No Sloptober

This October we challenge you to abstain from LLM based tools entirely. Think of this as a fast for your mind's health. This is not a judgement of others, but a personal challenge to you.

Nuance is hard (if not impossible on the internet), and so is balance.

Develop your own sense of nuance around LLMs what they're good for what they're bad for.

Suggested "hard core" 🤘 approach [1] [2]:

No AI/LLM tools whatsoever at home or work, do it the hard (core) way.

Onarheim's Law:

"Agents can only maintain or INCREASE entropy in a system. Humans are uniquely capable of decreasing it"

Why?

  1. Even if you find LLMs useful, it is useful to know how to do things yourself and train your skills.
  2. Stretch your brain, don't be a "Meat Proxy" [3]
  3. Mental health benefits, and avoiding ai psychosis
  4. Gain perspective by seeing what was good or bad when using LLMs.
  5. Learn something new! LLMs are well documented to make learning difficult for humans.
  6. Security - agents are known for wild security choices, and installing malware by accident (looking at you Shai Hulud)
  7. Write a blog post about your experiences in No Sloptober good or bad, I want to know what you learned about yourself!
  8. Bragging rights? Honor and glory!? Post #no-sloptober on socials. Screenshot your lack of usage in claude or whatever.

In the words of my toddler "I do by MYSELF"

What?

  1. Review and Clean up existing LLM output in your work/home codebases. They really do like to write A LOT of cruft in their comments. They also love to over-engineer/over-complicate software.
  2. Learn a new language! Pick a new language like Zig, Rust, Go, Lua, TypeScript, etc.
  3. Learn a new skill, join my Neovim cult!
  4. Pick up a new web framework, like Astro (or Mastro), or Effect.ts
  5. Practice code challenges, remember "code katas"?
  6. Start a project!
  7. Make a game (I recommend Excalibur, or Godot)

Convince your Manager:

"Hey , let's see if we can do some cost risk analysis around our LLM usage. Let's experiment with reduced/no LLM usage and measure our teams/orgs velocity, incident rate, and cost and see if there are any potential savings or risk mitigations we could enact in the future."

Or perhaps using the "iron triangle" proposition of software development. You can have things good, cheap, or fast... pick two.

Convince yourself:

  1. Unfortunately, corporations sometimes have an "AI under duress" to keep your job. Do what's right for your life and family and adjust these suggestions as needed to keep the overlords happy. ↩︎

  2. Language translation tools are incredibly useful, and help others participate globally in their non-native tongue. I think this is a uniquely human exception, and an extremely pro-human use, but I leave this up to you. However I do not want to diminish the importance of professional human translation and localization in products and services, these require a level of accuracy that I think should not be delegated to a machine. ↩︎

  3. Meat Proxy is a term used for people that launder their work conversations through a chatbot and apply no thought or no/minimal editorial review to the output and posting it back to you. I find it personally EXTREMELY disrespectful, I'd prefer no response at all. ↩︎