No AI Fridays

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.

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.

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.

Oh man, I help host a monthly AI meetup called AI Friday: https://aifri.day

My heart sank when I saw this post. I thought we’d created enemies!

No conflict here, though.

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.

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).

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.

I support this.

I also support No GenAI every day ending in a Y, but I support this, too.

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.

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.

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

Got no AI 7 days here. I sold my token budget to other staff and spent the money on beer.

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 :)

[delayed]

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.

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.

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.

No thanks

> You can use No AI Fridays to assess what's actually happening and retrospect on the choices the AI made for you.

This should happen daily.....

Let me make a better suggestion.

Pick a difficult/foreign topic that will force you to grow. Learn it with a book and in an "API agnostic" way. For example, it's better to learn about concurrency than goroutines. Feel free to use AI as your teacher or even student, but practice with your own brain.

Why stop there?!?#NoPhoneWeekends

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.

cringe

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.

"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.

Really should be Tuesdays or something. If done on Friday I feel that people (me) might just get lazy and not code at all.

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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.

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)