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Comment by noduerme | original | No AI Fridays
[−]noduerme · 2026-08-30 Sun 16:03 UTC · link
I don't think it has to do with sound. Some sounds can disrupt it, of course. I can work well in a noisy cafe as long as I'm not listening to any particular conversation. Although oftentimes, if I'm alone, I talk to myself out loud while I'm coding ("no, not that, it should go here... where's that header? stupid typo...")

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.