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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> 12+ hr coding benders

Even when I was young, I discovered that after a certain level of fatigue my coding became garbage, and after a night's sleep I had to delete it and redo it. After this tipping point, I just stop doing the hard stuff. If I still want to work, I work on routine things that didn't take much concentration.

I never understood how people can write complex code when fatigued. I just get negatively productive trying that.

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> I discovered that after a certain level of fatigue my coding became garbage, and after a night's sleep I had to delete it and redo it.

My best work happens at 2am, at about 4am I am too tired and get slow and get stuck, I think even then code quality suffers only a little bit.

That's just my experience, I believe it happens because if I am working at that time, I am hyped and or in the zone. There is a sort of second wind involved. The lack of distractions also helps I guess.

Exactly the same here, late night would be my most productive. I don’t know how sustainable this is as I mature lol.

Tbh the code I was writing wasn’t that complex from an engineering perspective. During my PhD I was writing “research code” which is more like writing scripts, not a full blown application or library. The most challenging part was translating the math/algorithms to code. And I would just get into a flow state sometimes and could not stop haha. I had a (bad?) habit during my PhD that whenever I was stuck on a problem I just kept bashing my head against it until I solved it (code or math).

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