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Comments (191)

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  Jcampuzano2
  At 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.
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  kstenerud
  Reminds 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.
• aed
  Oh man, I help host a monthly AI meetup called AI Friday: https://aifri.dayMy 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.
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  dgellow
  I 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.
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  xendo
  I 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.
• Sindisil
  I support this.I also support No GenAI every day ending in a Y, but I support this, too.
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  neuroticnews25
  >write code with your own handsHow is this supposed to work? Like emulate an agent with my brain and write down the output?
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  sdcfgy
  Got no AI 7 days here. I sold my token budget to other staff and spent the money on beer.
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  kstenerud
  The 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) 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!
• StilesCrisis
  My 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.
• brabel
  I 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.
• gwbas1c
  The 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.
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  BrucecarlL
  We 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.
• bingemaker
  This 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 :)
• mcdow
  i 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.
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  Waterluvian
  When 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.
• ethagnawl
  Nobody 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.
• furyofantares
  I 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).
• kekebo
  Maybe 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.
• notarobot123
  Sounds 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...
• bodash
  This is hilariously similar to an idea I had few months ago: https://humantodo.dev/
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  Kuyawa
  AI 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.FalseI've learned more, I am more engaged, it has positively impacted my critical thinking abilities and has increased my skill formationFor me it's AI 24/7 even on sundays
• rodrigosetti
  How about let everyone decide whether they want to use AI or not without any mandate
• artur_makly
  Why stop there?!?#NoPhoneWeekends
• numitus
  Sounds like assembler Friday. Or manual memory management Friday.
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  tyleo
  I 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.
• satnhak
  No thanks
• PenguinRevolver
  Some people are gonna take this as a three-day weekend. Pity.
• thec0d3
  Hard 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 debtRole 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 intelligenceMaking 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
• anon
  undefined
• tokai
  >study after study showsAnd 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.
• speak_plainly
  The 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?
• iAMkenough
  I 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.
• Dowwie
  You can choose to not use AI every day. Don't impose your culture on someone else, though.
• newswasboring
  Great 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.
• OutOfHere
  Such 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.
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  iamleppert
  This 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.
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  luxuryballs
  "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.
• anon
  undefined
• moomoo11
  cringe
• chrisjj
  > 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.
• wtigero
  [flagged]
• pranav_tech26
  [dead]
• huflungdung
  [dead]
• PeterStuer
  Sure. Imposed self controlled abstibense has worked every time. /s
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  skybrian
  I’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.
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  yipinwong
  This 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)