The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

I feel that respecting the focus of others is also an important skill.

If I'm pulled 27 different ways. Then when I finally get around to another engineer’s question “I need help” is a demand for my synchronous time and focus. Versus “I’m having problems with X, I need to Y, can you help me Z” could turn into a chat, or it could mean I’m able to deliver the needed information at once and move on. Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement.

On the flip side, a thing we could learn more from LLMs is how to give a good response by explaining our reasoning out loud. Not “do X” but instead “It sounds like you want to W, and that’s blocked by Y. That is happening because of Z. To fix it you need to X because it …”

> It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works

This is really a tragedy because the current technology is arguably one of the best things in existence for explaining "why?" to someone in a very personalized way. With application of discipline from my side, I can make the LLM lecture me until I genuinely understand the underlying principles of something. I keep hammering it with edge cases and hypotheticals until it comes back with "Exactly! ..." after reiterating my current understanding.

The challenge for educators seems the same as it has always been - How do you make the student want to dig deeper? What does it take to turn someone into a strong skeptic regarding tools or technology?

I'd propose the use of hallucinations as an educational tool. Put together a really nasty scenario (i.e., provoke a hallucination on purpose on behalf of the students that goes under their radar). Let them run with a misapprehension of the world for several weeks. Give them a test or lab assignment regarding this misapprehension. Fail 100% of the class on this assignment and have a special lecture afterward. Anyone who doesn't "get it" after this point should probably be filtered out anyways.

In a way, I think it shows why "superfluous" things like sports and art are so important in school. In those activities, there are no quick answers. You need to persist through the initial learning curve and slow physical adaptation just to get baseline competency. You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process.

This is my constant concern these days and it makes me wonder if grading needs to change in order to alleviate some of the pressure to get the right answer so that students can focus on how.

> Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students.

Gaining focus as a skill is something to work on with every batch of new students

We're on the same page. I'm turning that around to say: let's remember focus isn't something we're naturally born with, it has to be built. Worked on hard. People coming to that task are increasingly damaged/injured imho.

Appreciate the balanced take. An improvement to a technology can be good, or it can be harmful - and beyond a certain point, further amplification can destroy society and the commons which we all benefit from.

Coca leaves are a relatively benign part of daily life in Peru & a few other surrounding countries - they’re on the table in your hotel lobby, ready to be stirred into your tea. But cocaine - same base but made more intense with technology - causes many problems - and don’t even start about crack cocaine.

So when thinking of technology through the lens of what it amplifies we can consider traditional Internet research & writing contrasted vs. using AI - the latter gives instant answers and often an instant first draft.

Great for some; harmful for others. Where that point lies and what factors contribute is different for every individual.

I'm kind of in the same boat.

I've started doing something that I have been meaning to do for years, which is to go through all the seminal papers on concurrency and make a minimal implementation of them. I did Raft recently, then Lamport timestamps, then a lot of the common Mutex algorithms, then Paxos, and now I'm working on Ambient Calculus.

I've attempted this before, but I would always get stuck on some detail that I didn't fully grasp in the paper and would abandon the project. Using ChatGPT, I've been able to unblock myself much easier. I will ask it to clarify stuff in the paper, and sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's "wrong", so much as it's giving me some form of feedback and helps me think of other ideas on how to fix things.

Doing this, I manage to actually finish these projects, and I think I more or less understand them, and I certainly understand them more than I would have had I abandoned them a quarter of the way through like I usually do.

I was a skeptic until I started seeing it this way. I do think that this is exactly why we’ve seen LLMs overtake search engines so quickly in the last 12-18 months. They allow a feedback loop that just doesn’t exist scrolling and clicking.

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I’ve gotten into this mode too, but often when I do this, I eventually find myself in a rabbit hole dead end that the AI unwittingly lead me into. So I’m slowing down and using them to understand the code better. Unfortunately, all the tools are optimized for vibe coding, getting the quick answer without understanding, so it feels like I’m fighting the tools.

I recommend using them to ask questions about why something works rather than spit out code. They excel at that a lot of the time.

Notification blindness.

I've been struggling with finding balance for years as a front-line manager who codes. I need to be responsive-ish to incoming queries but also have my own tasks. If I am too responsive, it's easy for my work to become my evening time and my working hours for everybody else.

The "weaving" in of periods of focus is maintained by ignoring notifications and checking them in batches. Nobody gets to interrupt me when I'm in focus mode (much chagrin for my wife) and I can actually get stuff done. This happened a lot by accident, I get enough notifications for long enough that I don't really hear or notice them just like I don't hear or notice the trains that pass near my house.

This is why I honestly like discord over forums

I built a distributed software engineering firm pre-covid, so all of our clients were onsite even though we were full-remote. My engineers plugged into the engineering teams of our clients, so it's not like we were building on the side and just handing over deliverables, we had to fully integrate into the client teams.

So we had to solve this problem pre-covid, and the solution remained the same during the pandemic when every org went full remote (at least temporarily).

There is no "one size fits all approach" because each engineer is different. We had dozens of engineers on our team, and you learn that people are very diverse in how they think/operate.

But we came up with a framework that was really successful.

1) Good faith is required: you mention personnel abusing time/trust, that's a different issue entirely, no framework will be successful if people refuse to comply. This system only works if teammates trust the person. Terminate someone who can't be trusted.

2) "Know thyself": Many engineers wouldn't necessarily even know how THEY operated best (if they needed large chunks of focus time, or were fine multi-tasking, etc). We'd have them make a best guess when onboarding and then iterate and update as they figured out how they worked best.

3) Proactively Propagate Communication Standard: Most engineers would want large chunks of uninterrupted focus time, so we would tell them to EXPLICITLY tell their teammates or any other stakeholders WHEN they would be focusing and unresponsive (standardize it via schedule), and WHY (ie sell the idea). Bad feelings or optics are ALWAYS simply a matter of miscommunication so long as good faith exists. We'd also have them explain "escalation patterns", ie "if something is truly urgent, DM me on slack a few times and finally, call my phone."

4) Set comms status: Really this is just slack/teams. but basically as a soft reminder to stakeholders, set your slack status to "heads down building" or something so people remember that you aren't available due to focus time. It's really easy to sync slack status to calendar blocks to automate this.

We also found that breaking the day into async task time and sync task time really helped optimize. Async tasks are tasks that can get completed in small chunks of time like code review, checking email, slack, etc. These might be large time sinks in aggregate, but generally you can break into small time blocks and still be successful. We would have people set up their day so all the async tasks would be done when they are already paying a context switching cost. IE, scheduled agile cadence meetings etc. If you're doing a standup meeting, you're already gonna be knocked out of flow so might as well use this time to also do PR review, async comms, etc. Naturally we had people stack their meetings when possible instead of pepper throughout the day (more on how this was accomplished below).

Anyways, sometimes when an engineer of ours joined a new team, there might be a political challenge in not fitting into the existing "mold" of how that team communicated (if that team's comm standard didn't jive with our engineer's). This quickly resolved every single time when our engineer was proven out to be much more productive/effective than the existing engineers (who were kneecapped by the terrible distracting existing standard of meetings, constant slack interruptions, etc). We would even go as far as to tell stakeholders our engineers would not be attending less important meetings (not immediately, once we had already proven ourselves a bit). The optics around this weren't great at first, but again, our engineers would start 1.5-2X'ing productivity of the in-house engineers, and political issues melt away very quickly.

TL;DR - Operate in good faith, decide your own best communication standard, propagate the standard out to your stakeholders explicitly, deliver and people will respect you and also your comms standard.

They weren't wrong. Unfortunately, we didn't use it wisely and obliterated objective reality and allowed people to create spaces where they never have to engage with anything challenging.

And AI will be no different. People will rush head first into the fire and be flabbergasted when all of the hype and promise of utopia results in utter chaos and inequality.

If we assume that civilization is already teetering thanks to the smartphone/social media, the fallout of AI would make Thomas Cole blush.

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I’m finding the same usage of LLMs in terms of what actually I use them for day to day. When I need to look up arcane information, an LLM generally does better than a Google search.