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'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.
To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
[Edit] just seen that OP is pitching this rather than practicing it. I wonder if any team actually do have a practice like this...
> 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?
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.
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.
Could be another case for four-day work weeks, especially if AI is supposedly improving productivity during those four days a week.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
If your plan is to offload a task to AI, do you really need to dedicate your attention to it?
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.