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- Hacker News
- I am currently on an obsessive coding spree on my side projects where I only use AI to ask questions like I used to do on Stack Overflow. At work it’s nearly 100% AI because quite honestly the AI is more thorough and faster than humanly possible. I don’t get my coding itch scratched at work anymore, so my off work coding has become a necessity for me. At first it felt pointless, I know I could just write a prompt and get the code written in a minute. But now, as the blog post says, I feel my ability degrading and doing things by hand has become really important for me to try to stop that. The question however is whether the new generation of devs will need to be able to write and review code by hand or AI will just do it so much better than humans that it will make no sense to do that, and what the humans will need to focus on instead. I fear this thinking that humans must understand the code and keep the AI from making a mess may be a relic of our pre AI brains, and soon if not now already it’s quite the opposite.by brabel
- The technique I'm following is: If it's easier to explain it to an LLM, have the LLM do it. If it's easier to do it myself, I do it.
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.
by gwbas1c - My old workplace did the opposite: we had All AI Fridays where you had carte blanche to build out AI tooling or just work on AI stuff as long as it's vaguely related to your job.by StilesCrisis
- The problem with this site is that the studies it cites don't match the conclusions it draws.
"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!
by kstenerud - I was personally flabbergasted by this one:
> 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.
by arw0n - >write code with your own hands
How is this supposed to work? Like emulate an agent with my brain and write down the output?
- And what am I supposed to do when I hit a wall solving a problem? Just sleep on it?
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".
by cj - Do not recommend. There’s this stupid hard limit every day which takes like 8 hours to reset no matter how many tokens you usedby wonnage
- Just look at the keyboard and sort all characters by how probable you think they are next, type one and start from the beginning.by xendo
- It is provably impossible to write code manually.
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.
by avian - Got no AI 7 days here. I sold my token budget to other staff and spent the money on beer.by sdcfgy
- I guess alcoholism is cooler than using AI to do things nowadays, is that your stance?by scrollaway
- I support this.
I also support No GenAI every day ending in a Y, but I support this, too.
by Sindisil - Reminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory.
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.
by kstenerud - > 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.
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.
by sublinear - Apples and oranges
- Average output is acceptable at work, sure, and if all you want is a paycheck then yeah I agree, make Claude write all your code, who gives a damn. This advice is for people who want to learnby xgulfie
- This is a paradigm shift. If you know basic arithmetic, a calculator doesn't stop you from knowing how to add or multiply. But AI definitely stops you from learning how to reason. So it's not the same at all.by midtake
- >Reminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory.
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.
by coldtea - I made the site to convince my boss to let me not use AI on Fridays. Hoping to get some noise around it to make him believe it's real.by xendo
- Upvoting for visibility, not because I agree. This is really disingenuous, and quite a bad idea overall.
I’d make a joke about there not being a word for the reverse of plagiarism, except there is one: lying.
by elliotbnvl - I hope your boss listens! :)
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.
by aed - I would actually really recommend people who are using coding agents full time to make AI brakes for your weekend projects. Think of it like a small break to take the time to reconnect to the code and keep your brain muscles intact, a bit like a professional cyclist going for a casual ride in the forest to experience what they don’t experience anymore in their professional life.by dgellow
- This reads like a satire comment.
- Nah, if you not feeling fun coding a project, just use your free time on other stuff that you interested in.by smy20011
- I see where you're coming from, but I can't help being reminded of my youth when teachers would admonish me "YoU wOn'T aLwaAYs haVe A CalCulator in yOuR poCKet!"
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.
- For me its quite the opposite. My employer is too afraid to commit to any of it. Meanwhile, I've built more stable software for myself and my personal computing needs of higher quality and in faster turnaround times.
I've also seen how insanely good at doing a total rewrite / modernization the models can be.
- Oh man, I help host a monthly AI meetup called AI Friday: https://aifri.day
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.
by aed - At the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken.
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.
by Jcampuzano2 - If you’re not learning with AI in play, you sure as sunshine wont be learning anything without AI
It’s when we put arbitrarily impossible deadlines that AI users learn nothing
by lijok