Programmers need to start meditating(jacob.gold) |
Programmers need to start meditating(jacob.gold) |
I'm generally hyper rationalist, so this was a very interesting experience, and it happened because a random thing one of my friends said about meditation made something "click" in me.
It lasted about a day, I can't say I have any lasting effects from it now. It'd be interesting to see if I can make it happen again, but when I was in that state, I thought that trying to make it happen would defeat the purpose.
It's true that the proportion of founders has increased both in the US and in my country, Korea.
And unlike the old days, it feels like what's needed now isn't so much deep, concentrated programming knowledge in one area, but rather broad knowledge across many fields. The claim that "productivity has increased" really only applies to freelancers. In fact, there's been a noticeable increase in freelance outsourcing requests that would be hard to handle without AI, lots of short deadline gigs compared to before. And of course, that makes it harder to charge appropriately.
For teams, on the other hand, you still need things like code reviews and team decision making.
As an individual, I've practically become someone who just writes up a gate, lets AI handle the code, checks that the core domain doesn't break, watches the gate's rules, and pulls the lever.
The reason team work slows down is mainly because Agile methodologies and code review processes are still human centric and consensus driven, and human cognitive speed itself becomes the bottleneck.
So I can understand a lot of the arguments that come up in the comments. The important thing is that most people tend to only see their own situation and their own context, which makes it hard for them to understand others.
…sure you are buddy, sure you are…
Note to self: book appointment with Optometrist ASAP to correct how far my eyes have rolled back into my head.
I must admit, if this is the new way of doing software development (eg: not actually programming but working with LLMs) I am not going to stick around for that long. It's not what I fell on love with, it's not what I trained for etc. I may as well do a job I don't enjoy that lets me rest my brain for later.
That might change with time, but for now, all I see AI used for is additional code review and side scripts/tooling that don't need to be safety rated.
Of course, that might mean entirely switching language (C, C++ or increasingly but still in minority Rust), learning entirely different skills (control system theory, real time systems, possibly formal verification but usually not), etc.
No such thing! Companies that aren't already actively using AI for embedded development are looking closely at it and experimenting with procedures to incorporate into their workflow. Why anyone would think that a company would ignore a potential improvement to their bottom line is beyond me.
Yeah, it might take a while, but it will happen faster than you think.
The move-fast-break-things crowd is going to come after these as well, along with medical and defense software where lives are fully on the line. Sure, there will be failures and needless deaths and bombings of elementary schools, but that's just the price of being on the bandwagon.
When it comes to joy killers because of AI, then it is dismal how plagiarism (going by the definition of "presenting someone else's work without attribution") suddenly became widely accepted. When I see long lists of bullet points with interspersed bold text, I know that it is something the sender did not write or bother reviewing. Absolute cherry on top when in the end of that text you see the typical LLM suggestion that you can ask for more information, which the sender didn't even bother removing.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7614709/
The issue with roles close to business is that it doesn’t provide the right soil for good engineering . Your stakeholders have no concept of engineering and wants everything ASAP; Your manager is just a yes man who takes all tickets, and want you to use AI for everything because it’s so easy and quick; Your VP thinks your team is not moving quickly enough; Your VP puts speed before quality literally.
The thing is, I believe that some roles and some industries just don’t care about good engineering. If you want to be a good engineer, you have to stay away from them, even if they are high paying, and get yourself into a system programming role, in a company that fails you if you do not have good engineering practices. The only way to be a good engineer is to put yourself in such an environment that you will almost surely fail if you are not a good one. There is a cool-aid and many engineers drink that the most important thing is "business value", and I politely vomit that all out a while ago. The new rule is to become an engineer that they are still willing to pay you even if you spit on their faces.
Those roles and companies can die and I don’t give a fuck about those business clowns.
but you can prompt for 8 hours more or less
like running versus cycling - you can cover more distance by cycling and it's less intensive (I'm talking casual running/cycling, not racing
agents are a bicycle for the mind
Is it because the prompts matter less?
On the subject: some people find meditation very helpful, others find it a net negative, or useless, or impossible to do. So a categorical "you should do this" isn't correct or particularly helpful. Try it, if it works for you, great; but don't put it about that people who aren't doing it are being negligent in some way.
Absolutely. I've tried mediation in many situations and some classes but it's just not for me. My ADHD brain doesn't work that way. It's painfully boring and not relaxing at all. What does work for me is a walk through nature after a stressful day. There's another thing that works even better but too fringey and a bit nsfw to go into detail :) But anyway mediation definitely does not.
You need to find what works for you.
Pushing through that is what leads to progress.
Meditation is like physical exercise, it's not exactly "fun" at the time, you sort of have to learn to enjoy it, but it's never easy. Like exercise the real reward is backloaded
A most elementary form of meditation, is getting used to placing your attention on a sensation and keeping it anchored there - even when other sensations or thoughts arise.
Following the breath- place your awareness, your attention, on the sensation of air passing through your nostrils. Count one inbreath and outbreath cycle as «1», and count until 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how many repetitions of 10 or 21 you will do.
If at any point your attention has drifted to a different sensation - seeing, hearing etc, or thinking, visual imagery etc, then congratulate yourself for noticing, and restart from «1».
I recommend «The attention revolution» by Alan B. Wallace
It is rare to see laypeople discuss some of the different types and which one may be best suited for a particular goal.
If the goal is simply relieving stress, performing some sport outdoors —especially team sports— is probably more effective than any meditation, for most people.
Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...
So no, I will not be "meditating". My meditative states tend to be beard stroking and occasional F bomb.
1. Sit somewhere comfortable. Sitting "cross legged" or with your "back straight" as the guide linked to above advocates is not necessary. A comfortable chair/couch is fine.
2. The room should preferably be quiet. Though if you have the privilege of access to an outdoor courtyard that's quiet other than birdsong and chirp of insects, you'll probably enjoy it more. But a quiet room is good enough.
3. Phase 1: Set a timer on your watch/phone for 5 mins. Close your eyes. And let your mind wander. Doesn't matter what your mind drifts towards.
4. Phase 2: Restart the 5 min timer. Now, try quieten your mind of thoughts and focus instead on just your breathing. Be gentle with yourself. Your mind will wander again and that's fine. Just gently nudge it back to your breathing.
That's pretty much it. Slowly, over months try and increase Phase 2 from 5 to 10 mins.
When I described this to my partner, I used the analogy of treating your mind like a curious eager pup. In the first phase, cutting of external stimulus of sight by closing your eyes is like having the pup with you in a closed room.
In phase 2, you gently hold the puppy near you and get it to quiet down and stay still.
She mentioned that this analogy helped her a lot.
Honestly, this is pretty much the gist of it. I suspect that you will likely get most of the benefits of advanced meditative techniques with just the 2 simple steps from above. YMMV.
Be patient though. Getting to a fully calm state of mind takes months of practice.
Of course you also might exhaust yourself to some degree, as your own expectation might be that you can develop multiple things in parallel, while also having to review a lot of code where you might not have context, so in a way you have to hold more high level context in your brain state, what might be somewhat stressful. However, when you have been tech lead once, all of that is somewhat familiar.
And if you can't, THAT should be a big red warning sign for you.
But sure, if the most important thing is to mass produce tons of shitty code, it's your life - just don't give people dumb advice on what they NEED to do. :)
I’m sure many people produce more than me, but I retain my sanity as well as a high level of understanding of the code that I produce, which in my domain I feel is still important. I’ve tried ultracode-style subagent workflows and find that they rapidly produce reams of slop that I don’t have the patience or energy to properly review.
I also meditate quite a bit.
I have also done meditation, but I struggle to keep it up for long. I think you should really do it consistently to get majority of effects. Coding, exercising, drawing has always been an easier form of meditation for me.
Chess-players too are in a very "meditative" state when they play, and they enjoy it, I assume because it let's them focus on the game and forget about everything else.
Then why get overwhelmed by LLMs and meditate to calm down, when you can just write the code yourself at a healthier pace? Tools are supposed to be designed around humans, it’s not the human that has to adapt to the machine.
In any case, meditating with an end to destress or to reach higher levels of productivity is missing the point of meditation.
This is a common thing to say, but when during the development of human civilization has this actually been the case? Is agriculture designed around humans more than hunting/gathering? Is industrialized work more designed around humans than agrarian society?
I don't mean to sound pessimistic or technocratic; quite the contrary. But I think we shouldn't project our desire for equanimity onto romantized versions of civilization.
The point of being an experienced programmer is thinking in data structures and transformations, not in prose. Why would I introduce all that friction?
You should ____
Everyone is full of advice for others lmao
He told me that wasn’t normal, and I shouldn’t have to meditate just to function at work :’)
Was he a judgmental person in general? Or do you think he had an aversion to meditating?
I do have to say, if you were encouraging him to ALSO start meditating, I'd hate that too.
I did not encourage him to, this was just during a weekly 1:1 where I was sharing with him how I’ve been coping with the amount of workload and chaos happening among the team/myself.
He was wanting to empathize me that it’s not normal to have to do that to be functional at work, acknowledging how rough things were at the time.
I kept doing it, but fell out of practice. Also left and no longer work there, due to stress and poor support. Shocker.
What an utter piece of BS. AI goons really like to smell their own crap
As a fellow ADHD person I didn't get out the first few times I tried, but now find it quite helpful.
This is assuming you fully trust AI code. AI is still not perfect and sometimes might produce code with insufficient quality even when it works. For example, it can fix a bug in a wrong way, such as removing the symptoms instead of fixing the root cause. And so on. Also, I still have to review and test that generated code, especially in complex systems. Yes, AI reduces coding time, but at the expense of increasing the review / testing time, and review is not something all developers enjoy (both as reviewer and someone who is reviewed). This still doesn't seem to be something that has negligible cost of context switching. Also, AI tends to make you more lazy and care less about understanding the requirements. I'll prefer manual coding with some AI assistance for boring / repetitive tasks and finding potential mistakes for software that I care.
There’s a bunch of different tactics for this. Some people hold office hours. I block off 9am for code review any only do it once per day.
The programs we call agents are nothing like people.
Worth noting that this article is 25 years old. The world was very very different back then, especially when it comes to software engineering.
Context switching is a problem when the cost of switching contexts is non-negligible -- but in the age of agentic development is that still really true? Surely yes for some problems, but for many others I would argue it no longer is.
A personal anecdote for you:
At my company we have a local development CLI our devX team built, it allows for agents to interact with standing up, tearing down and managing local stacks for our software suite. When I receive customer feedback about a broken button, or a poor UX experience, I simply start up a prompt:
/metal user X reported an issue on the trial balance page, they encountered a blank page when using the inception to date filter. We need to investigate the root cause, spin up a new stack, and resolve the bug.
Then off to the next task, maybe some few hours later I'll check back in on the session and I'll see:
> PR created: https://github.com/company/repo/pull/12758295 > QA URL: http://localhost:8400/<url> > Summary of root cause and fix: lorem ipsum lorem ipsum
After a quick QA session I validate the fix, confirm that our claude reviewer has approved the PR and merge the PR to deploy. The mental burden of switching to this task is quite low, orders of magnitude lower than it would be 25 years ago.
This really isn’t a debate. OP is wrong.
Since the OP was about achieving flow state and focus, I thought this was relevant.
I've really tried a LOT during therapy and in some other situations. And it just doesn't work for me. Same with traditional exercise by the way. I can't do exercise in a gym or have those 'gamification' goals, it must be more natural.
At least if the metaphor is about coding as a means to creating usefully functional code as efficiently as possible. Careful coding by hand may eventually be a hobby activity.
Personally, while I do get some satisfaction in coding by hand it was always the production of something useful that I found most rewarding. I was never someone who wrote code for a hobby. With LLM's I'm more productive. And I find that very satisfying.
Didn't Azure, AWS and Cloudflare crash a few times in the second half of 2025 because of vibe coding?
Developement of nuclear power plant software is very conservative, it will use LLMs maybe in 10-15 years.
Asking for myself, some friends and HN community at large.