No AI Fridays: A CEO's Challenge to Reclaim Your Coding Skills
Citing studies linking LLM use to cognitive debt, reduced engagement, and weakened critical thinking, the CEO of HTMX has mandated 'No AI Fridays' for his company. The initiative encourages developers to spend one day a week coding without AI assistants, reading documentation, and thinking through problems manually. It's a practical response to the hidden costs of AI reliance, offering a way to assess AI's influence on your choices and preserve the joy of hands-on coding.
By defaulting to AI we miss opportunities for good old automation.
- 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.
- 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.day
My 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- neuroticnews25
>write code with your own hands
How is this supposed to work? Like emulate an agent with my brain and write down the output?
- Sindisil
I support this.
I also support No GenAI every day ending in a Y, but I support this, too.
- 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.