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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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 which I use to help me partition agent chats by task, run separate worktrees etc
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
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.
As someone brought up in Indian (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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a common thing to say, but when during the development of human civilization has this actually been the case? Is agriculture designed around humans more than hunting/gathering? Is industrialized work more designed around humans than agrarian society?
I don't mean to sound pessimistic or technocratic; quite the contrary. But I think we shouldn't project our desire for equanimity onto romantized versions of civilization.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
Didn't Azure, AWS and Cloudflare crash a few times in the second half of 2025 because of vibe coding?
So no, I will not be "meditating". My meditative states tend to be beard stroking and occasional F bomb.
Joel Spolsky disagrees here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What an utter piece of BS. AI goons really like to smell their own crap
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.
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.
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.
This is a common thing to say, but when during the development of human civilization has this actually been the case? Is agriculture designed around humans more than hunting/gathering? Is industrialized work more designed around humans than agrarian society?
I don't mean to sound pessimistic or technocratic; quite the contrary. But I think we shouldn't project our desire for equanimity onto romantized versions of civilization.
The point of being an experienced programmer is thinking in data structures and transformations, not in prose. Why would I introduce all that friction?
per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
…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.