"Atomic drills", as done for sports, do not apply well to programming IME. The following will make a lot more sense if you are familiar with the book Thinking F

"Atomic drills", as done for sports, do not apply well to programming IME. The following will make a lot more sense if you are familiar with the book Thinking Fast and Slow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow), or the research upon which that popularization is based. Atomic drills as performed for sports allow you to use System 2 (slow, deliberate, logical) to train System 1 (fast, reactive, emotional). But when programming you are almost always going to be in System 2. Programming does not deal with instantaneous reactions in the same way sports does. Sure, you might react to a bug report (dammit, Johnson, I told you async was a bad idea for this!) but its not like sports, where by the time you consciously process input your physical reaction should have already occurred. To take the example from the Judo article, if you have formed the thought of "that guy looks about to throw me!" you are probably already on the ground. There may be very time limited, competitive programming events where you need to think so fast that atomic drills can come into play. I do not know of any but they could exist. But basically, when programming, at least on a professional basis, you are not relying on physical reactions to get the job done. And atomic drills are about training physical reactions. There is definitely value, lots of it, to the "realistic work scenarios" you describe, it is just not the same as figuring out the bare fundamentals of a sport and practicing until they are entirely subconscious.