ThePrimeagen
Michael Paulson, known online as ThePrimeagen, a programmer who spent ten years at Netflix and now streams and teaches programming full time on Twitch and YouTube.
ThePrimeagen did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsAnd for me, that is the worst part about programming, is when you already know the solution and it's just a matter of how fast you can type and get it out from your head to your hands.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 1st of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd so we often talk about programming in perspective of web, or something that's pretty narrow, and I think that's just a social construct of Twitter more than anything else, that actually I don't believe it's that representative of the entire programming world out there.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 2nd of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsBut for me it just comes down to, is it really a good thing to do? Is it really actually something we want, is to value people in such a profane or just disregarding way? I just really think it's just bad for the soul. Even if all the stats said it was great for you, I still say it's actually bad.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 3rd of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsYou don't stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn't have a girlfriend, I didn't have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 4th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsIt's like trying to find meaning in your job. You can find satisfaction in what you do. That is a very good thing. You can find satisfaction and be happy with what you've created. You can be thrilled by the experience, but you cannot find... I doubt you can find purpose.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 5th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd so for me, the only way I can learn how to work smart is by working very, very hard and knowing that there's no shortcuts. And then when I finally figure out what smart is, when I work smart and work hard, it is that much better.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 6th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsThe journey is better than the destination. Everyone's heard this. Just take one second to apply what that means. That means forever starting from now, you are only going towards a place that's worse.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 7th of 31 in this recording
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Our reading
To actually understand a piece of technology, rebuild it from scratch rather than read about it.
Their wordsI highly recommend starting from scratch if you want to understand a concept. You don't know how an HTTP server works, create a TCP socket, learn how to parse HTTP.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 8th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsOne thing that I don't think a lot of people are talking about as we integrate more and more AI is that prompt injection is an extremely hard thing to defend against because it's not really clear how you defend against it.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 9th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsMost of software isn't the new stuff. Most of software is old crappy software that someone has to maintain, and it actually is really, really great and has lots of really hard problems.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 10th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd that's just the problem of big companies is that eventually every little thing has to become its own team. And so even small... There's no such thing as a small feature.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 11th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd so when I started streaming tech, my goal became to destroy whatever that tech mentality was, because it includes nobody. Everyone thinks that they're the smart people and they design for the dummies.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 12th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsYou kind of Google and you try to solve a problem in the language based on all of your previous experience. And so you don't have what makes that language special. You have what all the other languages make special.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 13th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsSometimes you have to move fast at the sacrifice of knowledge, and I'm totally on board for that, but I worry that what we'll create is an entire generation of incompetent programmers who can do some amount of things well, but anything that is unique, bespoke, or requires some extra like little elbow grease, might become very difficult. It might cause a whole chasm where juniors remain juniors forever.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 14th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsAt some point you have to take off the training wheels, because I think what you're really spotting is the difference between reading and writing code. I can read a lot of languages very well. I can see what's happening. I can understand it, but I would not be very good at writing it.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 15th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsIt's just that Zig, C, C++, all those languages that were being tested, they're all LLVM backends, right? That's the one that actually turns the thing into the executable part. And if there's a variation in speed, it just means in one language you didn't quite express what you are supposed to correctly.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 16th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsThere's a point in which all of your choices add up. And I typically find that right around 5 to 10,000 lines of code. The choices you've made either weigh you down or kind of free you up.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 17th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsIt's the same reason why I recommend learning how to type and learning your editor so well you don't even have to think about the action because the people that have to... Even if you just look down, that's still mental processing power you have to spend looking at a keyboard in which you already know where the key is.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 18th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsMost of the time I'm not thinking, I'm programming. I know what I want to do, I want to go as fast as possible because I've been just doing it for so long and I'm so familiar with the general space that it becomes a huge problem for me. I cannot tell you how many times that I've been purely bottlenecked by the fact that I just can't type fast enough and I just need to get it out of my head onto the text editor.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 19th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsThe editor obviously does not make the programmer, but I think it says a lot about your character as a programmer if you don't know how to use your editor well.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 20th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsI don't use Neovim because I love Neovim, I use Neovim because I love the instrument I play. And so it's like if Cursor can meet those needs, I could see myself moving over. I don't have some sort of obsessed attachment with it.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 21st of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsOkay, my general view is it comes down to something that's pretty simple, which is that if you're doing something in which is very predictable, AI is really nice. When you're doing something that is just not predictable, AI is not very nice to use. If you're using anything that's more cutting edge, AI will not be using it, or AI won't be very good at doing stuff with it.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 22nd of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsFor me personally, I kept introducing bugs, and I couldn't figure out why. And what I realized is that I developed... I wasn't copiloting well, I was autopiloting much better.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 23rd of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd so if you don't have those hard skills and you're not ultimately the driver at the end of the day, you're going to really find some hard times, and your ability to progress will be directly bound to how good the LLMs are.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 24th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsthere's been no computer improvement up to this date that did not result in more jobs.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 25th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsI mean, all I see is that if you say natural language can be used in the pipeline, you've just made that many more people can become programmers, which means that much more software will eventually be created, which means there's that much more software that will need to be maintained, and just becomes a real big snowballing effect.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 26th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd if you truly make yourself irrelevant, I would challenge you that you're just doing something that was just slightly too complicated to automate.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 27th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsIt doesn't actually care about the craft. But when you work with an intern or you work with somebody else, they care. When they factor something, they actually go over and go, "Oh yeah, this is actually kind of bad. I'm going to come back to that." They finish this, they go back over here and they make this even better. They actually care about the thing itself.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 28th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsI think there's this whole idea, I call it a denial of attention. I think there's an entire attack vector that's going to be happening. We're using LLMs to generate fake bug reports, fake all these things to just actually effectively to demotivate and hurt open source maintainers.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 29th of 31 in this recording
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Their wordsWhereas something like Microsoft, they made VS Code as a loss leader. Copilot's probably operating on a loss leader. These things are all getting you so tied into, GitHub, remote workspaces, CI, Copilot, you become this trapped in permanent person and if that price rises, the switching cost is so great at some point that you'll never be able to switch.
↗ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461youtube.com 30th of 31 in this recording