For over 20 years, the meditative focus of programming has been one of the best parts of my job. Every week I’d spend countless hours in a flow state, which quiets the default mode network. The DMN is responsible for daydreaming/reflection but also rumination/worrying, so quieting it settles your mind. If I didn’t manage to write code for a week, I’d start to notice it. Now it’s context switching all day 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.
  • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    7·
    21 hours ago

    Programming is not like actual meditation. At least, it never was for me. It meant being constantly busy thinking about design choices and alternatives. At best, it meant being very focused in the present, but way too focused and constantly solving puzzles.

    There’s been a few times I’ve been truly zen’d out with meditation and it is way fucking nicer than the feeling you get from even doing work you enjoy. It’s much nicer to actually just truly meditate than find a “meditative” hobby. Fishing isn’t meditation. Hiking isn’t meditation. But, you can meditate while you hike or fish if you try and know how to meditate… But you should probably learn to meditate first and get used to it.

    It would be way more important in this respect to just sit down next time you’re somewhere comfortable and just focus entirely on your breath, without putting your thoughts into words. Just truly be in that moment, breathing. Peaceful. Not strategizing about how best to handle a task, but just focusing on your breath. or even easier, start with guided meditations. Find somewhere peaceful and comfortable where you won’t be disturbed and just try it out.

    It feels like a waste of time at first but then it quickly ends up feeling like a necessary action to just truly exist and be sane, kind of like how if you jog every day eventually you feel like you need it and even look forward to it. At first you might freak out about trying not to think for 20 minutes, then eventually 2 hours feels easy. And the practice can help your mental health in so many ways. It’s kind of like a Vulcan superpower at times, like you might get social anxiety and seriously learn to turn it off. You just get more control over an organ that is responsible for how you think and feel, and that’s way more powerful than people imply. There’s a reason it’s suggested for mental health all the time.

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    5·
    21 hours 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.

    Are you more “productive” if you dont produce “your” work? Just sounds like bro is addicted to playing with bots.

  • Hxrmit@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    4·
    21 hours ago

    Did this buffoon really call himself a programmer because he uses robots to do all of his work?

  • reluctant_squidd@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    20 hours ago

    If using a LLM to generate code now makes you a programmer, learning it all from scratch must make you an international doctorate of Astro-computer linguistics.

    • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      19 hours ago

      So do we retroactively get the title…? how does this work? 😎

      That said, it is an incredible tool. Moral equivalent of an excavator or fork lift or something. It it is most effectively used as such to schlep great quantities of tedium around(implement this lugubrious API, reorganize this class hierarchy, swap out this abstraction/pattern). Things that before used to be hobby project killers to my ADHD brain are no longer the limiting factor.

      • reluctant_squidd@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        18 hours ago

        You just have to be careful with how it rewrites things.

        Also, even the best LLMs seem to trip on tiny details in code now and then. Like a directory mixup or maybe the name of a very specific built-in function.

        Sometimes it might find the issue, sometimes it will rewrite everything again trying to find it.

        Being an actual programmer means a lot in those situations.

        Happened to me maybe 1/5 times I asked it to generate things. Last time was maybe a week ago it fabricated a file location and then tried to rewrite core functions to get around it, rather than actually find it, but I haven’t been messing with it much this week.