One underestimated productivity booster is that you can write code on your phone by giving orders to a coding assistant in a spare moment. You can fill extra time that way instead of reading social media or playing a game.

I was just coding a personal website the other day while waiting for our number to be called at the DMV. I couldn’t really review the code but it did give me a chance to test on mobile.

This is without doing anything special, just using one instance of Claude Opus 4.5 and exe.dev.

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torginus 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I was just thinking about how harmful that idea is in general. I think true achievement and productivity comes from deep focus and immersion in the problem.

Ironically a lot of monotonous work that you were forced to do helped you immerse yourself in the problem domain and equipped you for the hard parts. Not just talking about AI btw, in general when people automate away the easy parts, the hard parts will suddenly seem more difficult, because there's no ramp-up.

While I know in some ways AI coding is helpful, the mode of work where you keep getting distracted while the agent works is much less productive when you just grind the problem.

I mean AI also helps you stay in the zone, but this 'casual' approach to work ultimately results in things not getting done, in my personal experience.

	▲	skybrian 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I imagine that's sometimes true. Also, sometimes you could be a busy beaver implementing a lot of stuff you don't need. (And I'm a hobbyist programmer now (retired) so it's all stuff I don't really need.) Also, sometimes being in the zone results in tunnel version and taking breaks results in new perspective. So I think this is an area where "it all depends" is the best summary.