I mask as a coping mechanism for ADHD and Social Anxiety. This masking causes me harm. I learned it in the way you describe.
The most helpful learning I've gotten through years of therapy has been to: (1) recognize what I'm doing (2) not beat myself up about it (3) try small steps to change my behavior so that I can feel good about it.
I'm the only person who can unlearn this for myself. I don't blame anyone who masks, and have nothing but empathy for the experience, but I'm proposing they can find a different way.
I still think it's important to (1) notice what's causing the problem, bring it into consciousness (2) understand the behavior (in this case: masking) and reckon with it if if's causing a bad outcome (burnout.)
Easier said than done. For me, therapy has been life-changing for helping me notice and understand unintentional behaviors.
Eh, this just feels like "software engineering simulator." I don't have autism but a good bit of this feels familiar (am I on the spectrum?) I'm an introvert and have struggled to cope with corporate work for a while.
What helps:
- Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
- Owning your calendar and timing for meetings to better suit your energy.
- Regular therapy and reflection, honestly.
- Regular exercise, doesn't matter who you are or what form, this is essential.
I can respect that this "simulation" fosters empathy, but worry that it also awfulizes/catastrophizes solvable problems. Figuring out functional routines and managing burnout is just as big a part of the job as writing code. It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
Hot take: Junior devs are going to be the ones who "know how to build with AI" better than current seniors.
They are entering the job market with sensibilities for a higher-level of abstraction. They will be the first generation of devs that went through high-school + college building with AI.
I'm curious about the "environmentally friendly" promise. How meaningful/measurable would removing these tags be?
I think there's something to be said for efficiency/no wasted bytes, but better for the environment feels like a major stretch/beside the point...
It's like saying "if we all cut out unnecessary adjectives from our speech, it would save 100k gallons of water per day." Could that be true, maybe? But that's not the thing that makes brevity meaningful/important.
(or: Tongue-in-cheek joke that went over my <head>?)
Feels reasonable in the first few paragraphs, then quickly starts reading like science fiction.
Would love to read a perspective examining "what is the slowest reasonable pace of development we could expect." This feels to me like the fastest (unreasonable) trajectory we could expect.
> Important Corollary Two. If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.
> People who aren’t programmers are just looking at the screen and seeing some pixels. And if the pixels look like they make up a program which does something, they think “oh, gosh, how much harder could it be to make it actually work?“
If you lose 8 hrs to weirdness, but save 10 hrs somewhere else, then yeah it does pay for itself.
My argument is that it doesn't need to improve overall productivity much to have positive ROI. Whether you agree that these tools improve productivity or not is another question.
I regret giving my TV my Wi-Fi password. By default, it has some knock-off Alexa assistant that triggers a couple times a day, even when I'm sitting in silence.
It also warns me it will auto-updates the software 1-2 times a month. My TV was perfect out of the box--it doesn't need an update. When I disable Wi-Fi, I get notifications that my TV is disconnected. Can't win.
I'm thinking back to various promises self-driving would be widespread by 2016. These set a certain expectation for how our roads would look that I don't think has been realized a decade later (even as I've ridden in Waymos/FSD Teslas.)
> Using human crash data, Waymo estimated that human drivers on the same roads would get into 78 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag. By comparison, Waymo’s driverless vehicles only got into 13 airbag crashes. That represents an 83 percent reduction in airbag crashes relative to typical human drivers.
> This is slightly worse than last September, when Waymo estimated an 84 percent reduction in airbag crashes over Waymo’s first 21 million miles.
nitpick: Is it really slightly worse, or is it "effectively unchanged" with such sparse numbers? At a glance, the sentence is misleading even though it might be correct on paper. Could've said: "This improvement holds from last September..."
In terms of absolute progress (e.g. towards finishing a feature or MVP) I think it it could have to do with a usual underestimation (optimism) for timelines.
I'm using Cursor mostly for exploratory/weekend projects. I usually opt for stacks/libraries I'm less familiar with, so I think there's some optimism/uncertainty to account for there.
I think there's another aspect to progress involving learning/becoming fluent in a codebase. When I build something from scratch, I become the expert, so familiar that later features become very easy/obvious to implement.
I haven't had this experience when I take a heavily agent-driven approach. I'm steering, but I'm not learning much. The more I progress, the harder new features feel to implement.
I don't think this is unique to working with AI. I guess the takeaway is that attention and familiarity matter.
I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations:
1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which packages to use can mitigate the problem, but it doesn't solve it.
2. The unpredictability of these missteps makes them particularly challenging. A few months ago, I used Claude to "one-shot" a genuinely useful web app. It was fully featured and surprisingly polished. Alone, I think it would've taken a couple weeks or weekends to build. But, when I asked it to update the favicon using a provided file, it spun uselessly for an hour (I eventually did it myself in a couple minutes). A couple days ago, I tried to spin up another similarly scoped web app. After ~4 hours of agent wrangling I'm ready to ditch the code entirely.
3. This approach gives me the brazenness to pursue projects that I wouldn't have the time, expertise, or motivation to attempt otherwise. Lower friction is exciting, but building something meaningful is still hard. Producing a polished MVP still demands significant effort.
4. I keep thinking about The Tortoise and The Hare. Trusting the AI agent is tempting because progress initially feels so much faster. At the end of the day, though, I'm usually left with the feeling I'd have made more solid progress with slower, closer attention. When building by hand, I rarely find myself backtracking or scrapping entire approaches. With an AI-driven approach, I might move 10x faster but throw away ~70% of the work along the way.
> These experiences mean that by no stretch of my personal imagination will we have AI that writes 90% of our code autonomously in a year. Will it assist in writing 90% of the code? Maybe.
Spot on. Current environment feels like the self-driving car hype cycle. There have been a lot of bold promises (and genuine advances), but I don't see a world in the next 5 years where AI writes useful software by itself.
Asking questions and unblocking yourself is a required competency for acting independently.
Developers should aim to be resourceful and respect others time, but I expect my reports to seek out help if they get genuinely stuck for more than 15 minutes (no clue what to do.)
It's much better than waiting around for your manager to find out you were working on the wrong problems (or nothing, waiting for instructions.)
I mask as a coping mechanism for ADHD and Social Anxiety. This masking causes me harm. I learned it in the way you describe.
The most helpful learning I've gotten through years of therapy has been to: (1) recognize what I'm doing (2) not beat myself up about it (3) try small steps to change my behavior so that I can feel good about it.
I'm the only person who can unlearn this for myself. I don't blame anyone who masks, and have nothing but empathy for the experience, but I'm proposing they can find a different way.