4 ms·

idk, if anything I’m thinking more. The idea that I might be able to build everything I’ve ever planned out. At least the way I’m using them, it’s like the perf

idk, if anything I’m thinking more. The idea that I might be able to build everything I’ve ever planned out. At least the way I’m using them, it’s like the perfect assistive device for my flavor of ADHD — I get an interactive notebook I can talk through crazy stuff with. No panacea for sure, but I’m so much higher functioning it’s surreal. I’m not even using em in the volume many folks claim, more like pair programming with a somewhat mentally ill junior colleague. Much faster than I’d otherwise be. this actually does include a crazy amount of long form latex expositions on a bunch of projects im having a blast iterating on. i must be experiencing what its almost like not having adhd

notrealyme123 9mo ago
I am currently writing a paper and I am thinking exactly the same. That must be how normal people feel.
skrebbel 9mo ago
Can you elaborate on how you use AI for this? Do you do it for coding or for “everything?”
ensocode 9mo ago
Maybe it’s not that we’re getting stupid because we don’t use our brains anymore. It’s more like having a reliable way to make fire — so we stop obsessing over sparks and start focusing on building something more important.
- jack_pp 9mo ago
  Instead of being the architect, engineer, plumber, electrician, carpenter you can (most of the time) just be the architect/planner. You for sure need to know how everything works in case LLMs mess the low level stuff up but it sure is nice not needing to lay bricks and dig ditches anymore and just build houses.
  - discreteevent 9mo ago
    It won't turn most people into architects. It will turn them into PMs. The function of PMs is important but without engineers you are not going to build a sustainable system. And an LLM is not an engineer.
    - jack_pp 9mo ago
      If you already are an engineer it frees you up to be an architect. If you aren't, then sure you'll be a PM with a lackluster team of engineers. LLMs can engineer small well defined functions / scripts rather well in my experience. Of course it helps to be able to understand what it outputs and prod it to engineer it just the way you want it. Still faster than me writing it from scratch, most of the time. And even if it's the same time as me doing it from scratch it feels easier so I can do more without getting tired.
      - deuplonicus 9mo ago
        And if you are already an architect - you are likely planning to start a business It just feels like AI upskills everyone a little.
        iugtmkbdfil834 9mo ago
        I don't think it is automatically accurate. I would be curious to learn how you arrived at that conclusion. What I seem to be seeing is that actual impact depends heavily on the person involved. Curious people dig in and even when lulled into copy/paste, they can usually snap out of it. But what do we do about those, who just want an answer, any answer..
    - Capricorn2481 9mo ago
      > It won't turn most people into architects. It will turn them into PMs That sounds awful. Every PM I've ever met, I did their job for them. They did nothing. And I've met some heavy hitter PMs with a lot of stripes and recommendations. The job of being a PM is over-exaggerated. It boils down to writing things down and bringing them up later. Something I ended up doing for them, because they didn't know enough to know what to write down. Their skills are interviewing well and drinking beers with important people. So what you said is a dreadful future, if true. And side note, my last PM didn't even take notes, he had AI do it for him. They were always wrong. I had to correct them constantly.
- discreteevent 9mo ago
  > Maybe it’s not that we’re getting stupid because we don’t use our brains anymore. The study shows that the brain is not getting used. We will get stupid in the same way that people with office jobs get unhealthy if they don't deliberately exercise.
ensocode 9mo ago
I feel the same. Do you think this is because the ADHD brain has so many ideas or is it the same for neuro-normal people?
kminehart 9mo ago
I can definitely relate to the abstract at least. While I am more productive now, and I am way more excited about working on longer term projects (especially by myself), I have found that the minutia is way more strenuous than it was before. I think that inhibits my ability to review what the LLM is producing. I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD or anything but i also haven't been tested for it. It's something I have considered but I think it's pretty underdiagnosed in Spain.
isolli 9mo ago
Indeed, I feel like AI makes it less lonely to work, and for me, it's a net positive. It still has downsides for my focus, but that can be improved...
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
zeroonetwothree 9mo ago
Interesting. I feel like it makes my ADHD worse. If I code “manually” then I can enter hyperfocus/flow and it’s relaxing. If I use AI to code then I have to sit around waiting for it to respond and I get distracted and start something else, forgetting what I was doing before. Maybe there’s a better workflow for me though.
- rom16384 9mo ago
  I don't have ADHD but I've set Codex CLI to send me a push notification via PushOver when it ends its turn and it helps a lot.
- theblazehen 9mo ago
  Try running multiple agents - more task switching overhead, but I find planning in one agent while another is executing is a good balance for me, and avoids the getting-distracted trap
  - footy 9mo ago
    task switching is precisely an issue with adhd though
    - theblazehen 9mo ago
      I'm adhd as well, so I get the pain. I tend to try and do frontend / backend on a single project to at least stay within the same domain
    - danielbln 9mo ago
      It helps to be able to ask at inside any session at any point "yo, what were we doing and how's it going"
- anthonypasq 9mo ago
  you gotta use faster models, this is the next big leap in agentic coding. In 2 years we will have opus 4.5 at 1000 tokens/sec and it will be glorious.
jimmaswell 9mo ago
Same here re: ADHD. It's been invaluable. A big project that would have been personally intractible is now easy - even if the LLM gives slightly wrong answers 20% of the time, the important thing is that it collapses the search space for what concepts or tools I need to look into and gives an overall structure to iterate on. I tend to use ChatGPT for the big planning/architectural conversation, and I find it's also very good at sample code; for code writing/editing, Copilot has been fantastic too, lately mostly using the Opus agent in my case. It's so nice being able to delegate some bullshit gruntwork to it while I either do something else or work on architecture in another window for a few minutes. It certainly hasn't inhibited learning either. The most recent example is shaders. I started by having it just generate entire shaders based on descriptions, without really understanding the pipeline fully, and asking how to apply them in Unity. I've been generally familiar with Unity for over a decade but never really touched materials or shaders. The generated shaders were shockingly good and did what I asked, but over time I wanted to really fine tune some of the behavior and wound up with multiple passes, compute shaders, and a bunch of other cool stuff - and understanding it all on a deeper level as a result.
kaydub 9mo ago
Yeah, I'd say I'm thinking and doing way more. One of my favorite things is that I no longer feel like I need to keep up with "framework of the year" I came up over a decade ago, places I worked were heavy on Java and Spring. Frontends were Jquery back then. Since then I've moved around positions quite a bit, many different frameworks, but typically service side rendered MVC types and these days I work as an SRE. The last 5 years I've fiddled with frontend frameworks and SPAs but never really got into it. I just don't have it in me to learn ANOTHER framework. I had quite a few projects, all using older patterns/frameworks/paradigms. Unfortunately these older paradigms don't lend themselves to "serverless" architecture. So when I want to actually run and deploy something I've gotta deploy it to a server (or ecs task). That shit starts to cost a bit of money, so I've never been able to keep projects running very long... typically because the next idea comes up and I start working on that and decide to spend money on the new things. I've been working at a cloud native shop the last 7 years now. Damn, you can run shit CHEAP in AWS if you know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing for parts of that, using dynamodb instead of rds, lambdas instead of servers. But I could never get far enough with modern frontend frameworks to actually migrate my apps to these patterns. Well, now it's easy. "Hey Claude, look at this repo here, I want to move it to AWS lambdas + apigw + cloudfront. Break the frontend out into a SPA using vue3. I've copied some other apps and patterns {here} so go view those for how to do it" And that's just the start. I never thought I'd get into game development but it's opened that up to me as well (though, since I'm not an artist professionally I have issues getting generative AI to make assets, so I'm stuck plodding along in aseprite and photoshop make shit graphics lol). I've got one simple game like 80% done and ideas for the next one. I never got too far down mobile development either. But one of the apps I made it could be super useful to have a mobile app. Describe the ux/ui/user flow, tell it where to find the api endpoints, and wham bam, android app developed. Does it make perfect code one shot? Sometimes, but not often, I'll have to nudge it along. Does it make good architectural decisions? Not often on its own, again, I'l nudge it, or even better, I'll spin up another agent to do code reviews and feed the reviews back into the agent building out the app. Keep doing that loop until I feel like the code review agent is really reaching or being too nitpicky. And holy shit, I've been able to work on multiple things at the same time this way. Like completely different domains, just have different agents running and doing work.
- 9mo ago

notrealyme123 9mo ago

I am currently writing a paper and I am thinking exactly the same. That must be how normal people feel.

skrebbel 9mo ago

Can you elaborate on how you use AI for this? Do you do it for coding or for “everything?”

ensocode 9mo ago

Maybe it’s not that we’re getting stupid because we don’t use our brains anymore. It’s more like having a reliable way to make fire — so we stop obsessing over sparks and start focusing on building something more important.

jack_pp 9mo ago
Instead of being the architect, engineer, plumber, electrician, carpenter you can (most of the time) just be the architect/planner. You for sure need to know how everything works in case LLMs mess the low level stuff up but it sure is nice not needing to lay bricks and dig ditches anymore and just build houses.
- discreteevent 9mo ago
  It won't turn most people into architects. It will turn them into PMs. The function of PMs is important but without engineers you are not going to build a sustainable system. And an LLM is not an engineer.
  - jack_pp 9mo ago
    If you already are an engineer it frees you up to be an architect. If you aren't, then sure you'll be a PM with a lackluster team of engineers. LLMs can engineer small well defined functions / scripts rather well in my experience. Of course it helps to be able to understand what it outputs and prod it to engineer it just the way you want it. Still faster than me writing it from scratch, most of the time. And even if it's the same time as me doing it from scratch it feels easier so I can do more without getting tired.
    - deuplonicus 9mo ago
      And if you are already an architect - you are likely planning to start a business It just feels like AI upskills everyone a little.
      - iugtmkbdfil834 9mo ago
        I don't think it is automatically accurate. I would be curious to learn how you arrived at that conclusion. What I seem to be seeing is that actual impact depends heavily on the person involved. Curious people dig in and even when lulled into copy/paste, they can usually snap out of it. But what do we do about those, who just want an answer, any answer..
  - Capricorn2481 9mo ago
    > It won't turn most people into architects. It will turn them into PMs That sounds awful. Every PM I've ever met, I did their job for them. They did nothing. And I've met some heavy hitter PMs with a lot of stripes and recommendations. The job of being a PM is over-exaggerated. It boils down to writing things down and bringing them up later. Something I ended up doing for them, because they didn't know enough to know what to write down. Their skills are interviewing well and drinking beers with important people. So what you said is a dreadful future, if true. And side note, my last PM didn't even take notes, he had AI do it for him. They were always wrong. I had to correct them constantly.
discreteevent 9mo ago
> Maybe it’s not that we’re getting stupid because we don’t use our brains anymore. The study shows that the brain is not getting used. We will get stupid in the same way that people with office jobs get unhealthy if they don't deliberately exercise.

ensocode 9mo ago

I feel the same. Do you think this is because the ADHD brain has so many ideas or is it the same for neuro-normal people?

kminehart 9mo ago

I can definitely relate to the abstract at least. While I am more productive now, and I am way more excited about working on longer term projects (especially by myself), I have found that the minutia is way more strenuous than it was before. I think that inhibits my ability to review what the LLM is producing. I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD or anything but i also haven't been tested for it. It's something I have considered but I think it's pretty underdiagnosed in Spain.

isolli 9mo ago

Indeed, I feel like AI makes it less lonely to work, and for me, it's a net positive. It still has downsides for my focus, but that can be improved...

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

zeroonetwothree 9mo ago

Interesting. I feel like it makes my ADHD worse. If I code “manually” then I can enter hyperfocus/flow and it’s relaxing. If I use AI to code then I have to sit around waiting for it to respond and I get distracted and start something else, forgetting what I was doing before. Maybe there’s a better workflow for me though.

rom16384 9mo ago
I don't have ADHD but I've set Codex CLI to send me a push notification via PushOver when it ends its turn and it helps a lot.
theblazehen 9mo ago
Try running multiple agents - more task switching overhead, but I find planning in one agent while another is executing is a good balance for me, and avoids the getting-distracted trap
- footy 9mo ago
  task switching is precisely an issue with adhd though
  - theblazehen 9mo ago
    I'm adhd as well, so I get the pain. I tend to try and do frontend / backend on a single project to at least stay within the same domain
  - danielbln 9mo ago
    It helps to be able to ask at inside any session at any point "yo, what were we doing and how's it going"
anthonypasq 9mo ago
you gotta use faster models, this is the next big leap in agentic coding. In 2 years we will have opus 4.5 at 1000 tokens/sec and it will be glorious.

jimmaswell 9mo ago

Same here re: ADHD. It's been invaluable. A big project that would have been personally intractible is now easy - even if the LLM gives slightly wrong answers 20% of the time, the important thing is that it collapses the search space for what concepts or tools I need to look into and gives an overall structure to iterate on. I tend to use ChatGPT for the big planning/architectural conversation, and I find it's also very good at sample code; for code writing/editing, Copilot has been fantastic too, lately mostly using the Opus agent in my case. It's so nice being able to delegate some bullshit gruntwork to it while I either do something else or work on architecture in another window for a few minutes. It certainly hasn't inhibited learning either. The most recent example is shaders. I started by having it just generate entire shaders based on descriptions, without really understanding the pipeline fully, and asking how to apply them in Unity. I've been generally familiar with Unity for over a decade but never really touched materials or shaders. The generated shaders were shockingly good and did what I asked, but over time I wanted to really fine tune some of the behavior and wound up with multiple passes, compute shaders, and a bunch of other cool stuff - and understanding it all on a deeper level as a result.

kaydub 9mo ago

Yeah, I'd say I'm thinking and doing way more. One of my favorite things is that I no longer feel like I need to keep up with "framework of the year" I came up over a decade ago, places I worked were heavy on Java and Spring. Frontends were Jquery back then. Since then I've moved around positions quite a bit, many different frameworks, but typically service side rendered MVC types and these days I work as an SRE. The last 5 years I've fiddled with frontend frameworks and SPAs but never really got into it. I just don't have it in me to learn ANOTHER framework. I had quite a few projects, all using older patterns/frameworks/paradigms. Unfortunately these older paradigms don't lend themselves to "serverless" architecture. So when I want to actually run and deploy something I've gotta deploy it to a server (or ecs task). That shit starts to cost a bit of money, so I've never been able to keep projects running very long... typically because the next idea comes up and I start working on that and decide to spend money on the new things. I've been working at a cloud native shop the last 7 years now. Damn, you can run shit CHEAP in AWS if you know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing for parts of that, using dynamodb instead of rds, lambdas instead of servers. But I could never get far enough with modern frontend frameworks to actually migrate my apps to these patterns. Well, now it's easy. "Hey Claude, look at this repo here, I want to move it to AWS lambdas + apigw + cloudfront. Break the frontend out into a SPA using vue3. I've copied some other apps and patterns {here} so go view those for how to do it" And that's just the start. I never thought I'd get into game development but it's opened that up to me as well (though, since I'm not an artist professionally I have issues getting generative AI to make assets, so I'm stuck plodding along in aseprite and photoshop make shit graphics lol). I've got one simple game like 80% done and ideas for the next one. I never got too far down mobile development either. But one of the apps I made it could be super useful to have a mobile app. Describe the ux/ui/user flow, tell it where to find the api endpoints, and wham bam, android app developed. Does it make perfect code one shot? Sometimes, but not often, I'll have to nudge it along. Does it make good architectural decisions? Not often on its own, again, I'l nudge it, or even better, I'll spin up another agent to do code reviews and feed the reviews back into the agent building out the app. Keep doing that loop until I feel like the code review agent is really reaching or being too nitpicky. And holy shit, I've been able to work on multiple things at the same time this way. Like completely different domains, just have different agents running and doing work.

9mo ago