Reflections on AI-assisted Programming | /en/2026/05/ai-reflections/

giscus 2026-05-04 09:08:04

My former colleague Nan kept telling me early last year that I should try Cursor, but I felt I didn’t need AI assistance at that time, since I knew pretty well what I wanted to do and how. Plus, …

https://yihui.org/en/2026/05/ai-reflections/

👍 11😄 2❤️ 2🚀 1 ▶

6 Comments

abichat 2026-05-12 09:31:45

You should definitely check out the Computo Journal 😉

👍 1 ▶

mbergins 2026-05-13 22:48:54

Why is there still no journal that allows and even encourages interactive graphics and computing right inside the papers?…

There was a journal named Distill which naively accepted interactive graphics, but they seem to have stopped publishing in 2021. They specialized in machine learning papers and I don't really know if the interactive elements ever caught on. I've seen a fair number of papers which are either defined by the shiny app backing them or have an associated shiny app (much thanks to you and all the contributors for making shiny so useful).

👍 1 ▶

AlFontal 2026-05-14 14:23:14

Distill rocked! And the reviews happened openly in GitHub. It's a pity they ended up closing and we are left with current-day academic publishing, sloppier every day.

shrektan 2026-05-14 16:15:27

It was hard to go to bed before 2am... exactly... i have been lack of sleep for about 5 months... i'll go to sleep now...

aibasawako-cyber 2026-07-14 08:12:17

My today's best goes to the ggsus! Fascinating how someone fantasied the aliens together with their god. HaaS competence proved.

👍 1 ▶

ningzhanglab 2026-07-26 04:59:11

sometimes I wonder would Yihui xie like AI? then I got this answer.

👍 1 ▶

jruizcabrejos 2026-07-28 13:42:06

Same.

yihanxu 2026-09-06 15:14:51

Two things that I resonated with:

The first three words that babies learn at daycare centers are usually: 1) No! 2) Mine! 3) More -- definitely true for Daniel!
Selective attention -- As the supply-side bottleneck is being solved by AI, I've become much picky at what questions to ask and what to bring into existence (what's important, worthwhile, and can outlive technological changes)

StevenPDang 2026-09-18 21:08:10

I understand that this post is a few months old but it really resonated with me. I'm currently still in college and there was never a point in my software career where I have been in the "pre-ai" era. In some narcissistic way I held pride in having technical skills that my peers did not, but now that gap has closed as LLMs have grown stronger and stronger.

Sometimes I wonder what It would have been like to be a developer in a pre-ai era. Growing up, I enjoyed scripting and learning new things, maybe I would have done well?