between how long it took to do the task between the same group... but the people who listened to music were much much less likely to realize that the entire task was a red herring and the code reduced down to return 0;.
From the masterpiece, Tragedy of the Man, describing the future where everything is done in the name of efficiency:
THE GREYBEARD
You left your workroom in great disarray.
MICHELANGELO
Because I had to fabricate the chair-legs
To the quality as poor as it can be.
I appeal’d for long, let me modificate,
Let me engrave some ornaments on it.
They did not permit. I wanted as a chance
The chair-back to change but all was in vain.
I was very close to be a madman
And I left the pains and my workroom, too. (stands back)
THE GREYBEARD
You get house arrest for this disorder
And will not enjoy this nice and warm day.
I’d probably drop GenAI before I dropped the music that allows me to focus. Also, at this stage of my career, I mainly code for fun, and blasting music across the house is part of it.
> writing a blurb that contains the same mental model
Good nugget. Effective prompting, aside from context curation, is about providing the LLM with an approximation of your world model and theory, not just a local task description. This includes all your unstated assumptions, interaction between system and world, open questions, edge cases, intents, best practices, and so on. Basically distill the shape of the problem from all possible perspectives, so there's an all-domain robustness to the understanding of what you want. A simple stream of thoughts in xml tags that you type out in a quasi-delirium over 2 minutes can be sufficient. I find this especially important with gpt-5, which is good at following instructions to the point of pedantry. Without it, the model can tunnel vision on a particular part of the task request.
It’s a lot more high-level executive functioning now, instead of grinding through endless syntax and boilerplate. Easy to mindlessly code to music, much harder to think about what you want to do next, and evaluate if the result you just got is what you really wanted.
It's hard to get in the zone with an LLM doing crazy stuff.
For instance this week when setting up a Django/Wagtail project GPT helpfully went ahead and created migration files in text instead of "makemigrations". Otherwise it did a bang up job and saved me a couple of hours.
Just no way I can get in the zone wrangling that kind of thing all day.
But I'm not sure getting in the coding zone frequently was all that mentally healthy so oh well.
Chill instrumental and lo-fi are your friends now. I also noticed I couldn't listen to music anymore but that's only because of vocals. Anything without language works just fine, especially at low volume.
The line that stood out for me was that "a 4-hour session of AI coding is more cognitively intense than a 4-hour session of non-AI coding."
Many programmers are rejecting AI coding because they miss the challenge they enjoy getting from conventional programming but this author finds it even more challenging. Or perhaps challenging in a different way?
That's an argument I had with a friend last year. I told him generative AI will make writing code easier, but the life of whoever is writing it far worse. Because writing code without using AI is done with some sort of due diligence: you memorize some stuff, look up other stuff in the docs or online, and you take some time actually solving the problem you have. If you succeed, you would've spent the needed time at YOUR pace, with an intrinsic reward of feeling good that you achieved something. With AI, on the other hand, you are in semi-cheat mode, throwing prompts after prompts and now you are trying to catch someone/something else's pace, zero reward, and more mentally exhausted.
The best approach is to use AI only when you are stuck and looking for potential solutions, but we all know that is not going to happen unless you have extreme self-control.
I let the AI first generate a outline of how it would do it as markdown. I adapt this and then let it add details into additional markdown files about technical stuff, eg how to use a certain sdk and so on. I correct these all.
And then I let the AI generate the classes of the outline one by one.
I encounter a problem which is my social media usage increase. The time when you wait for the agent to write code is kinda silly :) You can not switch to do other things as it will make your focus shift away from the code. So usually I just dumb scroll for 1 minute
> For frontend code and my side projects, AI coding seems to be even more effective and actually reduces the cognitive load, winning in all dimensions.
Can we see this frontend code? For research purposes, of course.
What happened to coding for joy in your free time? At work I do whatever the company wants as long as I get my money at the end of the month. Java? Sure boss. Golang? Let’s do it. LLMs? Whatever you want. TDD? Yep.
At home I still plan and devise my own worlds with joy. I may use LLMs for boring or repetitive tasks, or help or explanation; but I still can code better than the day before.
My theory as a none scientist is that you need a different part of the brain to think about AI prompts compared to coding yourself. Or maybe that whatever though process you need for coding intersects with the part that enjoys listening to music. And because of that intersection you can't focus on both at the same time.
It definitely changed how I get into flow state for me. But music still works, if not even better when coding with AI (listening to: techno, electro, edm). Generally my flow is to sit down, make a small plan of what I will work on, fire off 2 agents to work on different parts of the code that are lower hanging fruits (takes 2-10 mins for them to complete). Then while this is busy, map out some bigger tasks.
Agents finish, I queue them up with new low hanging fruits, while I architect the much bigger tasks, then fire that off -> Review smaller tasks. It really is a dance, but flow is much easier achieved when I do get into it; hours really just melt together. The important thing to do is to put my phone away, and block all and any social media or sites I frequent, because its easy to get distracted when agents aren just producing code and you're sitting on the sidelines.
[+] [-] foo42|6 months ago|reply
I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.
* setting aside whether this is currently possible, or whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.
[+] [-] latexr|6 months ago|reply
That dumb attitude (which I understand you’re criticising) of “more more more” always reminds me of Lenny from the Simpsons moving fast through the yellow light, with nowhere to go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR10t-B9nYY
> I suspect it doesn't matter how we feel about it mind you. If it's going to happen it will, whether we enjoy the gains first or not.
That is quite the defeatist attitude. Society becoming shittier isn’t inevitable, though inaction and giving up certainly helps that along.
[+] [-] theshrike79|6 months ago|reply
That's stupid and detrimental to your mental health.
You do it in an hour, spend maybe 1-2 hours to make it even better and prettier and then relax. Do all that menial shit you've got lined up anyway.
[+] [-] specproc|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] a_bonobo|6 months ago|reply
>In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labour power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labour and the wages paid to him for the labour.
Less often discussed is Marx's view of social alienation in this context: i.e., workers used to take pride in who they are based on their occupation. 'I am the best blacksmith in town.' Automation destroyed that for workers, and it'll come for you/us, too.
[+] [-] hnfsfdsd|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ramesh31|6 months ago|reply
This is precisely the question that scares me now. It is always so satisfying when a revolution occurs to hold hands and hug each other in the streets and shout "death to the old order". But what happens the next morning? Will we capture this monumental gain for labor or will we cede it to capital? My money is on the latter. Why wouldn't it be? Did they let us go home early when the punch card looms weaved months worth of hand work in a day? No, they made us work twice as hard for half the pay.
[+] [-] willtemperley|6 months ago|reply
Long term the craftsperson writing excellent code will win. It is now easier than ever to write excellent code, for those that are able to choose their pace.
[+] [-] darkwater|6 months ago|reply
That's why we should be against it but hey, we can provide more value to shareholders!
[+] [-] pdntspa|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] never_inline|6 months ago|reply
It's not really about excitement or enjoyment of work.
It's the fear about the __8x output__ being considered as __8x productivity__.
The increase in `output/productivity` factor has various negative implications. I would not say everything out loud. But the wise can read between the lines.
[+] [-] jodosha|6 months ago|reply
This is what happens with big technological advancements. Technology that enables productivity won’t free people time, but only set higher expectations of getting more work done in a day.
[+] [-] an0malous|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] deadbabe|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] antonvs|6 months ago|reply
I'm enjoying exactly what the author describes, so it's different strokes for different folks.
I always found the "code monkey" aspect of software development utterly boring and tedious, and have spent a lot of my career automating that away with various kinds of code generators, DSLs, and so on. \
Using an LLM as a general-purpose automated code monkey is a near-ideal scenario for me, and I enjoy the work more. It's especially useful for languages like Go or Java where repetitive boilerplate is endemic.
I also find it helps with procrastination, because I can just ask an LLM to start something for me and get over the initial hump.
> whether we're actually trading away more quality that we realise.
This is completely up to the people using it.
[+] [-] cmiles74|6 months ago|reply
Overall, is this even a good thing? With this increase in output, I suspect we'll need to apply more pressure to people requesting features to ensure those requests are high quality. When each feature takes half the time to implement, I bet it's easy to agree to more features without spending as much time evaluating their worth.
[+] [-] gyosko|6 months ago|reply
While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how:
- write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind)
- check/try the code
- repeat
is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.
[+] [-] nbaugh1|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] david-gpu|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ModernMech|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Rinum|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|6 months ago|reply
It's a perfectly cromulent approach and skillset - but it's a wildly different one.
[+] [-] broast|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|6 months ago|reply
If I listen to music, I can spend an hour CODING YEAH! and be all smug and satisfied, until I turn the music off and discover that everything I've coded is unnecessary and there is an easier way to achieve the same goal. I just didn't see it, because the creative part of my brain was busy listening to music.
From the post, it sounds like the author discovered the same thing: if you use AI to perform menial tasks (like coding), all that is left is thinking creatively, and you can't do that while listening to music.
[+] [-] freehorse|6 months ago|reply
You may be experiencing getting to different understanding of sth when you switch context. Similar to when you are stack it may be better to go for a walk than keep your head on top of a piece of paper or screen. I have had many of my breakthroughs while taking a shit in the toilet in the midst of working. Others experience similar with showers and whatever.
Afaik most ppl listen to music during certain tasks because it helps focusing. Esp when working in a busy office it really helps me to listen to certain kinds of predictable music to keep me from getting distracted. It creates a sort of entrainment that helps with attention.
Some people find music itself distracting, I myself find some kinds of music distracting, or during certain types of tasks. Then it obviously it does not fill its purpose.
[+] [-] shaan7|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sfn42|6 months ago|reply
I think this is individual, I have the same problem in social settings - if I'm having a conversation and a song I like is playing in the background I some times stop listening to the conversation and focus on the music instead, unintentionally.
My solution is to listen to music without vocals when I need to focus. I've had phases where I listen to classical music, electronic stuff, and lately I've been using an app I found called brain.fm which I think just plays AI generated lo-fi or whatever and there's some binaural beats thing going on as well that's supposed to enhance focus, creativity etc. I like it but some times I go back to regular music just because I miss listening to something I actually like.
[+] [-] elliottkember|6 months ago|reply
In my experience, there is no good shortcut to this realization. Doing it wrong first is part of the journey. You might as well enjoy the necessary mistakes along the way. The third time’s the charm!
[+] [-] leptons|6 months ago|reply
I've never, ever, ever once in 40 years of coding listened to music while coding and later found the code "unnecessary" or anything of the sort.
I engage in many creative pursuits outside of coding, always while listening to music, and I can confidently say that music has never once interfered in the process or limited the result in any way.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 months ago|reply
But also, this can create waste, in that people write the Best Code Ever in their flow state (while listening music or not), but... it wasn't necessary in the first place and the time spent was a waste. This can waste anything from an hour to six months of work (honestly, I had a "CTO" once who led a team of three dozen people or so who actually went into his batcave at home for six months to write a C# framework of sorts that the whole company should use. He then quit and became self-employed so the company had to re-hire him to make sense of the framework he wrote. I'm sure he enjoyed it very much though.)
[+] [-] saurik|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bdhcuidbebe|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoka|6 months ago|reply
THE GREYBEARD You left your workroom in great disarray.
MICHELANGELO Because I had to fabricate the chair-legs To the quality as poor as it can be. I appeal’d for long, let me modificate, Let me engrave some ornaments on it.
They did not permit. I wanted as a chance The chair-back to change but all was in vain. I was very close to be a madman And I left the pains and my workroom, too. (stands back)
THE GREYBEARD You get house arrest for this disorder And will not enjoy this nice and warm day.
[+] [-] DevKoala|6 months ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrA8Pi6nol8
[+] [-] nxpnsv|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] energy123|6 months ago|reply
Good nugget. Effective prompting, aside from context curation, is about providing the LLM with an approximation of your world model and theory, not just a local task description. This includes all your unstated assumptions, interaction between system and world, open questions, edge cases, intents, best practices, and so on. Basically distill the shape of the problem from all possible perspectives, so there's an all-domain robustness to the understanding of what you want. A simple stream of thoughts in xml tags that you type out in a quasi-delirium over 2 minutes can be sufficient. I find this especially important with gpt-5, which is good at following instructions to the point of pedantry. Without it, the model can tunnel vision on a particular part of the task request.
[+] [-] october8140|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mckn1ght|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mythrwy|6 months ago|reply
For instance this week when setting up a Django/Wagtail project GPT helpfully went ahead and created migration files in text instead of "makemigrations". Otherwise it did a bang up job and saved me a couple of hours.
Just no way I can get in the zone wrangling that kind of thing all day.
But I'm not sure getting in the coding zone frequently was all that mentally healthy so oh well.
[+] [-] nowittyusername|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nemoniac|6 months ago|reply
Many programmers are rejecting AI coding because they miss the challenge they enjoy getting from conventional programming but this author finds it even more challenging. Or perhaps challenging in a different way?
[+] [-] tamimio|6 months ago|reply
The best approach is to use AI only when you are stuck and looking for potential solutions, but we all know that is not going to happen unless you have extreme self-control.
[+] [-] fearface|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TrietNg|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sublinear|6 months ago|reply
Can we see this frontend code? For research purposes, of course.
[+] [-] Narciss|6 months ago|reply
If you say “you are praf” in Romanian it means that you are f*cked, wasted, done for, etc.
[+] [-] dakiol|6 months ago|reply
At home I still plan and devise my own worlds with joy. I may use LLMs for boring or repetitive tasks, or help or explanation; but I still can code better than the day before.
As usual, work != career.
[+] [-] stuaxo|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] icetank|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ai_assisted_dev|6 months ago|reply
Agents finish, I queue them up with new low hanging fruits, while I architect the much bigger tasks, then fire that off -> Review smaller tasks. It really is a dance, but flow is much easier achieved when I do get into it; hours really just melt together. The important thing to do is to put my phone away, and block all and any social media or sites I frequent, because its easy to get distracted when agents aren just producing code and you're sitting on the sidelines.