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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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

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.

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