No AI Fridays
noaifridays.com
noaifridays.com
Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their own professors) who can't answer the most basic of questions that I would have expected of sometimes even first year CS students in the days before AI was a thing, which is why I encourage them to build projects without it.
Personally, I'm starting to think that in university and education systems, all projects should now be done in class and in computer labs/monitored study halls because we can't trust anyone to not use AI anymore.
I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying.
I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc).
With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month.
I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time.
I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods.
I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done.
2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie.
I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
I’m with you — I’m producing more and better art, with a deeper understanding of the art which comes from scale. My music is more innovative, my simulations are richer and more fun, I can wake up in the morning with a new idea and have a prototype in hours. It is magical.
With modern AI, you basically just ask for something and what used to be days worth of work magically appears, you didn't really think through a single thing when it comes to implementation, architecture etc unless you made a conscious effort to audit that.
We also generally still encourage students to learn how to do certain operations and what they mean without a calculator before letting them rely on it to make things quicker. If you never knew what a sin/cos was you'd never even know when to use those or why they even exist on a calculator.
AI is a step up where you literally don't have to know what those are, you could just take a picture and ask for the solution and it would do that all for you if you let it.
In reality modern AI is a massive test of willpower. You can completely let go of the reigns and it will happily do everything for you.
The reins metaphor is also interesting and cuts both ways: riders don’t expect to do the walking themselves, and setting direction is not the same as doing (even understanding, or being able to do) the work.
Why do you think so many people prefer to listen to live music over an album playing on a jukebox?
Live music doesn't have the polish and perfection of a studio recording, it's much less efficient to have to manually play instruments than to just hit "play" on a song. So why bother?
I think it's because we're looking at things wrong all over the place.
Similar to live music, I definitely prefer to read code written by a real human. I can get in their head, understand how they were reasoning to solve a problem, even if there were problems with their reasoning.
When I hear all the breathless takes about AI "productivity" improvements, my brain just circles aback to the old saw about activity over achievement.
What are your outputs? What is activity and what is achievement?
A business person brags that AI is able to generate a report for them that used to require lots of manual work linking spreadsheets. OK.
What was the value of the report? What was the goal? I like to follow this all the way down-
- Widget sales report
Why?
- To inform inventory and production decisions, as well as marketing
Why?
- So that the company can make money? So that the founders can be proud of their product? So that the product can improve lives in some way?
Why?
- So that the people working can have improved lives, and/or more status in society
Why?
- So that collectively by competing with each other in structured ways, humans as a whole thrive and benefit
Etc...
OK. Where does AI fit into this? What has it taken away from the human experience, and how had it affected all of these goals?
The goal isn't code. It isn't even the product that the code makes - it's the reward signaling that you get from cooperating and competing with other people.
When you short circuit your efforts at creation by using AI, it feels the same to me as saying you're putting on a live music show, but instead just hitting "play" on an album.
But when you sit down at an awesome synth and start jamming, do you care whether the firmware was written by a real live human?
It's forest/trees.
Yes. Very much so.
I want to play an instrument that was thoughtfully designed and created at every level by someone with deep knowledge and passion.
I want hand crafted waveforms that someone spent endless hours with a headphone making just right, and they were damn proud of it.
I want to see videos of the person who did it and how. What inspired the sound, how it evolved.
I want the human experience.
"When you have ADHD, the problem isn’t that you lack attention, it’s that you struggle to control your attention — to put your attention where you want it to go rather than having it go where it wants to go. Hyperfocus is a natural consequence of that lack of control."
Lived it. Made it work for me professionally in the end. Do not not need pointy hair edicts telling me how to do career development.
This often means that you pay attention to nothing else around you or what's actually important which is where the deficit is.
“While the estimated 8 million adults in the USA affected by attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might find it nearly impossible to sit still in a lecture hall or excruciatingly challenging to focus on writing a term paper, these same individuals might find themselves spending hours at a time composing a new song, tinkering with their car, writing computer code, or watching television (Kessler et al., 2006). The term “hyperfocus” (HF) has been used to characterize this state of heightened, focused attention that individuals with ADHD frequently report (Brown, 2005; Conner, 1994; Ozel-Kizil et al., 2016).”[1]
Anyway, not touching ADHD drugs given how easily I can convince myself 2+ drinks is a fantastic idea. So, TLDR 100% not going here:
What it means is some people are able to potentially improve their lives by recognizing a pattern of behavior and educating themselves about strategies (including medication) that might help.
https://youtu.be/kzvQMdg66Go (Now with full animation control, not just blocking and posing.)
This isn't UGC. I know a lot of studios from my filmmaking and 30% of my customers are spending thousands of dollars a month. It's got really good word of mouth and 89% M3 retention.
There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft.
It's also completely open source (the desktop app and the server).
There's another variant of ArtCraft that works with other subscriptions (Runway, Higgs, OpenArt, Comfy, etc.) that I'm testing with some artists: https://artcraftx.ai
Artists are fine tuning their own workflows on top of my own source software and then sharing their variants of ArtCraft.
I'm building OpenSourceRouter.com (soon) that will be an open source OpenRouter/FAL/RunPod/Featherless fine tunes. It already powers ArtCraft and is 90% complete to launch. Maybe in the future compute will be fully portable and you can just login to services with compute.
I'm also building a collaborative space for AI artists to share workflows, refs, fine tunes, network, and collaboratively build. This side of the business is already here and growing and I haven't built the infra for it yet. It's currently in Discord and an assortment of other places.
I'm going to make ArtCraft work with local models too. Comfy is not comfortable, and an all-rust/native, heavily opinionated product with lots of love from filmmakers and artists can do a better job than node graphs IMO.
I really care about these tools and I'm doing all of this from a place of passion. I'm not a mercenary trying to get rich quick. I'm here for the mission of empowering artists (and I count myself - this is a tool for me.)
It's growing really fast and I'm talking to bigger and bigger folks. It's kind of wild.
"Soul-less slop for people who don't understand art nor craft".
Cutting corners no doubt has appeal to some people in the industry making things, but this says nothing about the appeal to audiences that are supposedly going to want to pay to watch entire movies containing this nonsense. The end result shown in this video and on your website https://getartcraft.com/ just doesn't look good, at all.
> There are two films coming out in theaters this year that use ArtCraft.
Which ones? Like the internet itself, if movies start filling up with more and more slop, it's just going to be another instance of enshitification.
I mean, you do you I guess..
During the pandemic I bought fifty grand of mocap gear to keep shooting virtually.
Are you a filmmaker? Because this tech helps me tell stories more directly than photons captured on extremely expensive glass, set dressing full of cheats and tricks, and spreadsheets of logistics.
I have several films coming out in theaters that use ArtCraft.
I'm working on anime reboots of several popular series from the 80's and 90's. Full licensing and original authors on board.
I'm talking to several major bands, huge directors, and tons of people in the space. I've talked to the leadership at many of the big studios and I'm working on deals.
I promise I care more about film than you do. I spend so much energy on it that it consumes me.
Hollywood already makes slop. Some of the projects that get greenlit are downright terrible. You don't need AI to make slop.
There are hundreds of AI filmmakers doing absolutely phenomenal work, and the pool is rapidly growing. You don't criticize early CG film for relying on imprecise Blinn-Phong shading, yet people who aren't even trying to carve sculptures out of the new kind of clay are eager to jump on AI rendering artifacts while discounting AI works as a whole.
An AI short film can take months and months of labor. An AI aided scene can take weeks. It's work. It's not "prompt and done".
What sucks is that I know a room full of people that went to expensive film school and wound up in support roles where they never got to helm their dream projects. Hollywood funding was never amenable to following your vision as your heart desired. We've been fortunate in software to not live with that curse. How many young Scorseses withered on the vine because they couldn't access the capital they needed to tell the stories their heart desired? AI is going to fix that.
I post stuff I make on reddit and the teenagers (or grown men?) say things like, "your mother should have used a coat hanger if she knew you'd use AI". And it's almost a daily occurrence on social media.
I'm having a great time, and you don't have to join the club. Do whatever you want with your life. But stop talking to us like this.
I get that what I posted here is a critical refutation and not simply a neutral art or tech post about AI to a friendly audience. It invites critique and that's fine. But all the same, why do people go out of their way to frame it like this? To dunk on positive things and experiences people are having?
Because you (and your legion of likeminded folks on pseudosocial media) indeed sound like some washed-up, self-delusional salesman with a loaded gun to his head, desperately trying to land that sales pitch. And that's before we come to address all the usual cheap clichés, false equivalences, or if you wrote that slop yourself in the first place, etc.
That said, I do hate genAI, and so have decent grounds for guessing why people would say things like that.
In my case, my employers have mandated LLM usage and all but banned actually programming, and I can see it rotting my ability to code and understand things.
That is extremely demoralizing, and I expect others going through it would be very likely to lash out in anger when they see people praising genAI as amazing and wonderful.
Distinct from that, those of us who have at one point supported ourselves in a purely artistic domain we love, such as music or illustration, are deeply saddened to see genAI destroying the opportunity to be paid to do those things we love. We hope that other humans will continue to invest their wealth into art made by humans, but clearly some are not, and that group may grow as the generators get better.
The pain of seeing the opportunities you had destroyed, both for yourself and for others, is made even more acute when you see someone shouting about how wonderful the tools causing the destruction are. Angry aggression is the expected result, we humans being what we are.
Finally, many of us in the anti-genAI camp are both able to see that the tools can be effective force-multipliers, but can also see the manifold negative externalities of genAI: on-demand propaganda, genAI psychosis, anonymous virtual rape (I don't know a better way to describe generating and distributing videos of actual humans doing sex acts they've never done), super-persuader scammers, potential massive job loss, concentration of social / political power into the GPU-holders' hands, accelerated climate change from the massive resource consumption, actual unaligned paperclip optimizers (see e.g. the HuggingFace hack, which is a textbook example of a monkeys-paw / paperclipper scenario), actually-effective mass surveillance, the increasing risk of bioterrorism at massive scale, and the looming possibility that an ASI evolved from these systems will actually bring us to "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" or extinction scenarios.
If you see all that, the urge to bully, insult, and denigrate people who are choosing all those consequences by using the things is very strong. Viewed from this angle, it's certainly hard not to conclude that those of us using genAI are being very, very selfish, choosing personal benefit over the collective good.
I feel guilty daily for not having the courage to refuse to use and accept the economic consequences (if I weren't a special-needs family's primary breadwinner, I would just refuse and accept the consequences).
Again, I'm sorry people are responding abusively to you, and I hope I will never react that way.
Have I helped you see why people might react cruelly to your comments?
It’s not like I’ve never heard the points you mentioned before, but I think you did a great job of assembling these ideas and presenting them in a sensible way… it’s legitimately made me far more empathetic to the AI haters and perhaps has even tempered my near-term optimism about AI.
I say near-term because I’m not so optimistic about AI in the medium- or long-term. And the short term may well be tiny.
Yes, *you* are able to leverage your previous expertise *that you spent years accumulating with your own mind* to productivitymaxx to the extreme and work on all the things. AI is awesome for people who know what they're doing. This is well-documented.
What is _also_ true is that people think less to a lot less when they defer work to AI. For those who are getting into this industry or learning new things (i.e. the people that you will eventually NOT hire for your growing business that you MIGHT have hired in the past), that is an absolutely terrible thing to have happen. This is _also_ well documented. Your success does not refute that.
I think there is a whole generation of people who were so culturally starved during their formative years they can only see a blank canvas as a useless white square.
"Who is going to buy a painting of a white square?"
> 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again.
Who do you think was responsible for that dystopia? It wasn't those people you mentioned, who built the 70% of the old internet. The enshittification started when the people whose passion in life is to make money caught the scent of money-making potential the internet had.
But then, how did those people actually accomplish the enshittification we're dealing with now? The answer is: with the enthusiastic help of the True Believers. Crypto is the best example. Just recall how many devs were convinced that the blockchain was going to revolutionize everything. And I mean devs. Not snake-oil peddlers in suits, not LinkedIn influencers, none of the usual posse of posers, but people who actually wrote code and were reasonably good at that.
And that's not the only example, just the best one. I've been there myself. Back when OOP, UML, capital-A Agile, CMMi, and MDA (Model Driven Architecture) were the Hot New Thing, I was one of the True Believers, following the trends and proselytizing my colleagues.
Every bit of the dystopia you lament was pushed by the combination of ambitious MBAs and True Believer devs.
And the reason I bring this up is because you're one of those True Believers now. It's easy to fall into that trap. All you need is to have enough good experiences with the Hot New Thing to suppress your critical thinking and believe that this will Make Everything Great Again.
The same kind of people who profited off the tech dystopia you saw are now ushering a new, worse tech dystopia that you're turning a blind eye to. Your belief that this new tech will somehow balance and even counteract what those people did to the internet you loved is not based in facts. It's faith.
I have found in the last year I "get more done" but I learn less. Whats even worse is if I burn though my token quota I am less likely(and less able) to "switch to manual". LLMs make an ocean of decisions and assumptions very quickly and if you don't slow it down very intentionally (and lose the promise of the AI providers are pitching) you will quickly not have a good idea of how systems work.
My actual coding ability is probably lower, but I’ve learned so much about music theory and production, CAD, and statistics. All because my hobby projects can go so much further than before.
OTOH, the output might stick?
Then the question becomes do you value knowledge for its own sake or for what it enables you to do? I don't have an answer.
I don’t expect it to be any different with AI, but YMMV.
How I experience it at least, there is no free lunch. Something that gives you knowledge and experience will almost by definition be painful and uncomfortable.
We use AI because it is faster, but that speed has a consequence.
I’d say both are valid. I’m definitely an outcome person. I like making things. I’m taking a multi-year break from a decades-long CNC ceramics project, and I have no doubt my knowledge and skills will atrophy. That’s fine, I’m confident I can pick them up again if/when I return.
If I fail to work hard enough on understanding the physics of alternate tunings and rely “too much” on AI to produce a piece, I’m ok with that. If and when I hit a wall and AI isn’t giving the results I want, I’ll dive deeper.
This is familiar territory for me as I prefer to do a breadth first survey of something I’m trying to learn before digging in to an actual project with depth to make all the mistakes and blunders that make you actually good at something.
AI can still be a huge help here. I don’t really use AI to write the actual code. I will be tooting along, in the flow state, and then bang off a question or request like “how would you write this block of code” “how does this API work?”, and then just take what it says under advisement.
I find as soon as I start accepting what the AI says without critical thinking or just hitting the “apply block” button, it’s time to take a break. I use CoPilot and I barely touch 40% token spend per month and to me it’s the best way to work, I am always engaged, have a full mental model of what I’m working on, and have someone pushing back and criticizing what I’m writing. This gets you out of tutorial hell, but keeps you motivated because you’re not always staring at a blank code window wondering where to start.
For my project I use Gemini/Google's AI mode to great effect. Quick answers to be reminded about syntax, and to get help when stuck. It actually enhances the flow state. Plus it's all free.
We used to call it "seeing through the code". The moment when you're no longer looking at text on a page, you're seeing what it does as you scroll through it.
What you need most, to get to that place, is to simply spend a lot of time writing and reading code until it becomes second nature. Something like 10,000 hours.
Once you've done that, reading an LLM's code is trivial. But letting it write most of the code, without reviewing it line by line, causes rapid brain atrophy. Because to really be in the zone, you need to keep everything relevant in your head. Which means it has to be in there in the first place.
I used to listen to classical music, rap or hip hop, but lately I’ve moved toward those long focus playlists on YouTube and things like Brain.fm. They seem to help me, so I was curious whether other people deliberately use something to get into that state or whether it just happens through the work itself.
It's something common to a lot of creative fields, that moment where u enter a sort of hyper-focused state where the line between you and the code blurs and you operate at peak efficiency.
It quite literally feels like overclocking your brain. I miss it a lot.
You said you miss that state a lot. What changed? Is it related to using AI more when coding or something else?
If you don’t enjoy programming keep trying, have the language or api docs open and do not use generative AI. Generative AI just gets you outcomes. An artist paints because they like painting, not because they like a pile of painted pictures.
With AI coding it suddenly feels like there are so many possibilities. My biggest problem now is almost the opposite: trying not to chase every idea and keeping myself focused on building one thing. There’s definitely a dopamine hit in seeing visible progress regularly :)
As someone who gets "in the zone" like the person you're replying to, I just don't get how this could possibly be the same thing. "Coming back later" doesn't make any sense when you're in that state. Stopping and waiting is a killer. You're just constantly doing things without necessarily consciously thinking about it.
Do you mean you're switching continually between the twelve sessions? Or literally "coming back" in a different sort of operating mode?
The closest thing to it for me using AI tools is specifically not running multiple "agents" but making targeted changes over and over and over but with a 10x+ increase in typing-vs-change ratio. (This also rules out things like Opus let alone Fable as they're just too slow and do too much at once.)
I point at the violins. I gesture the drums upwards. Sometimes I make a big broad gesture that encompasses the entire orchestra.
My agents are tasked, in part, with explaining the context with mockups and examples I can poke at for each job.
I don't really get in the zone for raw code typing, that's always been a slog.
I get more distracted if I attempt to focus on just one thing for a day.
Different brains.
Well hang on, why wouldn't you just have another agent planning Y for you? And then just come back and review what it comes up with?
Before AI, the only way I could get in the flow was by isolating myself from everything to avoid direct distractions (phone, emails, IM...) or indirect (having something else on my mind). It was something I was able to achieve only a few times a year. It did felt incredible. As soon I was getting stuck on something tedious, I had to resort to a web search and it broke the flow.
With AI, I can achieve this state every weekend for personal projects, and every day I'm WFH or when I'm alone in my corner of the office. I start with a list of goals/tasks, put X agents at work (I prefer working on multiple projects in parallel, with only one task per project) and while they're doing their stuff, I'm thinking about the next steps, filling the backlog, catching issues needing rework... I don't get stuck: either the agent we'll offer a workaround, or I'll push it in the backlog. Most often, the solution comes to me while I'm not in front of my computer. I can focus on the big picture, the actual problems that I'm trying to solve. Yesterday I did exactly this: started at 8am, leaving my desk just to fill my water bottle or empty my bladder... and it's only because a friend came to my place at 8pm that I stopped. I thought I was at it for only two hours...
I hate how this comment can make me look as an AI preacher; but I'm not trying to convince anyone to stop doing anything they're doing because I found the ultimate solution. No. I'm just describing how I'm enjoying _doing stuff_ on the computer more than I ever did in the ~30 years I've been doing it.
Another caveat is this was a graduate course, so I would expect more maturity and integrity on average than an undergrad course. But anecdotally I thought it was an interesting result.
[0] https://exploiting.systems/posts/2026-05-17-learning-focused...
But broadly my preliminary findings after a year or so:
1. AI gets you to that MVP 80% dopamine rush and then takes all that dopamine away if you lean into doing the last 20% with it. But if you try to do the last 20% yourself, you will experience the joy of agentic coding style and you will lose the ability to even produce dopamine. I use these things to build PoCs, not products.
2. The haters mostly have no idea how amazing getting to that 80% really is as a technological achievement and they are mostly stuck at Stochastic Parrot. And 3 days of the ungimped Fable demonstrated to me most of that remaining 20% is achievable, but not with gimping and/or production optimizations by the frontier labs.
3. If you want to see the promise and the limits of coding agents, you have to try to build something with them. But if you hate AI, you've already made up your mind and no amount of evidence will sway you, so don't bother.
4. These things are hideously power inefficient. And Moore's Law is out of steam. While we could stand up renewable and nuclear to power this, there are factions that hate one or the other more than they hate AI so good luck with that.
5. The San Francisco AGI cult is 100% unhelpful and the C-suite linkedin lunatics who take them seriously are even worse.
I'm reading a book written in the 90s but set in the 1980s where one of the assertions was that America is incompatible with technocracy. Prophetic methinks.
*No this does not mean I have some sort of 10x engineer privilege compared to GenZ and how will they ever learn to code? No, this just means I got the crap kicked out of me in grade school and consistently dismissed as weird growing up with the parents of those GenZ kids who have landed in a disturbing culture of learned helplessness and social media addiction built by an unholy cabal of GenX and GenY. They built it, they can fix it. Won't someone finally think of the chiiiilldren? Especially the weird ones that could replace me and outdo me?
It’s when we put arbitrarily impossible deadlines that AI users learn nothing
First year AI is teach assistive coding using llms with open source models. Setup a workbench llm for each student to have with an openweight model on it. Teach different ways of getting good results and go over setting up the whole environment yourself.
The next year do a 4hr lab in a lab room with office chairs, variable height desks, and model it off an open office. No special dress code, but name tags and people will talk to each other with the openness of dialog at a good workplace. This even gives the TA usable experience. You could introduce different structures with leads or co-equals or any useful team structure.
People need to be taught in-person working skills because companies don't want to hire people without experience. This also helps someone be able to interview for a work from home job.
My heart sank when I saw this post. I thought we’d created enemies!
No conflict here, though.
Personal example... A few weeks ago, I realized that with all these agents running and all the things I could be working on, I was spending my days managing shallow pings instead of going deep.
I have AI agents managing SEO and ad spend. I used to spend a little time every day reading what each had to say. Now each gives me one detailed report per week, with links to the underlying reports and specific things I need to look at. I block 90 minutes for each one, on different days, and use that time to go deep. It’s helped a lot.
I've also seen how insanely good at doing a total rewrite / modernization the models can be.
Now the entire world has a calculator in their pocket, and all that wrote memorization not only made me hate math as a child, it was a giant waste of time.
I suspect that one day we'll look back on advice like no-AI Fridays exactly as modern readers would react to "Punch-card only Tuesdays" in a modern enterprise.
Not using a calculator as a kid for math is pretty important, because the goal is to develop intuition. Same for software, playing music, learning a language. You have to keep some level of friction to develop and keep your intuition
I dunno, I think this example kind of works in the opposite direction. If we're talking about memorising tables of logarithms or something, then yeah that was a complete waste of time. But a lot of the stuff kids would like to skip because calculators can do it is the absolute basics. IMO it is still important to have a solid grasp of arithmetic, useful to have enough trigonometry that you intuitively understand where it can be useful, and so on. (Much more so if you want to leave open the possibility of studying further mathematics.) And for people to whom these things don't come naturally, you really need to drill it a bit in order to develop the conceptual understanding.
I don't know exactly where this does and doesn't apply to programming/CS, though. I would like to think that a lot of the fundamentals will remain useful, but maybe that will only be true for a few specialised workers and self-motivated hobbyists.
I don't even about sailing 100+nm off shore.
people assume every point of earth is somewhy equivalent to their porch.
in 2023 I had a pretty nice night ~4km from a town in Montenegro. I could even see it from the mountain I was at and still had to sleep under a bush because I was not prepared enough. Thanks to thousands years of history they have ancient outlets for mountain springs so you can have drinkable water in most unexpected places while walking down from a misadventure.
Imagine that happening ~20km off civilization. Unprepared one will just die, iphone+satellites or no.
I have no intention of doing that. I'm not an explorer. I don't own a boat that is both big enough to travel that far, but small enough not to have satellite internet. I own approximately zero pith helmets and know zero sherpas.
I’d make a joke about there not being a word for the reverse of plagiarism, except there is one: lying.
Giving yourself time to be idle and let a problem marinate is often where the breakthroughs and good ideas come from. If taste and human judgment are what separate useful AI output from slop, we need to give our brains time to cook instead of constantly bouncing between agents.
Which reminds me of when we were admonished to continue using assembly, lest our "real" skills atrophy from too much cushy C development.
Which reminds me of when we were admonished to keep our scope and probe skills sharp, and read and understand the schematics of whatever computer we were on, lest we forget how to diagnose faults in its components.
Which reminds me of when we were admonished to practice calculating in our heads and keeping slide rule skills sharp, lest they atrophy to a calculator.
You don't need to "keep practicing" in order to maintain your understanding.
The best engineers know how our systems work down to more levels, but for average developers producing average software with average impact, average output is acceptable.
In the snow.
Uphill.
Both ways.
And they were right. People used in interpreted and GC ones lost most if not all the ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory.
Today's bloated "1GB RAM for a small form app" apps are the results of this.
>You don't need to "keep practicing" in order to maintain your understanding.
You 100% need to.
It's not that they lost it, but rather that they never learned it. I didn't lose my ability to reason about those things during the 4 years where I worked in Python and Java.
And once again, for average software devs that's fine. Most non-critical software that doesn't perform very complex tasks can be optimized for time-to-market, which of course loses in other areas the business doesn't care as much about (such as bloat).
When that's not the case, you hire a specialist.
It's clearly absurd to abandon GC languages or to require everyone who uses one to learn assembly. Yes, it could be beneficial to learn the lowest levels of the machine, but with an opportunity cost. Advocates of many such principles are often those who have already paid that opportunity cost and consequently see no downside.
There has always been a known trade off with how much you need to know about a system against the practical ability to make something that someone uses.
If we talk directly to the practicality issue, what happens when AI can rewrite a program written in a highly expressive, but inefficient, language? A future AI might be able to turn a bloated prototype into a sleek, high performance, program where every byte is justified.
Then it would be absolutely true that a programmer who did not know the low level intricacies would not know how to do that for themselves, but would they need to? If they can make the things that they want to make and those things do not have obvious limitations, they could be learning a skill more relevant to the world that they live in.
By all means, learn assembly if you think it is interesting. I have learned Asm (and indeed written assemblers) for a variety of systems. I won't hold it against someone if they spend the time figuring out cross entropy instead.
What if I told you the "best engineers" pretty much all know the same things? The tools they use at work and the code they write to get paid doesn't reflect even half of what they know.
There will always be situations where a problem goes deep enough to leverage experiences from outside of the usual work role.
What if I told you that your "specialists", AI or not, are going to be objectively far worse at actually getting things done because they don't have the bigger picture in mind?
We've seen this race to the bottom in other disciplines before. Software is so special and lucky that all you have to do to prevent this is not use AI while lying to your boss that you are. When the boss finds out, they stop paying for AI and everyone is happy again.
I'd say that you need to provide some evidence for this extraordinary claim.
> What if I told you that your "specialists", AI or not, are going to be objectively far worse at actually getting things done because they don't have the bigger picture in mind?
I'd say that you need to provide some evidence for this extraordinary claim.
> We've seen this race to the bottom in other disciplines before.
Such as?
Anyone who chose to specialize went the vocational route of getting certifications and playing the contractor game. They have never truly handled anything on fire. They never stick around long enough to, and that's the whole point for them.
This pattern already happened in the (blue collar) "trades". It started in the late 20th century. Now we have some of the worst built homes, buildings, roads, etc. People will (sort of) put up with a pothole or leaky roof. They will not put up with major infrastructure outages or showstopper bugs that directly impact their minute-to-minute ability to function in modern society.
Do we really want to make this even worse with automated AI copypasta pretending to be "engineering"? Nobody is fooled. The cost cutting is hitting rock bottom, and tons of people overexposed to AI in their investments are about to lose their shirts.
Your "proof" is all there for anyone to find. Ask anyone outside your bubble.
They also started before that era, and after. I've met plenty of them throughout my career, and still do every so often. They were never very common.
> They wore all the hats
This isn't unique to that era.
> In that era, the devs at a startup were the "everything people".
They still are. You do everything because you don't have the resources to hire for any positions.
> Anyone who chose to specialize went the vocational route of getting certifications and playing the contractor game.
That depends on your definition of "specialize". I'm using it in the sense of learning one particular aspect well (in addition to anything else you learn). Certifications and contracting have nothing to do with it.
> This pattern already happened in the (blue collar) "trades". It started in the late 20th century. Now we have some of the worst built homes, buildings, roads, etc.
This is certainly true in the USA, although I'd argue that it's the companies cutting costs (and corners) rather than the tradespeople becoming unskilled. In most first world countries there are standards and audits that keep companies (mostly) in line so that you don't get disasters-in-waiting like the new Bay Bridge.
> Do we really want to make this even worse with automated AI copypasta pretending to be "engineering"? Nobody is fooled.
Like with any force multiplier tool, you get the early days where every Joe is pumping out crap (same kind of thing happened with COBOL), and then the shake-out happens where companies realize that it's not a free lunch, and you need skilled people after all.
I also support No GenAI every day ending in a Y, but I support this, too.
TODO: insert something about open source, beer, free beer, someone else's beer, trading beer, subgenius, slack etc etc
I have no idea how people can spend 40 hours a week interacting with those sycophantic random number generators, its like having the most annoying linkedin influencer you can imagine DM'ing you all day.
How is this supposed to work? Like emulate an agent with my brain and write down the output?
Sarcasm aside, I think there's a real phenomenon of AI removing the experience of getting stuck on a problem (where often I'll wake up the next day with a perfect solution in my head ready to implement). The same way social media removed the experience of "being bored".
It takes an agent on the order of 100 billion operations to produce a single token. A person (generously) taking just a second for a single mental addition or multiplication would take tens of thousands of years to write just a single line of code.
"Accumulate cognitive debt": The paper is a preprint, isn't peer reviewed, and has already had a rather blistering critique (https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00856) that raises concerns about sample size, reproducibility of the analyses, EEG methodology, inconsistent reporting, and transparency. Also the fact that they infer EEG connectivity = learning without evidence.
"Less engaged with your work": Doesn't measure engagement with work. It measured motivation, boredom, and sense of control on small tasks like writing a post or an email. The effects are small, and some of them cut against the site's thesis.
"Negatively impact your critical thinking abilities": It's a survey of knowledge workers about past tasks. It doesn't measure critical thinking ability at all. Even the paper's title says "Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects". It doesn't establish causation, and the direction is ambiguous.
"Hamper your skill formation": The one paper that has something, showing that using AI without learning about the things it's doing reduces knowledge acquisition (note it does not test retention). HOWEVER, the best AI users matched or beat the no-AI group!
> When we offload decision-making, we become unaware of the trade-offs.
My biggest issue with the new agentic workflow is that I'm constantly asked to make decisions, and it is not always immediately obvious how important they are. Like, yes, I see the people who just write 'implement feature x' and then call it a day. These people were lazy und uncreative to begin with, and will continue to cognitively decline with AI. But if you use it seriously, you're in a constant state of doing requirements engineering, weighing trade-offs, and making architecture decisions.
This is useful when iterating on UI, where I need to make a few minor changes; or when I need to "explore" to understand how a query or data model needs to work.
Otherwise, I don't need to dedicate a day to doing things by hand; I just do a few things by hand every day.
So anyways, I fully embrace and support the idea of bouncing your code off the compiler every Friday. It's what I do and I can really tell those skills need practice even after just a week.
The key is to find a good compromize between both expectations and it also depends on the conditions.
Could be another case for four-day work weeks, especially if AI is supposedly improving productivity during those four days a week.
For things you want to learn: Are you asking to have something solved, or are you asking for information so you can solve it?
There may be detrimental learning effects even with asking llms for information, but I think there's a fundamental difference in addressing it as an intern/slave vs teacher/tutor.
And its four preprints and one published one with an extremely weak experiment.
But seriously who offloads decision-making to LLMs? Thats the main thing they can't do proper.
Why only Friday? What does “doing things the old way” one day a week prove or benefit when you spend 90% of your time working with AI?
Tech people who have their entire identities wrapped up in being smart or the best engineer in the room have suddenly learned that intelligence is now a commodity and a cheap one at that.
Also, being intelligent is still important. Enabling the dumbest people in the room to dump their tidal wave of slop on others isn’t really a positive.
[Edit] just seen that OP is pitching this rather than practicing it. I wonder if any team actually do have a practice like this...
I'm not a CEO. If I don't own the code I write, I couldn't care less. Personal code is another story.
As to learning, are there really any adults offloading learning to AI?
> Study after study shows that using LLMs can cause you to accumulate cognitive debt, make you less engaged with your work, negatively impact your critical thinking abilities, and hamper your skill formation.
False
I've learned more, I am more engaged, it has positively impacted my critical thinking abilities and has increased my skill formation
For me it's AI 24/7 even on sundays
If it’s just your own datapoint, is it difficult to self assess?
My employer gifted me all that years before LLMs were released.
To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
That is not minimising.
If your plan is to offload a task to AI, do you really need to dedicate your attention to it?
Role playing we're all that smart while our economic behavior (I mean resource use not financial) suggests the opposite is really making me question the idea keeping electrical activity in the brain up is a sign of intelligence
Making life better for ourselves just going to make it worse for everyone eventually.
Having language to describe physics does not mean we control physics now. Entropy doesn't give a shit; we are its agents on Earth. Humans will destroy the structure of a human friendly environment. The only choice we have is 50-100 years or 1,000 based on how fast we consume it
I'm having a great time building personal web apps with exactly the features I want, and I also enjoy refactoring the source code to get closer to how I would ideally write it. I can use a coding agent to do both. What's not to like?
I stopped editing source code by hand as a self-imposed limitation to see how far I could go by prodding AI to do things my way, and it turns out it's pretty far, so I'm sticking with it.
Which isn't to say that writing code by hand can't be fun, too, under the right circumstances.
It also helps that I’m retired and this is hobby programming. If you’re being forced into it by circumstances at work, that wouldn’t be nearly as fun.
Reading code is way less enjoyable than writing it
Not using AI is similar to giving employees 20% of their time for any non-sprint work.
This privilege of No AI usage a day will lower the productivity, and rarely any companies will allow it (if they track your usage, which I am sure they do)
The end goal of every AI initiative is to lower headcount, if your employer is forcing AI usage you are digging your own grave.
I used "time" as privilege, not as AI as it's given as premise in the article. You didn't even attempt to decode my comment with the article content in the first place.
> The end goal of every AI initiative is to lower headcount, if your employer is forcing AI usage you are digging your own grave
The "trend" nowadays shows other ways.
And also Jevons paradoxe in the works. The more you use AI, the more work will spawn.
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you are just trying to pick a fight
@TRACK: DarmokTanagra
By "trend nowadays" I assume you're just choosing not to count the 700k layoffs in tech sector since 2022?
Show me all of the new products Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc have "spawned" since force feeding AI to their remaining staff. 100 different permutations for sycophantic AI models and fact simulators don't count.