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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

I know this is a terribly irresponsible and immature suggestion, but what I've been doing is every time I give claude code a request of indeterminate length, I just hit a blunt and chill out. That and sometimes I'll tab into the kind of game that can be picked up and put down on very short notice, here's where I shameless plug for the free and open source game Endless Sky.

For me personally, programming lost most of it's fun many years ago, but with claude code I'm having fun again. It's not the same, but for me personally, at this stage in my life, it's more enjoyable.

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Now that’s vibe coding.

That’s vibe coding while high. Probably terrible for assesing the results from Claude

The code works quite well, but I wouldn't inflict it on other humans. In my view, when you use a coding agent you're committing to forever maintaining that code with a coding agent. There are no human programmers participating in these projects.

I think oftentimes in the absence of context, people will substitute their own, usually worst-case context. They imagine someone vibe coding safety critical software that flies airplanes.

I think we much too often forget that the domain of software development has expanded its reach into literally everything and that we share a guild hall with all kinds: those who write deeply safety critical correct code, those who are hacking a blender, those who are just making their clerical task less repetitive, etc.

Well said, people online are so quick to criticise LLM usage because of possible security holes or what have you.I can assure you, when making something dumb for fun I wouldn’t have checked it for security holes when I was coding it either.

Ballmer curve in full effect

For anyone else that didn't recognize this reference, it's also known as the "Ballmer Peak": https://xkcd.com/323/

lol i love telling people my "Ballmer Peak" is 2 tokes of Cali Jack Herer

Programming stopped feeling fun for me once MBAs and bean counters took over. There's rarely time to write thoughtful code anymore. Even convincing management to invest in a sane architecture feels like an endless uphill battle.

Engineer teams are nothing but an annoying expense on the balance sheet and the goal is to cram as many features, as quickly as possible to get the sale.

That's exactly why I'm happy to use every tool available to get the work done efficiently. To this end, LLMs have been great for me, especially when dealing with large amounts of boilerplate code.

Long gone the days of crafting artisan code.

It's still fun for me. But a lot of my day right now isn't "coding". But playing the job market game to get stability back in life while juggling other part time work.

Of course, I know the next layoff will come. So I simply want to use the next time of stability to make sure I can be that artisan the next time industry kicks me out. But baby steps for now.

Sounds like you need to find a better job.

Sometimes a job is a job.

Y’all were having fun? I always had fun making things, but the coding part was always a means to an end for me, and one that caused endless frustration at times. I never have to debug regex or write a single date format line by hand ever again, and I will never ever miss it.

Every bit of coding that did anything other than give me meaningful progress on features on the thing I was actually trying to build, which at times was 80%+ of it, was always terrible.

That's precisely how I refactored dank-extract from dank-mcp and finally got dank-data to archive CT canna-data every Sunday at 4:20pm Pacific.

[1] https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-extract

[2] https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-data

yeah that's how I do it too but careful with the blunt, yesterday I was working away, had some time while an agent swarm ran, took a "little break" and now ghostty looks like this: https://s.h4x.club/kpuGgD12 :|

I feel like we used to do so much more customization and theming of our desktop environments in the 2000s/2010s. I miss it, and therefore love this for you!

I was totally obsessed with it, when I first got into linux as a kid in the late 90s, I spent forever and hours tweaking just my bashrc. I spent entirely too long on this stupid terminal, the media player and getting the rainbow thing to match up to the time of whatever was playing... oh well, had fun!

Oh man, I’d love your config if you were willing to share, that looks sweet

Well "little break" - I forked ghostty and re-wrote parts of it for Metal and a bunch of new uniforms and iChannels - so my config may not work for you, but here is everything config wise I have running right now in full: https://s.h4x.club/NQuG6pZN

Oh wow I see, great effort either way, thanks

Man you restored the original vibe in vibe coding.

(In all seriousness though, it's probably not good for your health.)

20 years ago we had the Ballmer Peak. With AI you may have found the next thing!

I play piano, it' a cool game play loop

Except there is a well-known phenomenon among programmers that commencing to work requires more energy than working itself (*).

Every time you chill out and come back to work, you will have to invest that extra bit of start-up energy. Which can be draining.

(* probably has to do with reloading your working memory)

Context switching tax.

For some. I have never experienced this myself. All my energy goes into keeping unconsciously destructive people from sabotaging the effort.

What do you mean by that? Can you clarify?

They mean they feel intellectually superior to their peers and want to humble brag about it.

No. Im the dumbest person in the room, mate. It means I have to deal with you all day. Sigh.

Well, at least one of those statements is probably true.

Yes, the first one obviously. Try it out sometime.

I err, don’t think you’re saying what you think you’re saying.

Omg you instigator, you are this person! Let me just spell it out and end this. Im an idiot man, I dont try to project intelligence, I just listen and act... and sometimes comment on the negative behavior of others, which comes from lived experience. Appreciate you being an example of antagonistically wasting someone's time because of what? An assumption of what I meant? wow.

Oh I’m the one wasting your time now? Suuure buddy…

It means people go through life making selfishly unconscious choices that hurt collaborative efforts and its tiring to constantly have to reign these people in instead of building said thing.

While this is certainly very true, I find coding through an LLM to require far less effort dedicated to this cognitive switching than does writing in some programming language, primarily because I no longer have to load the mental context for converting my high level human instructions to code that a programming environment actually supports. The mental context seems more lightweight and closer to the way I think about the problem when I'm not sitting at the computer actively working on it. If an idea comes to me while I'm away from the computer I can momentarily sit down, type in whatever I just thought of, and get going almost immediately. I think it also saves a huge amount of cognitive load and stress (for me) involved with switching around between different programs and languages, an unfortunate fact of life when dealing with legacy systems.

I didn’t know it was a common thing but it’s definitely something I’ve experienced!

This is true for me but just due to task anxiety in general, it’s not specific to coding. So I don’t get repeats of this with AI. If anything, it’s helped reduce the procrastination for me, because I feel more supported and less on my own with the task.

I can recommend a Steam Deck for gaming that can be easily interrupted and resumed. It also means that you can leave your "work" machine so that you can see when claude has finished.

Imagine the captain high while auto pilot is on... who's flying this thing!

It’ll probably be fine. Mostly.

Wow, this is a new low I did not expect to see. "Just get high and you'll be able to code with an LLM." Preceded by, "I know it's terrible."

I'm wholly unwilling to relinquish my health and my morals to "AI" so I can "ship faster." What a pathetic existence that would be.

Welcome to Taylorism. Not just for assembly line workers anymore.

One of the best programmers I know personally is constantly under the influence of marijuana. As "immature" as it may sound, she's still extremely aware of what she's doing and is able to work in an environment I would give up in after 2 weeks. The kind of environment that denies 1 day PTO for your birthday because of a deadline (hint, every week is a deadline).

I do not smoke myself, but it made me realize how little I know regarding THC and CBD

> I do not smoke myself, but it made me realize how little I know regarding THC and CBD

Long-term use causes the psychedelic part of THC effects to diminish over time. At some point, only a mild depressant effect remains - somewhat similar to chamomile. It does have some effect on intelligence and short-term memory, but if the alternative is to be too stressed to think at all, it might be better to just smoke.

Obviously, if possible, psychotherapy or a prescription from a psychiatrist (or better yet, a change of environment) would be better (in the latter case, it depends on the prescribed drug, of course), but THC is not that bad an alternative where it's legal.

I appreciate your honesty. For what it's worth, this is not a commercial endeavor and is all motivated entirely by scratching my own personal itches. I'm not being paid to do this.

Natural results when incentives are on "shippng" and not "quality". People find ways to ship out stuff faster. And perhaps drown their apprehensions about quality.

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