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No AI Fridays
- bingemaker 17d agoThis is a great initiative! I'm going to send this to my team, hoping to get some positive response. Maybe we should also have code-we-love :)
- henrycoler 15d ago[dead]
- xendo 17d agoI made the site to convince my boss to let me not use AI on Fridays. Hoping to get some noise around it to make him believe it's real.
- elliotbnvl 17d agoUpvoting for visibility, not because I agree. This is really disingenuous, and quite a bad idea overall. I’d make a joke about there not being a word for the reverse of plagiarism, except there is one: lying.
- xendo 17d agoHave you read the page? I'm the COE of HTMX. I'm the boss.
- Diti 17d agoSo is everybody, apparently. https://x.com/htmx_org/status/1726986945430233323 https://x.com/htmx_org/status/1726986945430233323
- elliotbnvl 17d agoOops. I took your comment at face value. Sorry!
- newswasboring 17d agoDisingenuous? Plagiarism? Care to explain? I dont even understand what you mean by these words in this context.
- k4rli 17d agoHe was just taking the piss, being both OP and the boss of htmx.
- aed 17d agoI hope your boss listens! :) Giving yourself time to be idle and let a problem marinate is often where the breakthroughs and good ideas come from. If taste and human judgment are what separate useful AI output from slop, we need to give our brains time to cook instead of constantly bouncing between agents.
- BrucecarlL 17d agoWe need No AI Hours everyday. We need this kind of time every day to clear our minds, reflect on what AI has brought us, and consider whether it's necessary to address the issue of technical debt.
- xendo 17d ago100%. Making it a whole day makes it easier to sell and stick to, that's it. It's just brutal to have a whole day when you need to focus and not just mindlessly prompt.
- Retr0id 17d agoI let Claude's 5 hour limits do this for me.
- knollimar 17d agoI propose 1 session per day and 3 hours to ingest the slurry into your brain
- Sindisil 17d agoI support this. I also support No GenAI every day ending in a Y, but I support this, too.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- sdcfgy 17d agoGot no AI 7 days here. I sold my token budget to other staff and spent the money on beer.
- scrollaway 17d agoI guess alcoholism is cooler than using AI to do things nowadays, is that your stance?
- qmmmur 17d agoIt absolutely is
- valleyer 17d agoOne of the strawiest strawmen I've seen in quite some time.
- sdcfgy 17d agoLooking at some of the shit I have to deal with, yes it is. TODO: insert something about open source, beer, free beer, someone else's beer, trading beer, subgenius, slack etc etc
- sensanaty 17d agoLiterally everything and anything on the planet is cooler than AI, yes
- misiti3780 17d agoso if you drink beer, you're automatically an alcoholic - I bet you're fun to hang out with
- wonnage 17d agoAI is somewhere down there with Covid and Ubisoft, I’m gonna go with yes
- DarmokTanagra 17d agoI just cleaned my cats litter box and that was cooler than AI. I have no idea how people can spend 40 hours a week interacting with those sycophantic random number generators, its like having the most annoying linkedin influencer you can imagine DM'ing you all day.
- dgellow 17d agoI would actually really recommend people who are using coding agents full time to make AI brakes for your weekend projects. Think of it like a small break to take the time to reconnect to the code and keep your brain muscles intact, a bit like a professional cyclist going for a casual ride in the forest to experience what they don’t experience anymore in their professional life.
- giancarlostoro 17d agoFor me its quite the opposite. My employer is too afraid to commit to any of it. Meanwhile, I've built more stable software for myself and my personal computing needs of higher quality and in faster turnaround times. I've also seen how insanely good at doing a total rewrite / modernization the models can be.
- dgellow 17d agoI specified „people using coding agents full time“
- giancarlostoro 17d agoFully aware, just tired of hearing about AI in extremes. Theres some of us who just want to use it in a useful way.
- mapontosevenths 17d agoI see where you're coming from, but I can't help being reminded of my youth when teachers would admonish me "YoU wOn'T aLwaAYs haVe A CalCulator in yOuR poCKet!" Now the entire world has a calculator in their pocket, and all that wrote memorization not only made me hate math as a child, it was a giant waste of time. I suspect that one day we'll look back on advice like no-AI Fridays exactly as modern readers would react to "Punch-card only Tuesdays" in a modern enterprise.
- dgellow 17d agoMore like: take some time without your phone. Something I assume everybody here would agree is a sane thing to do. Not using a calculator as a kid for math is pretty important, because the goal is to develop intuition. Same for software, playing music, learning a language. You have to keep some level of friction to develop and keep your intuition
- tyleo 17d agoI find it interesting when people say, “I need time away from the AI to think.” I use AI for development but I would not say I’ve offloaded my thinking to AI. AI is great for pushing text but I haven’t found its system design skills to be that good. To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
- dgellow 17d agoI felt the same until I actually tried to stop for a week or so. And I could feel the constant temptation and anxiety of not having the coding agents as a sort of safety net. Taking a clean brake made me realize how much I was losing my skills and connection to the actual implementation, not just the high level pieces of it. I also didn’t realize at the time how much of my design thinking is done while working on code, and all the constant small decisions that are actually impactful
- a2ff6eeb0 17d agoWhy wouldn't you offload your thinking to AI?! That's the entire point of having it!
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- aed 17d agoOh man, I help host a monthly AI meetup called AI Friday: https://aifri.day https://aifri.day My heart sank when I saw this post. I thought we’d created enemies! No conflict here, though. Personal example... A few weeks ago, I realized that with all these agents running and all the things I could be working on, I was spending my days managing shallow pings instead of going deep. I have AI agents managing SEO and ad spend. I used to spend a little time every day reading what each had to say. Now each gives me one detailed report per week, with links to the underlying reports and specific things I need to look at. I block 90 minutes for each one, on different days, and use that time to go deep. It’s helped a lot.
- newswasboring 17d agoGreat initiative. I was expecting something like this to happen. I think a good addition to the website can be success stories people share from this approach. Sending a link this to a manager is not very convincing, but managers respond very well to social proof.
- Jcampuzano2 17d agoAt the very least, I do encourage people who are working on personal projects for explicitly learning and studying purposes to purposefully not use AI. Of course, if the purpose of the project is to learn AI, then that rule is allowed to be broken. Anecdotal example but I know plenty of students (Including my own brother) who graduated recently who did it almost entirely with AI (unfortunately at the request of their own professors) who can't answer the most basic of questions that I would have expected of sometimes even first year CS students in the days before AI was a thing, which is why I encourage them to build projects without it. Personally, I'm starting to think that in university and education systems, all projects should now be done in class and in computer labs/monitored study halls because we can't trust anyone to not use AI anymore.
- wkjagt 17d agoI got out of tech about 5 years ago, before AI really took off. I still do a lot of personal projects and now never use AI. I tried it a bit (only free plans) but noticed how much it caused me to no longer be able to think through a solution myself. I thought I was learning a lot from it but for some reason whatever I learned from it didn't stick. So now I'm no longer using it at all. I do realize that this is very specific to my situation of course.
- echelon 17d agoI really do not get all of y'all claiming this causes you to "not be able to think". I worked on six nines active active payments infra that handled billions in daily transaction volume. I've built laser projection systems to play interactive games on skyscrapers. That ability is not atrophying. I'm able to do 10-20x what I was able to do before AI, and I'm able to work at a breadth, depth, and level of polish that was previously impossible without mastering other diciplines (CSS, design, etc). With AI, I've built several video games, my own SRS software, my own productivity software, and a business making $5M ARR and growing 70% month on month. I've now done more hardware projects in the past eight months than I have in the last ten years. I might even start doing physics and bio (I did my undergrad in biochem) if I can find the time. I'm also back to making movies. I was a major hobbyist filmmaker before the pandemic. I've shot dozens of films. They're extremely logistically complex and take so much time, and I was never capable of working in the high fantasy or sci fi genres I wanted to. Seedance is scratching so many of my itches it isn't even funny. It's like a gift from the gods. I'm working more now than ever before, and I'm turning those hours of writing pointless glue code or testing new libraries and frameworks into actual productive work. Getting real work done. 2010-2020 felt like tech dystopia to me. Cellphone incrementalism, walled gardens, adtech, crypto, locked down devices. It was a pale shadow of the excitement of the early web. Personal websites, kids making Flash games, the indie web, p2p, people building stuff being 70% of the internet. For the first time in a long time, I feel extremely hopeful about the future and excited to work with tech again. tl;dr - I can still write in cursive, but it turns out I just don't need to as I write my movie. I do not get you folks who claim this is bad. This is magical.
- StilesCrisis 17d agoMy old workplace did the opposite: we had All AI Fridays where you had carte blanche to build out AI tooling or just work on AI stuff as long as it's vaguely related to your job.
- luxuryballs 17d ago"Not too much AI" or "Just enough AI" also, if you feel the need for a No AI Friday it could mean you also need to just use less AI, or try to only use it for the correct things so you don't lose visibility, for example don't let it make decisions for you, have it present the decisions.
- WD-42 17d agoChoosing from a set of decisions the agent presents you might feel like you are making a decision, but you’ll never make the one that wasn’t presented.
- luxuryballs 17d agoseeing the decision point is exactly what allows you to prevent bad foundational decisions, you are of course able to see beyond any pre-canned choices
- WD-42 17d agoYou might think you are above the power of suggestion but I guarantee you are not.
- luxuryballs 16d agowhat are you suggesting
- skybrian 17d agoI’m not going to go that far (you do you), but reading the source code seems like a great way to remain in touch with the implementation. On my hobby project, I do a lot of reading code, asking the AI pointed questions about how things work, and asking it to clean up messes.
- simonklitj 17d agoSo you’re left with the least interesting tasks? Not trying to be too snarky, or too much of a luddite, but that would be a killer for me, motivationally.
- skybrian 17d agoMaybe we just disagree about what's fun? Some people like to build things by hand and other people enjoy working with power tools. I'm having a great time building personal web apps with exactly the features I want, and I also enjoy refactoring the source code to get closer to how I would ideally write it. I can use a coding agent to do both. What's not to like? I stopped editing source code by hand as a self-imposed limitation to see how far I could go by prodding AI to do things my way, and it turns out it's pretty far, so I'm sticking with it. Which isn't to say that writing code by hand can't be fun, too, under the right circumstances. It also helps that I’m retired and this is hobby programming. If you’re being forced into it by circumstances at work, that wouldn’t be nearly as fun.
- bluefirebrand 17d ago> reading the source code seems like a great way to remain in touch with the implementation Reading code is way less enjoyable than writing it
- skybrian 17d agoIt depends why you’re reading it. I enjoy cleaning up messy source code, and now I have a power tool to do it.
- yipinwong 17d agoThis will be the pattern only the "privileged" workers will be able to afford. Not using AI is similar to giving employees 20% of their time for any non-sprint work. This privilege of No AI usage a day will lower the productivity, and rarely any companies will allow it (if they track your usage, which I am sure they do)
- DarmokTanagra 17d agoPrivileged workers are the ones who's employers are paying for AI while still keeping them employed in the first place. The end goal of every AI initiative is to lower headcount, if your employer is forcing AI usage you are digging your own grave.
- yipinwong 17d ago> Privileged workers are the ones who's employers are paying for AI while still keeping them employed in the first place. I used "time" as privilege, not as AI as it's given as premise in the article. You didn't even attempt to decode my comment with the article content in the first place. > The end goal of every AI initiative is to lower headcount, if your employer is forcing AI usage you are digging your own grave The "trend" nowadays shows other ways. And also Jevons paradoxe in the works. The more you use AI, the more work will spawn. --- you are just trying to pick a fight @TRACK: DarmokTanagra
- DarmokTanagra 17d agoI understood your original comment just fine, I just thought that the point you were making was stupid. By "trend nowadays" I assume you're just choosing not to count the 700k layoffs in tech sector since 2022? Show me all of the new products Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc have "spawned" since force feeding AI to their remaining staff. 100 different permutations for sycophantic AI models and fact simulators don't count.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- notarobot123 17d agoSounds good. They're encouraging others to join in but it'd be great to hear if this actually has an impact so far and how its worked out for HTMX. I imagine there are some interesting anecdotes about what actually happens when teams do this. [Edit] just seen that OP is pitching this rather than practicing it. I wonder if any team actually do have a practice like this...
- pranav_tech26 17d ago[dead]
- ethagnawl 17d agoNobody should be in a position where they need to clear something like this with their boss. Now, I'm certain people are but that just means those of us with seniority and in leadership have failed those people.
- satnhak 17d agoNo thanks
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- Kuyawa 17d agoAI 24/7 > Study after study shows that using LLMs can cause you to accumulate cognitive debt, make you less engaged with your work, negatively impact your critical thinking abilities, and hamper your skill formation. False I've learned more, I am more engaged, it has positively impacted my critical thinking abilities and has increased my skill formation For me it's AI 24/7 even on sundays
- ItsMattyG 17d agoWhat makes it false?
- Barbing 17d agoFalse based on your sample size of one, (which is fine to share), or you’ve also read this somewhere? If it’s just your own datapoint, is it difficult to self assess?
- yoyohello13 17d agoI guess you’re the exception. Congrats
- wonnage 17d agoThose are rookie numbers, once Elon sends my agents to Mars they’ll be doing 40 extra minutes per sol
- artur_makly 17d agoWhy stop there?!?#NoPhoneWeekends
- huflungdung 17d ago[dead]
- numitus 17d agoSounds like assembler Friday. Or manual memory management Friday.
- furyofantares 17d agoI don't know about Fridays but I like spending some significant amount of time full-vibing then some significant amount of time full-manual, coming to terms with what has been done-but-not-pushed, figuring out how I want the code to actually work and look, with roughly zero regard to how much transformation or starting-anew it will take from what has been vibed - easy come, easy go. Then once I really know what exactly I want, either transform the vibed code into it, or delete and start over (maybe manually, maybe prompting).
- moomoo11 17d agocringe
- iamleppert 17d agoThis is as silly as saying you shouldn’t drive your car on Friday’s and walk to work instead. Why only Friday? What does “doing things the old way” one day a week prove or benefit when you spend 90% of your time working with AI? Tech people who have their entire identities wrapped up in being smart or the best engineer in the room have suddenly learned that intelligence is now a commodity and a cheap one at that.
- yoyohello13 17d agoObjectively, it actually would be beneficial for most people to walk to work once a week… Also, being intelligent is still important. Enabling the dumbest people in the room to dump their tidal wave of slop on others isn’t really a positive.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- nunez 17d agoOh man; public transit and the suburbs as a concept would be SO MUCH BETTER if a federal law like this existed
- gwbas1c 17d agoThe technique I'm following is: If it's easier to explain it to an LLM, have the LLM do it. If it's easier to do it myself, I do it. This is useful when iterating on UI, where I need to make a few minor changes; or when I need to "explore" to understand how a query or data model needs to work. Otherwise, I don't need to dedicate a day to doing things by hand; I just do a few things by hand every day.
- iAMkenough 17d agoI like this idea. Like "no watering your lawn on Mondays" to conserve water. Could be another case for four-day work weeks, especially if AI is supposedly improving productivity during those four days a week.
- neuroticnews25 17d ago>write code with your own hands How is this supposed to work? Like emulate an agent with my brain and write down the output?
- xendo 17d agoJust look at the keyboard and sort all characters by how probable you think they are next, type one and start from the beginning.
- cj 17d agoAnd what am I supposed to do when I hit a wall solving a problem? Just sleep on it? Sarcasm aside, I think there's a real phenomenon of AI removing the experience of getting stuck on a problem (where often I'll wake up the next day with a perfect solution in my head ready to implement). The same way social media removed the experience of "being bored".
- wonnage 17d agoDo not recommend. There’s this stupid hard limit every day which takes like 8 hours to reset no matter how many tokens you used
- avian 17d agoIt is provably impossible to write code manually. It takes an agent on the order of 100 billion operations to produce a single token. A person (generously) taking just a second for a single mental addition or multiplication would take tens of thousands of years to write just a single line of code.
- PenguinRevolver 17d agoSome people are gonna take this as a three-day weekend. Pity.
- tokai 17d ago>study after study shows And its four preprints and one published one with an extremely weak experiment. But seriously who offloads decision-making to LLMs? Thats the main thing they can't do proper.
- mcdow 17d agoi inadvertently do this at work anyway. i burn through my monthly token budget on boring-but-valuable tasks, and then i spend the rest of the month doing stuff by hand.
- Waterluvian 17d agoWhen I was 9 or 10 I flew somewhere with my family for the first time. On landing, the pilot bounced the plane off the runway. While taxiing he came on the intercom and apologized for the "slightly rough" landing, explaining that they usually use <fragmented memory> some autopilot to land/smooth the landing and that to keep qualified they have to do it manually every so often. So anyways, I fully embrace and support the idea of bouncing your code off the compiler every Friday. It's what I do and I can really tell those skills need practice even after just a week.
- stavros 17d agoApparently they didn't do it manually often enough, huh.
- prmoustache 17d agoUnrelated to the bouncing part I once chatted with an airline pilot and he mentionned the expectations on what is a good landing are different depending if you are a pilot or a passenger. A passenger is looking for comfort and wants a very soft one. A pilot prefers a slightly rougher one where you actually feel the wheels hitting and gripping to the ground because he is looking for feedback and control. The key is to find a good compromize between both expectations and it also depends on the conditions.
- Dowwie 17d agoYou can choose to not use AI every day. Don't impose your culture on someone else, though.
- rodrigosetti 17d agoHow about let everyone decide whether they want to use AI or not without any mandate
- kstenerud 17d agoReminds me of when we were admonished to use a "real" compiled language rather than an interpreted, GC'd one, lest we lose our ability to reason about the system, cache, and memory. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to continue using assembly, lest our "real" skills atrophy from too much cushy C development. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to keep our scope and probe skills sharp, and read and understand the schematics of whatever computer we were on, lest we forget how to diagnose faults in its components. Which reminds me of when we were admonished to practice calculating in our heads and keeping slide rule skills sharp, lest they atrophy to a calculator. You don't need to "keep practicing" in order to maintain your understanding. The best engineers know how our systems work down to more levels, but for average developers producing average software with average impact, average output is acceptable.
- burner54828182 17d agoApples and oranges
- Razengan 17d agoReminds of the time when we had to plant our own apple trees instead of buying them from the market, and to get up early at 1 AM to milk the oranges instead of just buying juice
- seizethecheese 17d agoApples, apple juice, apple concentrate
- speak_plainly 17d agoThe cognitive debt accusation is dumb. Implying there is some sort of cognitive deterioration when it is merely a label used by the authors to describe lower cognitive engagement while using AI and some persistence of that lower engagement when returning to the task without it … which is predictably going to be the case when you’re offloading work. If your plan is to offload a task to AI, do you really need to dedicate your attention to it?
- PeterStuer 17d agoSure. Imposed self controlled abstibense has worked every time. /s
- frgturpwd 16d agoHow I feel when I see a fat person dieting.
- brabel 17d agoI am currently on an obsessive coding spree on my side projects where I only use AI to ask questions like I used to do on Stack Overflow. At work it’s nearly 100% AI because quite honestly the AI is more thorough and faster than humanly possible. I don’t get my coding itch scratched at work anymore, so my off work coding has become a necessity for me. At first it felt pointless, I know I could just write a prompt and get the code written in a minute. But now, as the blog post says, I feel my ability degrading and doing things by hand has become really important for me to try to stop that. The question however is whether the new generation of devs will need to be able to write and review code by hand or AI will just do it so much better than humans that it will make no sense to do that, and what the humans will need to focus on instead. I fear this thinking that humans must understand the code and keep the AI from making a mess may be a relic of our pre AI brains, and soon if not now already it’s quite the opposite.
- kekebo 17d agoMaybe this is a useful way to address maladaptive llm use for some, but it seems to focus the discussion on either-or (using llms) as opposed to how (to use them). For things you want to learn: Are you asking to have something solved, or are you asking for information so you can solve it? There may be detrimental learning effects even with asking llms for information, but I think there's a fundamental difference in addressing it as an intern/slave vs teacher/tutor.
- wtigero 17d ago[flagged]
- bodash 17d agoThis is hilariously similar to an idea I had few months ago: https://humantodo.dev/ https://humantodo.dev/
- chrisjj 17d ago> If the productivity gains from AI are so big, spending one day a week to minimize its downsides shouldn't be a difficult trade-off. That is not minimising.
- kstenerud 17d agoThe problem with this site is that the studies it cites don't match the conclusions it draws. "Accumulate cognitive debt": The paper is a preprint, isn't peer reviewed, and has already had a rather blistering critique (https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00856 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00856) that raises concerns about sample size, reproducibility of the analyses, EEG methodology, inconsistent reporting, and transparency. Also the fact that they infer EEG connectivity = learning without evidence. "Less engaged with your work": Doesn't measure engagement with work. It measured motivation, boredom, and sense of control on small tasks like writing a post or an email. The effects are small, and some of them cut against the site's thesis. "Negatively impact your critical thinking abilities": It's a survey of knowledge workers about past tasks. It doesn't measure critical thinking ability at all. Even the paper's title says "Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects". It doesn't establish causation, and the direction is ambiguous. "Hamper your skill formation": The one paper that has something, showing that using AI without learning about the things it's doing reduces knowledge acquisition (note it does not test retention). HOWEVER, the best AI users matched or beat the no-AI group!
- arw0n 17d agoI was personally flabbergasted by this one: > When we offload decision-making, we become unaware of the trade-offs. My biggest issue with the new agentic workflow is that I'm constantly asked to make decisions, and it is not always immediately obvious how important they are. Like, yes, I see the people who just write 'implement feature x' and then call it a day. These people were lazy und uncreative to begin with, and will continue to cognitively decline with AI. But if you use it seriously, you're in a constant state of doing requirements engineering, weighing trade-offs, and making architecture decisions.
- OutOfHere 17d agoSuch a policy is overcomplicating it. Instead, I make sure I understand nearly everything the AI produces before using its code. If I understand its output, it helps me grow.
- thec0d3 17d agoHard for me to take seriously a society addicted to destroying the planet through high tech hasn't already lost critical thinking and lives with high cognitive debt Role playing we're all that smart while our economic behavior (I mean resource use not financial) suggests the opposite is really making me question the idea keeping electrical activity in the brain up is a sign of intelligence Making life better for ourselves just going to make it worse for everyone eventually. Having language to describe physics does not mean we control physics now. Entropy doesn't give a shit; we are its agents on Earth. Humans will destroy the structure of a human friendly environment. The only choice we have is 50-100 years or 1,000 based on how fast we consume it
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- MetroWind 16d agoThe author is a CEO, so I can see why they care that much. I'm not a CEO. If I don't own the code I write, I couldn't care less. Personal code is another story. As to learning, are there really any adults offloading learning to AI?