5 ms·

Programmers need to start meditating

164 points by enz 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
ehnto 3mo ago
I have certainly noticed my stress skyrocket in this new mode of working. I was used to getting a lot done very quickly, with intense pockets of work followed downtime. Now it feels more like a steady stream of medium stress, and there is no opportunity to stop or drop the thread. 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.
- senfiaj 3mo ago
  Yeah, same thoughts. And this industry is becoming so volatile, I'm not sure what will happen tomorrow. I mean it's highly unlikely that AI will replace developers at least in the next 10 years, but I'm not sure what will "software developer" become. Certain people love to work with details. If AI is taking away this joy, I'll rather retire as early as possible from this volatile industry.
  - bragh 3mo ago
    Maybe we just aren't far enough in the vibe coding side of things and there are still too many people in the industry who still pay attention to details, so no major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding. So the people who pay attention to details are still carrying their organizations, but I do wonder how long it is going to be sustainable. 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.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      > major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding Didn't Azure, AWS and Cloudflare crash a few times in the second half of 2025 because of vibe coding?
      - ThunderSizzle 3mo ago
        Catastrophies would be we vibe coded a nuclear plant or space rocket system and we blew up thousands of people due to a vibe coding error.
        inigyou 3mo ago
        Bringing most of the western world economy to a standstill isn't one? When I say AWS was down I mean AWS was down.
        antonvs 3mo ago
        > Bringing most of the western world economy to a standstill That’s a huge exaggeration.
        inigyou 3mo ago
        True, it was Crowdstrike that did that, and that one wasn't AI.
        antonvs 3mo ago
        The Crowdstrike outage only affected Windows machines. It probably improved the world economy.
        leonidasrup 3mo ago
        I can confirm that nuclear power plant software has much higher quality level than normal commercial software and extremly extensive testing. In addition, lot of nuclear safety is checked below the software level on hardware level. Developement of nuclear power plant software is very conservative, it will use LLMs maybe in 10-15 years.
  - stalfie 3mo ago
    10 years is a long time. 10 years ago the Transformer architecture didn't exist. I would call it moderately unlikely at best. At the very least, I would say it's likely that development will require an entirely different skillet 10 years from now.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - uxhacker 3mo ago
    It’s not just that. Working with multiple agents and tasks switching will increase cognitive load significantly leading to both poor decision making and increased stress. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7614709/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7614709/
  - markus_zhang 3mo ago
    I’m trying to get a bit away from the business stakeholders, into more technically required roles. Eventually my goal is to get into a system programming role. 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.
    - senfiaj 3mo ago
      In my company it's a bit more complicated, but I have the spirit of your thoughts. I think business software (such as the ERP-like software I work on) is often an entropy magnet from the complexity point of view. It doesn't strive to be simple and elegant because business / finance world is messy. Whether all the complexity and messiness of the financial world is accidental or justified, this is irrelevant for me because I don't care about their business problems. It will be soul sucking anyway.
      - markus_zhang 3mo ago
        Yeah I agree. And sometimes it is not really the complexity. For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  Not sound harsh but that the people who solved problems with code just because they love coding disappears from problem-solving environments does sounds like a win-win for everyone involved. I've both been in situations where I loved coding the solution more than I want the problem solved, and I got in the way of people who just wanted the solution, and vice-versa where architect-astronauts are more interested in coding then solving things so they get in the way. If these could be better separated, that feels like the right direction, in both cases.
  - throw-the-towel 3mo ago
    Loving code does not necessarily mean being an architecture astronaut.
    - embedding-shape 3mo ago
      The people I'm talking about literally like coding for the sake of coding (many have shared comments here on HN about it in the past too), which I think is the same group who now are loosing their "passion for software engineering" as the LLM takes over the typing/coding part, but still leaves the design/intention to the human. But yes I agree, one does not equal the other, but if one person has one of those characteristics they tend to also have a bit of the other, at least in my experience.
      - hgoel 3mo ago
        Agreed, I see a lot of the type of people you're describing on here.
        discreteevent 3mo ago
        That type are called "engineers". I used to interview them and I didn't care if they knew anything about the business. Large codebases are the most complex things we have ever worked on and can easily become unmaintainable. I wanted people who really cared about code quality and consistency in order to offset this. I think that it would be even more important to hire people like that now and even though we will need less programmers there were never enough of that type to go around anyway.
- VorpalWay 3mo ago
  One idea to consider might be going into safety critical embedded work (e.g. brake controllers, critical systems for airplanes/trains, medical devices, some industrial systems, ...). AI hasn't penetrated much here yet. It isn't at all clear how or if you would be able to certify the process for example. 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.
  - rdbell 3mo ago
    "Switch to a field that involves many people dying if you write a bug" doesn't sound like the less stressful alternative to me.
    - dosisking 3mo ago
      So maybe try the weapons industry? If you write a bug, it will probably miss the target, and people won't die.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3mo ago
        Or it hits a school instead.
    - tempodox 3mo ago
      Especially for developers of server, desktop, or web software. Experience in those fields will be more a hindrance than an advantage if you want to enter embedded development. Embedded is a whole different beast and you’d have to unlearn a lot of bad habits and expectations that your former field instilled in you. No hiring manager will give you the time for that.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago
    > going into safety critical embedded work 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.
- memoriyato3 3mo ago
  it was impossible to write code for 8 hours straight, you naturally had to stop 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
  - reactordev 3mo ago
    The point was they trained to be a runner, not a cyclist.
    - ordersofmag 3mo ago
      But the metaphorical goal is to cover distance not get fit or to make the best use of what you trained for. A trained runner on a bike is faster than a trained runner. 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.
      - skydhash 3mo ago
        > A trained runner on a bike is faster than a trained runner. Not true if they kept going the wrong direction.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Why is prompting for 8 hours easier than coding for 8 hours? Is it because the prompts matter less?
    - makapuf 3mo ago
      I find the opposite to be true. I'm much less in control when prompting than programming. So I can be much more in the flow during programming and 8h (well stopping to lunch) can be no issue. I feel bad prompting 2h straight.
- ecocentrik 3mo ago
  That sounds dangerously like your organization has overcommitted to AI, is hemorrhaging money and is squeezing their human engineers to make up the difference.
- MyHonestOpinon 3mo ago
  Just wondering if we are working a lot but perhaps we do not get the same feeling of accomplishment that we used to get since we feel that we are not really doing the work?
- deterministic 3mo ago
  I feel the complete opposite. I am much more relaxed now since I can be way more effective while actually working less.
homarp 3mo ago
well, gurus are supposed to meditate, once in a while. per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
6stringmerc 3mo ago
“I’m doing five things at once very effectively” …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.
- globalnode 3mo ago
  hehe
delis-thumbs-7e 3mo ago
I noticed how relaxing and meditative programming can be. It might sound that after day job basically solving other people pronlems I sit down late at noght to just write code for hours on end. But I really enjoy it. Using LLM’s to generate the code ruins it. 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.
- galaxyLogic 3mo ago
  My favorite metaphor for programming is playing chess. Your opponent in programming is the complexity, you don't see its moves before the coding and design progress, before you make your choices/moves. You solve a problem by writing some code but that causes new problems down the line you didn't know existed before you made your choice of writing some specific code. or choosing a specific design. 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.
pjmlp 3mo ago
On the contrary, many still need to learn how to say no.
jahala 3mo ago
Meditation - «getting used to» 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
- david-gpu 3mo ago
  Thank you. I like the comparison of "meditation" with "sport": it is not all the same, even if there are commonalities between some disciplines. 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.
- globalnode 3mo ago
  thanks
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Why 21?
  - ebu87 3mo ago
    Because is half of 42
  - tasuki 3mo ago
    No idea, but the five tibetan rites were also recommended to me with 21 repetitions. Perhaps it's an Eastern thing.
- mstaoru 3mo ago
  So you can place your attention on a single session of Claude Code, count to 21, and switch to another? :)
senfiaj 3mo ago
>> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switches-considered-harmful/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...
- gb2d_hn 3mo ago
  I feel like it depends on the task, and that's why people seem to disagree on this. Think about a manager managing 5 devs. If he is working on planning and managing work for his dev team, we don't say he is task switching, he's just taking a management role where he takes a high level view of the task at hand and then delegates the deep dive. Where it differs for devs is that we could in theory run multiple agents concurrently, but frequently, currently, we have to dive in and give the agents significant steers and this pulls us in to the detail. The same will happen for managers. The variables are the complexity of the task, the capability of the agent and the number of tasks. There are lots of scenarios where devs can run multiple tasks without too much mental overload, but I think what is hard is that we don't know when an agent will underperform on a task and we will get pulled back into developer mode. Maybe it's a case of running for as long as you can in manager mode and then accept that when one agent needs help, you have to single task with that agent (I think this is what makes us feel like we are the bottleneck, and that's where the feeling of stress creeps in). I thought about this a lot while working on https://www.agentkanban.io https://www.agentkanban.io which I use to help me partition agent chats by task, run separate worktrees etc
  - coffeefirst 3mo ago
    Uh, I am an EM, and you have to treat context switching as the enemy or nothing gets done. 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.
  - senfiaj 3mo ago
    >> I feel like it depends on the task, and that's why people seem to disagree on this. Think about a manager managing 5 devs. If he is working on planning and managing work for his dev team, we don't say he is task switching, he's just taking a management role where he takes a high level view of the task at hand and then delegates the deep dive. 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.
sph 3mo ago
You say programming used to be a meditative activity. 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.
- varjag 3mo ago
  It's fine for your pet projects. But for most of professional programming it's no longer feasible as you'll be at a small fraction of your machine assisted performance.
  - sph 3mo ago
    My performance in writing code was never once the problem. I don’t get why I should increase the amount of output by depending on a third party tool to do my thinking to whom I have to explain my very abstract thought process in words. The point of being an experienced programmer is thinking in data structures and transformations, not in prose. Why would I introduce all that friction?
  - witx 3mo ago
    If you think performance relates to speed and amount of code per unit of time yes. If you're more grounded with the reality of software engineering then no
    - varjag 3mo ago
      I have in fact masters in SE and three decades experience of commercial programming. Loved every minute of it (well except the burnout episode) and still do my hobby projects. So I would say no, you are wrong. The models decimate not just the coding (the best and the most fun part of development) but all the pseudo-engineering roles like architects or product managers too. Simply because there's less need for communication in the team as the surface of work for each dev is now quite enormous.
ajb 3mo ago
This isn't the worst article, and it's triggered a decent amount of discussion (despite being very short). However, I really dislike "What you're doing wrong/failing to do" titles. They are intended to trigger anxiety, which is manipulative and (in this case) precisely contradicts the concern the author is purporting to have for the rest of us. 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.
- wolvoleo 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - Tarq0n 3mo ago
    Relaxation isn't really a goal of meditation. When you do it you cultivate a kind of meta-cognition, an awareness of - and control over - the kind of invasive thinking that usually dominates our awareness. As a fellow ADHD person I didn't get out the first few times I tried, but now find it quite helpful.
    - pantulis 3mo ago
      This. It's like you end up growing your own PAUSE button for the rest of your day and you can break your own fourth wall.
    - 3mo ago
phyzix5761 3mo ago
For anyone interested in Vipasanna mediation in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw: https://sirimangalo.org/text/how-to-meditate/ https://sirimangalo.org/text/how-to-meditate/
- hannofcart 3mo ago
  As someone brought up in a Hindu household (with Brahmin orthodoxy at that and all the casteism that came with it) and having learnt to shun all of that culture, and the religious indoctrination, here's the essence of mindfulness meditation that I was taught that I still practice and find useful. 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.
  - phyzix5761 3mo ago
    The Mahasi method is quite different. You don't try to calm or control your mind. You observe and note your experiences as they're happening. Over time the calmness comes (and goes) but its not the goal. The goal is to see reality clearly. This clear seeing (which is where the word Vipassana comes from) leads to a change in the habit patterns that cause our stress and suffering.
iamflimflam1 3mo ago
I don’t think this article is suggesting really going for it in terms of meditation. But, as a warning to people, there is evidence that meditation can be dangerous for some people.
witx 3mo ago
> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. After working full-time like this for ~8 months, one thing I’m sure of is that this way of working involves much less time spent in a flow state. What an utter piece of BS. AI goons really like to smell their own crap
jdw64 3mo ago
Personally, I feel that as an individual, it's the right time to complete a program, but as a team, it's become harder. 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.
stavros 3mo ago
I was discussing Buddhism with a few Buddhist friends this past weekend, and I randomly had an enlightenment. It was a very odd experience, I felt like I understood all the weird things I'd heard from them, and I suddenly became very calm and accepting of everything. I also had a sense of sort of "watching" what I was experiencing through my own eyes. 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.
- cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
  What was the thing that made you click?
  - stavros 3mo ago
    I asked my friend "is the purpose of meditation just to feel existence?" and he said "yes, and also taking your fears, insecurities, etc and throwing them away", and something just clicked.
keyle 3mo ago
I've been doing this for 25 years professionally and let's just say I'm more the 3 coffees, 1 redbull, headphones and bassdrive kind of programmer. So no, I will not be "meditating". My meditative states tend to be beard stroking and occasional F bomb.
testfrequency 3mo ago
I was so stressed at work a few years ago. Burnt out. Exhausted. I started meditating. Shared with my manager that I started, and it’s been helping me process all the chaos at work. He told me that wasn’t normal, and I shouldn’t have to meditate just to function at work :’)
- bartvk 3mo ago
  What a strange opinion. If it helps you do better at work, why wouldn't it be something to encourage? 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.
  - testfrequency 3mo ago
    He was a smartass, but also very blunt - unsparingly. 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.
titanomachy 3mo ago
I try not to context switch when doing agentic programming. Instead, I use a single agent thread (in pi) and pay extra for faster inference (GLM 5.2 from fireworks.ai, currently; around 100 tokens per second). I rarely spend more than $25 per working week, which is a fraction of a percent of my own fee (I’m a specialist consultant). I also keep an Anthropic subscription and use that for longer research and design tasks. 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.
Uptrenda 3mo ago
Bros "discuss on hacker news" link takes you to submit the article here. that really rustles my jimmies. its unfortunate that bro couldnt csrf the submit link thanks to submit tokens. I have no doubt he would have tried that too.
cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
There is also a simpler approach: just stop using AI. And if you can't, THAT should be a big red warning sign for you.
- memoriyato3 3mo ago
  that's like "stop using a car, you can walk between cities and its healthier"
  - cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
    So far I see it more like "you buy a car to take you between cities, but you end up routinely driving even just 1 km to a store, +50 kg overweight and then prematurely dead due to a heart attack." 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. :)
    - cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
      (putting aside the negative impact of the data centers on the planet, which is not "your life" anymore)
  - shiandow 3mo ago
    I guess my experience is better described as "stop trying to drive a car into your destination"
  - emptybits 3mo ago
    Perhaps: "If you find yourself re-arranging your life into a [car|AI|...]-dependent life, stop before it's too late?"
crudgen 3mo ago
I think the more stressful part is the management expectation that things will speed up more, especially when you can generate plausible looking frontends relatively quickly. And if you have out of touch control-freak management without any technical experience, you waste more life time arguing with them. 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.
dan_i 3mo ago
[dead]
lobibi 3mo ago
I’ve started doing mornings without any llm assisted work, and keeping it only for after 11. I find it gives me back the joy of designing my systems in a highly focused state, while keeping the later part of the day for persisting those well thought out ideas into code.
eimrine 3mo ago
I have tried to research what "meditation" really means. I discovered that its meaning is somewhere between "doing nothing" and "processing ceremony". Now it easier for me to analyze those articles with such an optics.
throwthrowuknow 3mo ago
Honestly, just go for walks or do something else physical that doesn’t involve a screen. Don’t listen to a podcast. Just take in the scenery or focus on what you’re doing.
- cindyllm 3mo ago
  [dead]
stdatomic 3mo ago
No. What they need is to stop being told "ok this is good enough now we need you to implement this other highly-necessary half-assed feature using ai as fast as possible."
- Etheryte 3mo ago
  I don't think this is a constructive way to look at life. You can't control what others say and do, what you can do is choose how you react and act on it.
BoingBoomTschak 3mo ago
Reeks of SanFran in here...
bsenftner 3mo ago
Although I do meditate, I do not think this is the answer to our career's stress. That answer lies in learning how to generate a climate, a culture of open communications. Communications that include asking why, without triggering expectation that the questions are a lead up to blame, or anything other than understanding. Programmers need to learn communications, because BELIEVE IT OR NOT a software engineer's career is almost entirely some communications situation one after another. That is literally what we do: we translate communications between systems that cannot communicate on their own. That is literally the purpose of software. But this is probably news to a lot of you, and many of you will argue that it is not. That's why this career is in such stress, it does not even realize what it does. Sure we write software, which is an act of translating actions and behaviors into another language and environment which we understand and others outside of our field do not. We're communications professionals with a non-human entity.
docwirth 3mo ago
I can’t agree that meditation and flow are very equal. In fact they are rather the opposite: while being in the flow (of programming) means been absorbed by your thoughts and you are most likely not be aware of being aware or or being thinking. In most meditation practices the goal is to be aware of your thoughts and inner processes
- mikey-wang 3mo ago
  Agree, flow state is self-forgetting, and meditation is selflessness.
pgisapedo 3mo ago
You need to ____ You should ____ Everyone is full of advice for others lmao
fallat 3mo ago
You don't already? I thought that's what every programmer has been doing.
visarga 3mo ago
Meditation can also hype up your anxiety depending on individual circumstances and personality. And it is by no means easy, you have to invest much effort to get results. It's like refactoring your code base (mind).
gambler 3mo ago
Programmers need to stop listening to obnoxious people who are proudly destroying our industry while simulataneously farming our anxiety for attention and validation. Software enegineering is not the kind of field that should require adoption of some universal coping mechanism. The fact that you're suddenly bing told to adapt to something harming you should raise all kind of qustions and red flags.
paulbjensen 3mo ago
Meditation is great, but there might also be other options available when it comes to dealing with the effects of context switching. For me, I find the Pomodoro technique really effective, but there's a key caveat, which is that you try to focus on one thing at a time (which flies in the face of using multiple AI agents working on x number of things at the same time). Another angle to explore is how much of the process of software development that we do manually can we automate, particularly the parts that still require human input (like code reviews). That may also help with reducing the cognitive load.
- jplusequalt 3mo ago
  >Another angle to explore is how much of the process of software development that we do manually can we automate, particularly the parts that still require human input (like code reviews). That may also help with reducing the cognitive load. Get your vibe coded software with zero human reviewers away from the public infrastructure.
  - paulbjensen 3mo ago
    I’m talking about CI pipelines where you have: - Unit tests - End to End testing with Cucumber and Puppeteer (or Playwright these days) - Code Coverage analysis - Lint and formatting checks - Tools like knit to remove unused code - Security checking tools like Synk and Socket - Size checking If you look at what those tools do, they automate aspects of reviewing PRs. The question then becomes - what still gets done manually, and are there ways to automate that.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
marcAKAmarc 3mo ago
Just wanted stop here to say that I find myself lucky to be able to retain employment as a gamedev engineer without using any AI or agent in my daily process. I work remote, so I don't know what the experience of my collegues entails. Am I really slipping into antiquity?
- casper14 3mo ago
  If you use zero AI, I would say yes
  - jplusequalt 3mo ago
    If he uses zero AI, he's better off than someone who hasn't looked at their own code in months.
jplusequalt 3mo ago
When the state of the industry is so bad that people need to start recommended mindfulness to unfuck your brain, then it's time to get the fuck out.
hiq 3mo ago
Regarding the multi-tasking induced by this new way of working (agentic coding), I've moved from quick and short iterations to a longer ideally one-shot prompt, optimizing for less reviewing and less context switching. I used to send a prompt as early as possible, meaning that'd really just give the rough idea, barely a sentence, and see what the model would come up with, thinking that I'd save time if it got it right for the first time, and maybe I'd just need to correct what it got wrong (it's faster at typing than me). That means a lot of multitasking at a rather high pace, which takes its toll if you do it for too long. I've recently switched to writing longer prompts (doing part of the planning myself), hoping to get better results and to have less to review: I'm realizing I'd rather write more and read less, past a certain threshold. I don't really want to iterate with an agent; I want to tell it, maybe in somewhat verbose terms, what I want, I want a quick confirmation that it'll indeed work, and I want the final output (e.g. a commit), that's it. That's probably what some users have been doing since the beginning, but with all the hype around this tech, maybe I got caught by this idea that with just a few words, I can get stuff done. In my experience, it's indeed just a few words, but for useless units of work (iterations with a model) rather than what I really want (commit) which itself will often require non-trivial amount of input. In this case, I'd rather give it all in one go, in a somewhat focused state.
archagon 3mo ago
Unionizing. The word you’re looking for is unionizing.
nickvec 3mo ago
As mentioned in the article, Waking Up is a great option if you want to get into meditation. Highly recommend reading Sam Harris’ book “Waking Up” as well.
bitbasher 3mo ago
You could meditate.. or you could write some code and care about the craft. I find that much more fulfilling than a few minutes of mindful breathing. Hell, you can do both!
mxmilkiib 3mo ago
"'A Course on Early Buddhist Meditation' is a series of ten long-format talks on meditation by Bhante Sujato. The curriculum derives from the early suttas, particularly from the Theravada tradition. "The video trailer for the original course from which this series has been derived/edited can be found here - https://youtu.be/EEOykTO5754 https://youtu.be/EEOykTO5754 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMC0iGGyFk&list=PL70fWqztn7OVo4h1RSRfuIzmb83S6O5Qt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMC0iGGyFk&list=PL70fWqztn7... "Mahāsatipaṭṭhānasutta - Bh. Sujato", the main breath mindfulness/meditation sutta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMC0iGGyFk&list=PL70fWqztn7OVo4h1RSRfuIzmb83S6O5Qt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMC0iGGyFk&list=PL70fWqztn7... https://suttacentral.net/dn22/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=main&notes=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin https://suttacentral.net/dn22/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain... A_History_of_Mindfulness_Bhikkhu_Sujato.pdf; https://santifm.org/santipada/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/A_History_of_Mindfulness_Bhikkhu_Sujato.pdf https://santifm.org/santipada/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/A_H... "This series of 10 Dhamma Talks by Bhante Sujato, given during the rains retreat in Santi Forest Monastery in NSW, Australia in 2007 is the most detailed description of Ajahn Mahachatchai's Metta Meditation technique I have ever come across on the internet." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HREe6phLMpU&list=PLTcGMzIEhlsa0maPxIduPyYSNonn0_umT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HREe6phLMpU&list=PLTcGMzIEhl... Cūḷavedallasutta/The Shorter Elaboration, a socratic discource between a nun and, iirc, their former partner, who later became a monk/mendicant ("begger") "10.2 “The noble eightfold path is conditioned.” (grasping for good things is good, until you finish crossing the river with that raft) https://suttacentral.net/mn44/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=main&notes=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin https://suttacentral.net/mn44/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain... https://suttacentral.net/snp1.8/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=main&notes=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin https://suttacentral.net/snp1.8/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=pla... https://youtu.be/maBmEU4YUi8 https://youtu.be/maBmEU4YUi8 - Metta Sutta/The Discourse on Love, recital/chant in English by Sujato
albertfranquesa 3mo ago
[flagged]
heisnotanalien 3mo ago
Programming is NOT meditative even the old way. Yes you can get into a flow state but that's not really meditation. In fact you're really just disassociating in a way and is easy to end stuck in your head too much. In fact, without balance, long periods of coding can leave some people feeling mentally over-identified with abstract thinking and less connected to their body or immediate experience. It is also worth saying that you don't need to sit still to meditate. You can do yoga or go for a walk. Walking meditation is very underrated IMHO.
paradox242 3mo ago
This article is literally the meme of the guy sitting in the middle of a room on fire confidently declaring "this is fine".

164 points by enz 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

ehnto 3mo ago

I have certainly noticed my stress skyrocket in this new mode of working. I was used to getting a lot done very quickly, with intense pockets of work followed downtime. Now it feels more like a steady stream of medium stress, and there is no opportunity to stop or drop the thread. 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.

senfiaj 3mo ago
Yeah, same thoughts. And this industry is becoming so volatile, I'm not sure what will happen tomorrow. I mean it's highly unlikely that AI will replace developers at least in the next 10 years, but I'm not sure what will "software developer" become. Certain people love to work with details. If AI is taking away this joy, I'll rather retire as early as possible from this volatile industry.
- bragh 3mo ago
  Maybe we just aren't far enough in the vibe coding side of things and there are still too many people in the industry who still pay attention to details, so no major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding. So the people who pay attention to details are still carrying their organizations, but I do wonder how long it is going to be sustainable. 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.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    > major catastrophes haven't happened yet because of vibe coding Didn't Azure, AWS and Cloudflare crash a few times in the second half of 2025 because of vibe coding?
    - ThunderSizzle 3mo ago
      Catastrophies would be we vibe coded a nuclear plant or space rocket system and we blew up thousands of people due to a vibe coding error.
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        Bringing most of the western world economy to a standstill isn't one? When I say AWS was down I mean AWS was down.
        antonvs 3mo ago
        > Bringing most of the western world economy to a standstill That’s a huge exaggeration.
        inigyou 3mo ago
        True, it was Crowdstrike that did that, and that one wasn't AI.
        antonvs 3mo ago
        The Crowdstrike outage only affected Windows machines. It probably improved the world economy.
      - leonidasrup 3mo ago
        I can confirm that nuclear power plant software has much higher quality level than normal commercial software and extremly extensive testing. In addition, lot of nuclear safety is checked below the software level on hardware level. Developement of nuclear power plant software is very conservative, it will use LLMs maybe in 10-15 years.
- stalfie 3mo ago
  10 years is a long time. 10 years ago the Transformer architecture didn't exist. I would call it moderately unlikely at best. At the very least, I would say it's likely that development will require an entirely different skillet 10 years from now.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- uxhacker 3mo ago
  It’s not just that. Working with multiple agents and tasks switching will increase cognitive load significantly leading to both poor decision making and increased stress. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7614709/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7614709/
- markus_zhang 3mo ago
  I’m trying to get a bit away from the business stakeholders, into more technically required roles. Eventually my goal is to get into a system programming role. 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.
  - senfiaj 3mo ago
    In my company it's a bit more complicated, but I have the spirit of your thoughts. I think business software (such as the ERP-like software I work on) is often an entropy magnet from the complexity point of view. It doesn't strive to be simple and elegant because business / finance world is messy. Whether all the complexity and messiness of the financial world is accidental or justified, this is irrelevant for me because I don't care about their business problems. It will be soul sucking anyway.
    - markus_zhang 3mo ago
      Yeah I agree. And sometimes it is not really the complexity. For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts.
embedding-shape 3mo ago
Not sound harsh but that the people who solved problems with code just because they love coding disappears from problem-solving environments does sounds like a win-win for everyone involved. I've both been in situations where I loved coding the solution more than I want the problem solved, and I got in the way of people who just wanted the solution, and vice-versa where architect-astronauts are more interested in coding then solving things so they get in the way. If these could be better separated, that feels like the right direction, in both cases.
- throw-the-towel 3mo ago
  Loving code does not necessarily mean being an architecture astronaut.
  - embedding-shape 3mo ago
    The people I'm talking about literally like coding for the sake of coding (many have shared comments here on HN about it in the past too), which I think is the same group who now are loosing their "passion for software engineering" as the LLM takes over the typing/coding part, but still leaves the design/intention to the human. But yes I agree, one does not equal the other, but if one person has one of those characteristics they tend to also have a bit of the other, at least in my experience.
    - hgoel 3mo ago
      Agreed, I see a lot of the type of people you're describing on here.
      - discreteevent 3mo ago
        That type are called "engineers". I used to interview them and I didn't care if they knew anything about the business. Large codebases are the most complex things we have ever worked on and can easily become unmaintainable. I wanted people who really cared about code quality and consistency in order to offset this. I think that it would be even more important to hire people like that now and even though we will need less programmers there were never enough of that type to go around anyway.
VorpalWay 3mo ago
One idea to consider might be going into safety critical embedded work (e.g. brake controllers, critical systems for airplanes/trains, medical devices, some industrial systems, ...). AI hasn't penetrated much here yet. It isn't at all clear how or if you would be able to certify the process for example. 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.
- rdbell 3mo ago
  "Switch to a field that involves many people dying if you write a bug" doesn't sound like the less stressful alternative to me.
  - dosisking 3mo ago
    So maybe try the weapons industry? If you write a bug, it will probably miss the target, and people won't die.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3mo ago
      Or it hits a school instead.
  - tempodox 3mo ago
    Especially for developers of server, desktop, or web software. Experience in those fields will be more a hindrance than an advantage if you want to enter embedded development. Embedded is a whole different beast and you’d have to unlearn a lot of bad habits and expectations that your former field instilled in you. No hiring manager will give you the time for that.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago
  > going into safety critical embedded work 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.
memoriyato3 3mo ago
it was impossible to write code for 8 hours straight, you naturally had to stop 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
- reactordev 3mo ago
  The point was they trained to be a runner, not a cyclist.
  - ordersofmag 3mo ago
    But the metaphorical goal is to cover distance not get fit or to make the best use of what you trained for. A trained runner on a bike is faster than a trained runner. 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.
    - skydhash 3mo ago
      > A trained runner on a bike is faster than a trained runner. Not true if they kept going the wrong direction.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Why is prompting for 8 hours easier than coding for 8 hours? Is it because the prompts matter less?
  - makapuf 3mo ago
    I find the opposite to be true. I'm much less in control when prompting than programming. So I can be much more in the flow during programming and 8h (well stopping to lunch) can be no issue. I feel bad prompting 2h straight.
ecocentrik 3mo ago
That sounds dangerously like your organization has overcommitted to AI, is hemorrhaging money and is squeezing their human engineers to make up the difference.
MyHonestOpinon 3mo ago
Just wondering if we are working a lot but perhaps we do not get the same feeling of accomplishment that we used to get since we feel that we are not really doing the work?
deterministic 3mo ago
I feel the complete opposite. I am much more relaxed now since I can be way more effective while actually working less.

homarp 3mo ago

well, gurus are supposed to meditate, once in a while. per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

6stringmerc 3mo ago

“I’m doing five things at once very effectively” …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.

globalnode 3mo ago
hehe

delis-thumbs-7e 3mo ago

I noticed how relaxing and meditative programming can be. It might sound that after day job basically solving other people pronlems I sit down late at noght to just write code for hours on end. But I really enjoy it. Using LLM’s to generate the code ruins it. 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.

galaxyLogic 3mo ago
My favorite metaphor for programming is playing chess. Your opponent in programming is the complexity, you don't see its moves before the coding and design progress, before you make your choices/moves. You solve a problem by writing some code but that causes new problems down the line you didn't know existed before you made your choice of writing some specific code. or choosing a specific design. 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.

pjmlp 3mo ago

On the contrary, many still need to learn how to say no.

jahala 3mo ago

Meditation - «getting used to» 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

david-gpu 3mo ago
Thank you. I like the comparison of "meditation" with "sport": it is not all the same, even if there are commonalities between some disciplines. 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.
globalnode 3mo ago
thanks
inigyou 3mo ago
Why 21?
- ebu87 3mo ago
  Because is half of 42
- tasuki 3mo ago
  No idea, but the five tibetan rites were also recommended to me with 21 repetitions. Perhaps it's an Eastern thing.
mstaoru 3mo ago
So you can place your attention on a single session of Claude Code, count to 21, and switch to another? :)

senfiaj 3mo ago

>> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switches-considered-harmful/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...

gb2d_hn 3mo ago
I feel like it depends on the task, and that's why people seem to disagree on this. Think about a manager managing 5 devs. If he is working on planning and managing work for his dev team, we don't say he is task switching, he's just taking a management role where he takes a high level view of the task at hand and then delegates the deep dive. Where it differs for devs is that we could in theory run multiple agents concurrently, but frequently, currently, we have to dive in and give the agents significant steers and this pulls us in to the detail. The same will happen for managers. The variables are the complexity of the task, the capability of the agent and the number of tasks. There are lots of scenarios where devs can run multiple tasks without too much mental overload, but I think what is hard is that we don't know when an agent will underperform on a task and we will get pulled back into developer mode. Maybe it's a case of running for as long as you can in manager mode and then accept that when one agent needs help, you have to single task with that agent (I think this is what makes us feel like we are the bottleneck, and that's where the feeling of stress creeps in). I thought about this a lot while working on https://www.agentkanban.io https://www.agentkanban.io which I use to help me partition agent chats by task, run separate worktrees etc
- coffeefirst 3mo ago
  Uh, I am an EM, and you have to treat context switching as the enemy or nothing gets done. 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.
- senfiaj 3mo ago
  >> I feel like it depends on the task, and that's why people seem to disagree on this. Think about a manager managing 5 devs. If he is working on planning and managing work for his dev team, we don't say he is task switching, he's just taking a management role where he takes a high level view of the task at hand and then delegates the deep dive. 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.

sph 3mo ago

You say programming used to be a meditative activity. 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.

varjag 3mo ago
It's fine for your pet projects. But for most of professional programming it's no longer feasible as you'll be at a small fraction of your machine assisted performance.
- sph 3mo ago
  My performance in writing code was never once the problem. I don’t get why I should increase the amount of output by depending on a third party tool to do my thinking to whom I have to explain my very abstract thought process in words. The point of being an experienced programmer is thinking in data structures and transformations, not in prose. Why would I introduce all that friction?
- witx 3mo ago
  If you think performance relates to speed and amount of code per unit of time yes. If you're more grounded with the reality of software engineering then no
  - varjag 3mo ago
    I have in fact masters in SE and three decades experience of commercial programming. Loved every minute of it (well except the burnout episode) and still do my hobby projects. So I would say no, you are wrong. The models decimate not just the coding (the best and the most fun part of development) but all the pseudo-engineering roles like architects or product managers too. Simply because there's less need for communication in the team as the surface of work for each dev is now quite enormous.

ajb 3mo ago

This isn't the worst article, and it's triggered a decent amount of discussion (despite being very short). However, I really dislike "What you're doing wrong/failing to do" titles. They are intended to trigger anxiety, which is manipulative and (in this case) precisely contradicts the concern the author is purporting to have for the rest of us. 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.

wolvoleo 3mo ago
> 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.
- Tarq0n 3mo ago
  Relaxation isn't really a goal of meditation. When you do it you cultivate a kind of meta-cognition, an awareness of - and control over - the kind of invasive thinking that usually dominates our awareness. As a fellow ADHD person I didn't get out the first few times I tried, but now find it quite helpful.
  - pantulis 3mo ago
    This. It's like you end up growing your own PAUSE button for the rest of your day and you can break your own fourth wall.
  - 3mo ago

phyzix5761 3mo ago

For anyone interested in Vipasanna mediation in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw: https://sirimangalo.org/text/how-to-meditate/ https://sirimangalo.org/text/how-to-meditate/

hannofcart 3mo ago
As someone brought up in a Hindu household (with Brahmin orthodoxy at that and all the casteism that came with it) and having learnt to shun all of that culture, and the religious indoctrination, here's the essence of mindfulness meditation that I was taught that I still practice and find useful. 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.
- phyzix5761 3mo ago
  The Mahasi method is quite different. You don't try to calm or control your mind. You observe and note your experiences as they're happening. Over time the calmness comes (and goes) but its not the goal. The goal is to see reality clearly. This clear seeing (which is where the word Vipassana comes from) leads to a change in the habit patterns that cause our stress and suffering.

iamflimflam1 3mo ago

I don’t think this article is suggesting really going for it in terms of meditation. But, as a warning to people, there is evidence that meditation can be dangerous for some people.

witx 3mo ago

> I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. After working full-time like this for ~8 months, one thing I’m sure of is that this way of working involves much less time spent in a flow state. What an utter piece of BS. AI goons really like to smell their own crap

jdw64 3mo ago

Personally, I feel that as an individual, it's the right time to complete a program, but as a team, it's become harder. 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.

stavros 3mo ago

I was discussing Buddhism with a few Buddhist friends this past weekend, and I randomly had an enlightenment. It was a very odd experience, I felt like I understood all the weird things I'd heard from them, and I suddenly became very calm and accepting of everything. I also had a sense of sort of "watching" what I was experiencing through my own eyes. 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.

cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
What was the thing that made you click?
- stavros 3mo ago
  I asked my friend "is the purpose of meditation just to feel existence?" and he said "yes, and also taking your fears, insecurities, etc and throwing them away", and something just clicked.

keyle 3mo ago

I've been doing this for 25 years professionally and let's just say I'm more the 3 coffees, 1 redbull, headphones and bassdrive kind of programmer. So no, I will not be "meditating". My meditative states tend to be beard stroking and occasional F bomb.

testfrequency 3mo ago

I was so stressed at work a few years ago. Burnt out. Exhausted. I started meditating. Shared with my manager that I started, and it’s been helping me process all the chaos at work. He told me that wasn’t normal, and I shouldn’t have to meditate just to function at work :’)

bartvk 3mo ago
What a strange opinion. If it helps you do better at work, why wouldn't it be something to encourage? 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.
- testfrequency 3mo ago
  He was a smartass, but also very blunt - unsparingly. 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.

titanomachy 3mo ago

I try not to context switch when doing agentic programming. Instead, I use a single agent thread (in pi) and pay extra for faster inference (GLM 5.2 from fireworks.ai, currently; around 100 tokens per second). I rarely spend more than $25 per working week, which is a fraction of a percent of my own fee (I’m a specialist consultant). I also keep an Anthropic subscription and use that for longer research and design tasks. 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.

Uptrenda 3mo ago

Bros "discuss on hacker news" link takes you to submit the article here. that really rustles my jimmies. its unfortunate that bro couldnt csrf the submit link thanks to submit tokens. I have no doubt he would have tried that too.

cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago

There is also a simpler approach: just stop using AI. And if you can't, THAT should be a big red warning sign for you.

memoriyato3 3mo ago
that's like "stop using a car, you can walk between cities and its healthier"
- cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
  So far I see it more like "you buy a car to take you between cities, but you end up routinely driving even just 1 km to a store, +50 kg overweight and then prematurely dead due to a heart attack." 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. :)
  - cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
    (putting aside the negative impact of the data centers on the planet, which is not "your life" anymore)
- shiandow 3mo ago
  I guess my experience is better described as "stop trying to drive a car into your destination"
- emptybits 3mo ago
  Perhaps: "If you find yourself re-arranging your life into a [car|AI|...]-dependent life, stop before it's too late?"

crudgen 3mo ago

I think the more stressful part is the management expectation that things will speed up more, especially when you can generate plausible looking frontends relatively quickly. And if you have out of touch control-freak management without any technical experience, you waste more life time arguing with them. 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.

dan_i 3mo ago

[dead]

lobibi 3mo ago

I’ve started doing mornings without any llm assisted work, and keeping it only for after 11. I find it gives me back the joy of designing my systems in a highly focused state, while keeping the later part of the day for persisting those well thought out ideas into code.

eimrine 3mo ago

I have tried to research what "meditation" really means. I discovered that its meaning is somewhere between "doing nothing" and "processing ceremony". Now it easier for me to analyze those articles with such an optics.

throwthrowuknow 3mo ago

Honestly, just go for walks or do something else physical that doesn’t involve a screen. Don’t listen to a podcast. Just take in the scenery or focus on what you’re doing.

cindyllm 3mo ago
[dead]

stdatomic 3mo ago

No. What they need is to stop being told "ok this is good enough now we need you to implement this other highly-necessary half-assed feature using ai as fast as possible."

Etheryte 3mo ago
I don't think this is a constructive way to look at life. You can't control what others say and do, what you can do is choose how you react and act on it.

BoingBoomTschak 3mo ago

Reeks of SanFran in here...

bsenftner 3mo ago

Although I do meditate, I do not think this is the answer to our career's stress. That answer lies in learning how to generate a climate, a culture of open communications. Communications that include asking why, without triggering expectation that the questions are a lead up to blame, or anything other than understanding. Programmers need to learn communications, because BELIEVE IT OR NOT a software engineer's career is almost entirely some communications situation one after another. That is literally what we do: we translate communications between systems that cannot communicate on their own. That is literally the purpose of software. But this is probably news to a lot of you, and many of you will argue that it is not. That's why this career is in such stress, it does not even realize what it does. Sure we write software, which is an act of translating actions and behaviors into another language and environment which we understand and others outside of our field do not. We're communications professionals with a non-human entity.

docwirth 3mo ago

I can’t agree that meditation and flow are very equal. In fact they are rather the opposite: while being in the flow (of programming) means been absorbed by your thoughts and you are most likely not be aware of being aware or or being thinking. In most meditation practices the goal is to be aware of your thoughts and inner processes

mikey-wang 3mo ago
Agree, flow state is self-forgetting, and meditation is selflessness.

pgisapedo 3mo ago

You need to ____ You should ____ Everyone is full of advice for others lmao

fallat 3mo ago

You don't already? I thought that's what every programmer has been doing.

visarga 3mo ago

Meditation can also hype up your anxiety depending on individual circumstances and personality. And it is by no means easy, you have to invest much effort to get results. It's like refactoring your code base (mind).

gambler 3mo ago

Programmers need to stop listening to obnoxious people who are proudly destroying our industry while simulataneously farming our anxiety for attention and validation. Software enegineering is not the kind of field that should require adoption of some universal coping mechanism. The fact that you're suddenly bing told to adapt to something harming you should raise all kind of qustions and red flags.

paulbjensen 3mo ago

Meditation is great, but there might also be other options available when it comes to dealing with the effects of context switching. For me, I find the Pomodoro technique really effective, but there's a key caveat, which is that you try to focus on one thing at a time (which flies in the face of using multiple AI agents working on x number of things at the same time). Another angle to explore is how much of the process of software development that we do manually can we automate, particularly the parts that still require human input (like code reviews). That may also help with reducing the cognitive load.

jplusequalt 3mo ago
>Another angle to explore is how much of the process of software development that we do manually can we automate, particularly the parts that still require human input (like code reviews). That may also help with reducing the cognitive load. Get your vibe coded software with zero human reviewers away from the public infrastructure.
- paulbjensen 3mo ago
  I’m talking about CI pipelines where you have: - Unit tests - End to End testing with Cucumber and Puppeteer (or Playwright these days) - Code Coverage analysis - Lint and formatting checks - Tools like knit to remove unused code - Security checking tools like Synk and Socket - Size checking If you look at what those tools do, they automate aspects of reviewing PRs. The question then becomes - what still gets done manually, and are there ways to automate that.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

marcAKAmarc 3mo ago

Just wanted stop here to say that I find myself lucky to be able to retain employment as a gamedev engineer without using any AI or agent in my daily process. I work remote, so I don't know what the experience of my collegues entails. Am I really slipping into antiquity?

casper14 3mo ago
If you use zero AI, I would say yes
- jplusequalt 3mo ago
  If he uses zero AI, he's better off than someone who hasn't looked at their own code in months.

jplusequalt 3mo ago

When the state of the industry is so bad that people need to start recommended mindfulness to unfuck your brain, then it's time to get the fuck out.

hiq 3mo ago

Regarding the multi-tasking induced by this new way of working (agentic coding), I've moved from quick and short iterations to a longer ideally one-shot prompt, optimizing for less reviewing and less context switching. I used to send a prompt as early as possible, meaning that'd really just give the rough idea, barely a sentence, and see what the model would come up with, thinking that I'd save time if it got it right for the first time, and maybe I'd just need to correct what it got wrong (it's faster at typing than me). That means a lot of multitasking at a rather high pace, which takes its toll if you do it for too long. I've recently switched to writing longer prompts (doing part of the planning myself), hoping to get better results and to have less to review: I'm realizing I'd rather write more and read less, past a certain threshold. I don't really want to iterate with an agent; I want to tell it, maybe in somewhat verbose terms, what I want, I want a quick confirmation that it'll indeed work, and I want the final output (e.g. a commit), that's it. That's probably what some users have been doing since the beginning, but with all the hype around this tech, maybe I got caught by this idea that with just a few words, I can get stuff done. In my experience, it's indeed just a few words, but for useless units of work (iterations with a model) rather than what I really want (commit) which itself will often require non-trivial amount of input. In this case, I'd rather give it all in one go, in a somewhat focused state.

archagon 3mo ago

Unionizing. The word you’re looking for is unionizing.

nickvec 3mo ago

As mentioned in the article, Waking Up is a great option if you want to get into meditation. Highly recommend reading Sam Harris’ book “Waking Up” as well.

bitbasher 3mo ago

You could meditate.. or you could write some code and care about the craft. I find that much more fulfilling than a few minutes of mindful breathing. Hell, you can do both!

mxmilkiib 3mo ago

"'A Course on Early Buddhist Meditation' is a series of ten long-format talks on meditation by Bhante Sujato. The curriculum derives from the early suttas, particularly from the Theravada tradition. "The video trailer for the original course from which this series has been derived/edited can be found here - https://youtu.be/EEOykTO5754 https://youtu.be/EEOykTO5754 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMC0iGGyFk&list=PL70fWqztn7OVo4h1RSRfuIzmb83S6O5Qt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMC0iGGyFk&list=PL70fWqztn7... "Mahāsatipaṭṭhānasutta - Bh. Sujato", the main breath mindfulness/meditation sutta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMC0iGGyFk&list=PL70fWqztn7OVo4h1RSRfuIzmb83S6O5Qt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMC0iGGyFk&list=PL70fWqztn7... https://suttacentral.net/dn22/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=main&notes=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin https://suttacentral.net/dn22/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain... A_History_of_Mindfulness_Bhikkhu_Sujato.pdf; https://santifm.org/santipada/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/A_History_of_Mindfulness_Bhikkhu_Sujato.pdf https://santifm.org/santipada/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/A_H... "This series of 10 Dhamma Talks by Bhante Sujato, given during the rains retreat in Santi Forest Monastery in NSW, Australia in 2007 is the most detailed description of Ajahn Mahachatchai's Metta Meditation technique I have ever come across on the internet." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HREe6phLMpU&list=PLTcGMzIEhlsa0maPxIduPyYSNonn0_umT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HREe6phLMpU&list=PLTcGMzIEhl... Cūḷavedallasutta/The Shorter Elaboration, a socratic discource between a nun and, iirc, their former partner, who later became a monk/mendicant ("begger") "10.2 “The noble eightfold path is conditioned.” (grasping for good things is good, until you finish crossing the river with that raft) https://suttacentral.net/mn44/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=main&notes=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin https://suttacentral.net/mn44/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain... https://suttacentral.net/snp1.8/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=main&notes=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin https://suttacentral.net/snp1.8/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=pla... https://youtu.be/maBmEU4YUi8 https://youtu.be/maBmEU4YUi8 - Metta Sutta/The Discourse on Love, recital/chant in English by Sujato

albertfranquesa 3mo ago

[flagged]

heisnotanalien 3mo ago

Programming is NOT meditative even the old way. Yes you can get into a flow state but that's not really meditation. In fact you're really just disassociating in a way and is easy to end stuck in your head too much. In fact, without balance, long periods of coding can leave some people feeling mentally over-identified with abstract thinking and less connected to their body or immediate experience. It is also worth saying that you don't need to sit still to meditate. You can do yoga or go for a walk. Walking meditation is very underrated IMHO.

paradox242 3mo ago

This article is literally the meme of the guy sitting in the middle of a room on fire confidently declaring "this is fine".