Programmers need to start meditating

ehnto

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.

homarp

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

6stringmerc

“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.

delis-thumbs-7e

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.

pjmlp

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

jahala

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

senfiaj

>> 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-switche...

sph

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.

ajb

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.

phyzix5761

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

iamflimflam1

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

> 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

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

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.

keyle

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

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 :’)

titanomachy

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

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

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.

crudgen

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.