Comment by jwblackwell
7 months ago
One slightly unexpected side effect of using AI to do most of my coding now is that I find myself a lot less tired and can focus for longer periods. It's enabled me to get work done while faced with other distractions. Essentially, offload some mental capacity towards AI frees up capacity elsewhere.
I find the opposite to be true. I am a lot more productive, so I work on more things in parallel, which makes me extremely tired by the end of the day, as if my brain worked at 100% capacity..
Yeah I do feel the pressure to run multiple instances of Claude Code now. Haven't really managed to find a good workflow, I find I just get too distracted swapping between tasks and then probably end up working slower than if I had just stayed in one IDE instance
Codex is the perfect workflow for me: instead of swapping, just accept / reject cls / refine tasks
Yeah and after a few days of this, I find I can't do anything and stop all the side projects for a few days until im recharged again and can get back to it.
I bet we will all need a new type of therapy for that at some point in the future.
On one hand, I've found that it reduces acute fatigue, but on the other I've found there's also an inflection point where it can encourage more fatigue over longer time horizons if you're not careful.
In the past I'd often reach a point like an unexpected error or looking at some docs would act like a "speed bump" and let me breath, and typically from there I'd acknowledge how tired I am, and stop for the moment.
With AI those speed bumps still exist, but there's sometimes just a bit of extra momentum that keeps me from slowing down enough to have that moment of reflection on how exhausted I am.
And the AI doesn't even have to be right for that to happen: sometimes just reading a suggestion that's specific to the current situation can trigger your own train of thought that's hard to reign back in.
I like to think of AI as cars:
You can go to the Walmart outside town on foot. And carry your stuff back. But it is much faster - and less exhaustive - to use the car. Which means you can spend more quality time on things you enjoy.
There are detriments to this as well.
Exercise is good.
Being outside is good.
New experiences happen when you're on foot.
You see more things on foot.
Etc etc. We make our lives way too efficient and we atrophy basic skills. There are benefits to doing things manually. Hustle culture is quite bad for us.
Going by foot or bicycle is so healthy for us for a myriad of reasons.
While this is absolutely true, “walking to Walmart” is a terrible example due to the lack of pedestrian infrastructure and distances involved :)
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I think in a way this is a good analogy, because it also includes the downside. If you always drive everywhere and do everything by car, your health will suffer due to lack of physical activity.
And you'll randomly kill people on your way there.
( Of course dear reader, YOU won't randomly kill people because you're a "good driver". )
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You got it backwards, there wouldn't be a walmart outside of town if there were no cars, you'd walk to the local butcher/baker/whatever in <10min.
Yes, but there are cars. That genie has already escaped its bottle.
And you pay small local stores with higher prices - which leads to more people, even in such small-towns with local butchers and bakers to get into their ride and go to the Lidl or Aldi on the outskirts.
Much like companies will realise LLM-using devs are more efficient by some random metric (do I hear: Story points and feature counts?), and will require LLM use from their employees.
Where you’d be able to afford much less (not judging the trade-off, but that’s the primary reason why the US is headed in the opposite direction).
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That’s a nice analogy! Though one might argue that the walk in of itself would be good for your health (as evidenced by me putting on some weight after replacing my 30 minute daily walk to the office with working remotely).
One could also do the drive (use AI) and then get some fresh air after (personal projects, code golf, solving interesting problems), but I don’t thing everyone has the willpower for that or the desire to consider that.
Oh man. I really hope AI doesn't do as much harm to us as cars have.
At the price of a sluggish, atrophied body.
which is why people now pay $100 a month for a gym membership.
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That’s why we need an AI infrastructure like amsterdam, where you can bike everywhere. It’s faster and more convenient than a car for most trips and keeps everyone fit and happy.
this analogy is flawed to its core. The car doesn't make you forget how to walk, because you are still forced to walk in certain circumstances. Delegating learning to an llm will increase your reliance on it, and will eventually affect the way you're learning. A better analogy is the usage of GPS. If you use it continuously, you will be dependent on it to get to a place, and lose the capacity to find places on your own.
Car culture societies are as bad as smoking for general health.
The problem is that when it's for work, the company now knows you have access to a car, so sends you on 20x the trips. You have no more quality time, and your physical health suffers from lack of exercise.
Which is exactly why many jobs actively require a driver's license where I live.
The car analogy has that covered already. When Guttenberg was printing bibles, those things sold like warm bread rolls - these days, printing books is barely profitable. The trick with new disruptive tech always is to be an early adopter - not the long tail.
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In this context: Brain only is going on foot/bike Search Engine is by car LLM is direct delivery to the home with the clerk packing your groceries (with them making the choices for you)
And then you drive to the gym to run on a treadmill for two hours.
Enter "Coding Bootcamps" and "Hackathons"