I haven't reduced my thinking! Today I asked AI to debug an issue. It came with a solution that it was clearly correct, but it didn't explain why the code was in that state. I kept steering AI (which just wanted to fix) toward figuring out the why and it digged through git and github issue at some point,in a very cool way. And finally it pulled out something that made sense. It was defensive programming introduced to fix an issue somewhere else, which was also in turn fixed, so useless.

At that point an idea popped in my mind and I decided to look for similar patterns in the codebase, related to the change, found 3. 1 was a non bug, two were latent bugs.

Shipped a fix plus 2 fixes for bugs yet to be discovered.

Great article. Moment I finished reading this article, I thought of my time in solving a UI menu problem with lot of items in it and algorithm I came up with to solve for different screen sizes. It took solid 2 hrs of walking and thinking. I still remember how I was excited when I had the feeling of cracking the problem. Deep thinking is something everyone has it within and it varies how fast you can think. But we all got it with right environment and time we all got it in us. But thats long time ago. Now I always off load some thinking to AI. it comes up with options and you just have to steer it. By time it is getting better. Just ask it you know. But I feel like it is good old days to think deep by yourself. Now I have a partner in AI to think along with me. Great article.

I've found that it's often useful to spend the time thinking about the way I would architect the code (down to a fair level of minutia) before letting the agent have a go.

That way my 'thinker' is satiated and also challenged - Did the solution that my thinker came up with solve the problem better than the plan that the agent wrote?

Then either I acknowledge that the agent's solution was better, giving my thinker something to chew on for the next time; or my solution is better which gives the thinker a dopamine hit and gives me better code.

Many people here might be in a similar situation to me, but I took an online masters program that allowed for continuing education following completion of the degree. This has become one of my hobbies; I can take classes at my own expense, not worry about my grades, and just enjoy learning. I can push myself as much as I want and since the classes are hard, just completing 1 assignment is enough to force me to "think". Just sharing my experience for people who might be looking for ways to challenge themselves intellectually.

I feel like AI has given me the opportunity to think MORE, not less. I’m doing so much less mindless work, spending most of my efforts critically analyzing the code and making larger scale architectural decisions.

The author says “ Even though the AI almost certainly won't come up with a 100% satisfying solution, the 70% solution it achieves usually hits the “good enough” mark.”

The key is to keep pushing until it gets to the 100% mark. That last 30% takes multiples longer than the first 70%, but that is where the satisfaction lies for me.

People here seem to be conflating thinking hard and thinking a lot.

Most examples mentioned of “thinking hard” in the comments sound like they think about a lot of stuff superficially instead one particular problem deeply, which is what OP is referring to.

Rich Hickey and the Clojure folks coined the term Hammock Driven Development. It was tongue in cheek but IMO it is an ideal to strive towards.

Personally: technical problems I usually think for a couple days at most before I need to start implementing to make progress. But I have background things like future plans, politics, philosophy, and stories, so I always have something to think about. Close-up technical thinking is great, but sometimes step back and look at the bigger picture?

I don't think AI has affected my thinking much, but that's because I probably don't know how to use it well. Whenever AI writes a lot of code, I end up having to understand if not change most of it; either because I don't trust the AI, I have to change the specification (and either it's a small change or I don't trust the AI to rewrite), the code has a leaky abstraction, the specification was wrong, the code has a bug, the code looks like it has a bug (but the problem ends up somewhere else), I'm looking for a bug, etc. Although more and more often the AI saves time and thinking vs. if I wrote the implementation myself, it doesn't prevent me from having to think about the code at all and treating it like a black box, due to the above.

I believe it is a type of burnout. AI might have accelerated both the work and that feeling.

I found that doing more physical projects helped me. Large woodworking, home improvement, projects. Built-in bookshelves, a huge butcher block bar top (with 24+ hours of mindlessly sanding), rolling workbenches, and lots of cabinets. Learning and trying to master a new skill, using new design software, filling the garage with tools...

Thinking harder than I have in a long time with AI assisted coding.

As I'm providing context I get to think about what an ideal approach would look like and often dive into a research session to analyze pros and cons of various solutions.

I don't use agents much because it's important to see how a component I just designed fits into the larger codebase. That experience provides insights on what improvements I need to make and what to build next.

The time I've spent thinking about the composability, cohesiveness, and ergonomics of the code itself have really paid off. The codebase is a joy to work in, easy to maintain and extend.

The LLMs have helped me focus my cognitive bandwidth on the quality and architecture instead of the tedious and time consuming parts.

A lot of productive thinking happens when asleep, in the shower, in flow walking or cycling or rowing.

It's hard to rationalise this as billable time, but they pay for outcome even if they act like they pay for 9-5 and so if I'm thinking why I like a particular abstraction, or see analogies to another problem, or begin to construct dialogues with mysel(ves|f) about this, and it happens I'm scrubbing my back (or worse) I kind of "go with the flow" so to speak.

Definitely thinking about the problem can be a lot better than actually having to produce it.

I think harder because of AI.

I have to think more rigorously. I have to find ways to tie up loose ends, to verify the result efficiently, to create efficient feedback loops and define categorical success criteria.

I've thought harder about problems this last year than I have in a long time.

I am thinking harder than ever due to vibe coding. How will markets shift? What will be in demand? How will the consumer side adapt? How do we position? Predicting the future is a hard problem... The thinker in me is working relentlessly since December. At least for me the thinker loves an existential crisis like no other.

Good highlight of the struggle between Builder and Thinker, I enjoyed the writing. So why not work on PQC? Surely you've thought about other avenues here as well.

If you're looking for a domain where the 70% AI solution is a total failure, that's the field. You can't rely on vibe coding because the underlying math, like Learning With Errors (LWE) or supersingular isogeny graphs, is conceptually dense and hasn't been commoditized into AI training data yet. It requires that same 'several-day-soak' thinking you loved in physics, specifically because we're trying to build systems that remain secure even against an adversary with a quantum computer. It’s one of the few areas left where the Thinker isn't just a luxury, but a hard requirement for the Builder to even begin.

“We now buy our bread… it comes sliced… and sure you can just go and make your sandwich and it won’t be a rustic, sourdough that you spent months cultivating. Your tomatoes will be store bought not grown heirlooms. In the end… you have lost the art of baking bread. And your sandwich making skills are lost to time… will humanity ever bake again with these mass factories of bread? What have we lost! Woe is me. Woe is me.”

Well thinking hard is still there if you work on hard abstract problems. I keep thinking very hard, even though 4 CCs pump code while I do this. Besides, being a Gary Kasparov, playing on several tables, takes thinking.

I really don't believe AI allows you to think less hard. If it did, it would be amazing, but the current AI hasn't got to that capability. It forces you to think about different things at best.

You were walking to your destination which was three miles away

You now have a bicycle which gets you there in a third of the time

You need to find destinations that are 3x as far away than before

Eventually I always get to a problem I can't solve by just throwing an LLM at it and have to go in and properly debug things. At that point knowing the code base helps a hell of a lot, and I would've been better off writing the entire thing by hand.

Make sure you start every day with the type of confidence that would allow you to refer to yourself as an intellectual one-percenter

You don't have to miss it, buy a differential equation book and do one per day. Play chess on hard mode. I mean there's so many ways to make yourself think hard daily, this makes no sense.

It's like saying I miss running. Get out and run then.

What a bizarre claim. If you can solve anything by thinking, why don't you become a scientist? Think of a theory that unites quantum physics and general relativity.

> At the end of the day, I am a Builder. I like building things. The faster I build, the better.

This I can’t relate to. For me it’s “the better I build, the better”. Building poor code fast isn’t good: it’s just creating debt to deal with in the future, or admitting I’ll toss out the quickly built thing since it won’t have longevity. When quality comes into play (not just “passed the tests”, but is something maintainable, extensible, etc), it’s hard to not employ the Thinker side along with the Builder. They aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

Then again, I work on things that are expected to last quite a while and aren’t disposable MVPs or side projects. I suppose if you don’t have that longevity mindset it’s easy to slip into Build-not-Think mode.

Cognitive skills are just like any other - use them and they will grow, do not and they will decline. Oddly enough, the more one increases their software engineering cognition, the less the distance between "The Builder" and "The Thinker" becomes.

The ziphead era of coding is over. I'll miss it too.

Give the AI less responsibility but more work. Immediate inference is a great example: if the AI can finish my lines, my `if` bodies, my struct instantiations, type signatures, etc., it can reduce my second-by-second work significantly while taking little of my cognitive agency.

These are also tasks the AI can succeed at rather trivially.

Better completions is not as sexy, but in pretending agents are great engineers it's an amazing feature often glossed over.

Another example is automatic test generation or early correctness warnings. If the AI can suggest a basic test and I can add it with the push of a button - great. The length (and thus complexity) of tests can be configured conservatively relative to the AI of the day. Warnings can just be flags in the editors spotting obvious mistakes. Off-by-one errors for example, which might go unnoticed for a while, would be an achievable and valuable notice.

Also, automatic debugging and feeding the raw debugger log into an AI to parse seems promising, but I've done little of it.

...And go from there - if a well-crafted codebase and an advanced model using it as context can generate short functions well, then by all means - scale that up with discretion.

These problems around the AI coding tools are not at all special - it's a classic case of taking the new tool too far too fast.

Just work on more ambitious projects?

I feel that AI doesn't necessarily replace my thinking, but actually helps to explore deeper - on my behalf - alternative considerations in the approach to solving a problem, which in turn better informs my thinking.

I feel like I'm doing much nicer thinking now, I'm doing more systems thinking, not only that I'm iterating on system design a lot more because it is a lot easier to change with AI

If it's this easy to convince you to stop being creative, to stop putting in effort to think critically, then you don't deserve the fulfilment that creativity and critical thinking can give you. These vibe coding self pity articles are so bizarre.

Great, so does that mean that it is time to vibe code our own alternatives of everything such as the Linux kernel because the AI is sure 'smarter' than all of us?

Seen a lot of DIY vibe coded solutions on this site and they are just waiting for a security disaster. Moltbook being a notable example.

That was just the beginning.

"Sometimes you have to keep thinking past the point where it starts to hurt." - Fermi

Would like to follow your blog, is there an rss feed?

I definitely relate to this. Except that while I was in the 1% in university who thought hard, I don't think my success rate was that high. My confidence in the time was quite high, though, and I still remember the notable successes.

And also, I haven't started using AI for writing code yet. I'm shuffling toward that, with much trepidation. I ask it lots of coding questions. I make it teach me stuff. Which brings me to the point of my post:

The other day, I was looking at some Rust code and trying to work out the ownership rules. In theory, I more or less understand them. In practice, not so much. So I had Claude start quizzing me. Claude was a pretty brutal teacher -- he'd ask 4 or 5 questions, most of them solvable from what I knew already, and then 1 or 2 that introduced a new concept that I hadn't seen. I would get that one wrong and ask for another quiz. Same thing: 4 or 5 questions, using what I knew plus the thing just introduced, plus 1 or 2 with a new wrinkle.

I don't think I got 100% on any of the quizzes. Maybe the last one; I should dig up that chat and see. But I learned a ton, and had to think really hard.

Somehow, I doubt this technique will be popular. But my experience with it was very good. I recommend it. (It does make me a little nervous that whenever I work with Claude on things that I'm more familiar with, he's always a little off base on some part of it. Since this was stuff I didn't know, he could have been feeding me slop. But I don't think so; the explanations made sense and the the compiler agreed, so it'd be tough to get anything completely wrong. And I was thinking through all of it; usually the bullshit slips in stealthily in the parts that don't seem to matter, but I had to work through everything.)

yes but you solved problems already solved by someone else. how about something that hasn't been solved, or yet even noticed? that gives the greatest satisfaction

"Before you read this post, ask yourself a question: When was the last time you truly thought hard? ... a) All the time. b) Never. c) Somewhere in between."

What?

To me thinking hard involved the following steps-

1. Take a pen and paper.

2. Write down what we know.

3. Write down where we want to go.

4. Write down our methods of moving forward.

5. Make changes to 2, using 4, and see if we are getting closer to 3. And course correct based on that.

I still do it a lot. LLM's act as assist. Not as a wholesale replacement.

At the day job there was a problem with performance loading data in an app.

7 months later waffling on it on and off with and without ai I finally cracked it.

Author is not wrong though, the number of times i hit this isnt as often since ai. I do miss the feeling though

With AI, I now think much harder. Timelines are shorter, big decisions are closer together, and more system interactions have to be "grokked" in my head to guide the model properly.

I'm more spent than before where I would spend 2 hours wrestling with tailwind classes, or testing API endpoints manually by typing json shapes myself.

I think AI didn't do this. Open source, libraries, cloud, frameworks and agile conspired to do this.

Why solve a problem when you can import library / scale up / use managed kuberneted / etc.

The menu is great and the number of problems needing deep thought seems rare.

There might be deep thought problems on the requirements side of things but less often on the technical side.

> I have tried to get that feeling of mental growth outside of coding

A few years before this wave of AI hit, I got promoted into a tech lead/architect role. All of my mental growth since then has been learning to navigate office politics and getting the 10k ft view way more often.

I was already telling myself "I miss thinking hard" years before this promotion. When I build stuff now, I do it with a much clearer purpose. I have sincerely tried the new tools, but I'm back to just using google search if anything at all.

All I did was prove to myself the bottleneck was never writing code, but deciding why I'm doing anything at all. If you want to think so hard you stay awake at night, try existential dread. It's an important developmental milestone you'd have been forced to confront anyway even 1000 years ago.

My point is, you might want to reconsider how much you blame AI.

Why not find a subfield that is more difficult and requires some specialization then?

I think hard all the time, AI can only solve problems for me that don't require thinking hard. Give it anything more complex and it's useless.

I use AI for the easy stuff.

Instant upvote for a Philiip Mainlander quote at the end. He's the OG "God is Dead" guy and Nietzsche was reacting (very poorly) to Mainlander and other pessimists like Schopenhauer when he followed up with his own, shittier version of "god is dead"

Please read up on his life. Mainlander is the most extreme/radical Philosophical Pessimist of them all. He wrote a whole book about how you should rationally kill yourself and then he killed himself shortly after.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Mainl%C3%A4nder

https://dokumen.pub/the-philosophy-of-redemption-die-philoso...

Max Stirner and Mainlander would have been friends and are kindred spirits philosophically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_philosophical_...

> Yes, I blame AI for this.

Just don't use it. That's always an option. Perhaps your builder doesn't actually benefit from an unlimited runway detached from the cost of effort.

I refer to it as "Think for me SaaS", and it should be avoided like the plague. Literally, it will give your brain a disease we haven't even named yet.

It's as if I woke up in a world where half of resturaunts worldwide started changing their name to McDonalds and gaslighting all their customers into thinking McDonalds is better than their "from scratch" menu.

Just dont use these agentic tools, they legitimately are weapons who's target is your brain. You can ship just as fast with autocomplete and decent workflows, and you know it.

Its weird, I dont understand why any self respecting dev would support these companies. They are openly hostile about their plans for the software industry (and many other verticles).

I see it as a weapon being used by a sect of the ruling class to diminsh the value of labor. While im not confident they'll be successful, I'm very disappointed in my peers that are cheering them on in that mission. My peers are obviously being tricked by promises of being able join that class, but that's not what's going to happen.

You're going to lose that thinking muscle and therefor the value of your labor is going to be directly correlated to the quantity and quality of tokens you can afford (or be given, loaned!?)

Be wary!!!

> I tried getting back in touch with physics, reading old textbooks. But that wasn’t successful either. It is hard to justify spending time and mental effort solving physics problems that aren’t relevant or state-of-the-art

I tried this with physics and philosophy. I think i want to do a mix of hard but meaningful. For academic fields like that its impossible for a regular person to do as a hobby. Might as well just do puzzles or something.

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Pre-processed food consumer complains about not cooking anymore. /s

... OK I guess. I mean sorry but if that's revelation to you, that by using a skill less you hone it less, you were clearly NOT thinking hard BEFORE you started using AI. It sure didn't help but the problem didn't start then.