Yet another Hacker News

25 points vaughands 21 hours ago 14 comments

vaughands 21 hours ago | parent

I thought I would share. I don't see this discussed much and thought it was interesting (it's my own post) when doing some introspection today. Is it from moving up in my career and I just type a little less? Has the movement from typing in a code editor all day to writing more prose helped? It's hard to say for sure, but a fun observation. :) I am curious if anyone else has experienced the same.

alexebird 1 hour ago | parent

This has been a welcome benefit from the agentic coding era for my RSI. Thanks for sharing.

jpgvm 1 hour ago | parent

It's generally also just less typing if you are using long running agents, you can input the goals, steer it a bit then go for a nice walk and check in again on it in 30-40mins. I hope we can normalise this workflow as it will be much better for everyones health and longevity in the field.

IMO LLMs are the best thing to happen to coding in my ~15 years of being in the game.

I wager they have probably added on another 5-10 years to my engineering career as I was contemplating getting out before they showed up.

Have also been convincing some friends that have "gone woods" over the years to put the woodworking tools down for a day or two and give them a go. So far so good, a few folks have found the spark again and it's been awesome to see them make digital things again too.

htrp 1 hour ago | parent

except management expectation will be that you spawn 30 different things and check them every 2 minutes

r_lee 1 hour ago | parent

I'm so confused at how people think that this will be a reality, like, what kind of boss would look at this and go: yep sure my people will only work for a few minutes here and there, let's keep paying them their huge 6 figure salaries ??

am I missing something here..?

blktiger 57 minutes ago | parent

There is definitely a limit to how many things you can manage at a time. Maybe 3 or 4 depending on how much context switching you do.

jpgvm 23 minutes ago | parent

The walk is usually work too, just instead of staring at the screen and trying to think I take a walk and actually think. So when I get back I can provide input to the robot that will result in meaningful output.

Companies that pay people to hit enter instead of using auto-approve/bypass are going to lose to companies that pay people to think and produce results, regardless of how much time they spend in front of the screen or how many prompts they input.

sodapopcan 55 minutes ago | parent

I'm not saying this to be snooty or whatever, but RSI is also solvable via a custom keyboard or learning Vim motions (or both). I had really bad RSI and it totally went away after the combo of learning to type properly (which you mentioned in your post) and switching to Vim full time. Vim motions reduce the amount of stretching you need to do by a LOT. Snippets also helped. I am of course talking about in The Before Times.

azuremis 36 minutes ago | parent

That's been my experience as well. I remember the pain from the keyboard and also doing too much clicking when making wordpress websites. Now that I do more agentic development, I type a lot less and am working to dictate more with voice also.

applicative 1 hour ago | parent

I recursively self-improve my shoe-tying powers every morning.

notnullorvoid 55 minutes ago | parent

What helped my RSI:

- Using mouse less

- Ergonomic keyboard

- Learning to type better (I still suck, but speed is fast enough, and I don't get a soar neck or fingers from my previous glance at KB then back to monitor and smash keys)

- Positioning top of monitor to eye level

- Gradually transitioning from programming through rapid trial and error, to building and exploring logical models of programs in my head, then type out some code that usually works.

All my experiments and usage of AI if anything lead to more typing rather than less.

aussieguy1234 44 minutes ago | parent

If you set up speech to text like voxtype, you won't even have to type the prompt into the AI and can do your programming almost entirely by voice.

I don't have RSI, but I do this whenever my arms get tired to make sure I don't end up with it.

senderista 27 minutes ago | parent

LLMs have indeed done wonders for recursive self-improvement. /s

godshatter 23 minutes ago | parent

What helped my RSI was learning a new computer layout (dvorak in my case). It went away and has stayed gone for 25-ish years. Keeping bikeyboardal between qwerty and dvorak probably helps.