ThePrimeagen
Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.
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What they believe
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The worst part of programming is already knowing the solution, when the day holds no unknowns and the work is only typing it out.
And 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.
youtube.comSaid 22 Mar 2025This on korrents
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 31 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The worst part of programming is already knowing the solution, when the day holds no unknowns and the work is only typing it out.
And 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
The sense that programming is mostly web programming is a social construct of Twitter, not a picture of the field.
And 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
The case against pornography does not depend on the statistics: even if every study said it was good for you, it would still be bad for the soul.
But 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Show 28 more
An addiction is not ended by finding something better to put in its place; you do not stop a problem by replacing it.
You 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
A job can give you satisfaction and even thrill, but not purpose, and a programmer looking for purpose in the work is looking in the wrong place.
It'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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Work smarter, not harder is bad advice, because the only way to find out what smart looks like is to work very hard first.
And 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
The journey is better than the destination is a shallow phrase: taken literally it says every place you are heading from now on is worse.
The 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
To actually understand a piece of technology, rebuild it from scratch rather than read about it.
I 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Prompt injection is an extremely hard attack to defend against, and hardly anyone integrating AI is talking about it.
One 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Most of software is not the new stuff; it is old, crappy code somebody has to maintain, and it is full of genuinely hard problems.
Most 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
In a big company there is no such thing as a small feature, because every little thing eventually becomes its own team.
And 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Tech's self-image as the smart people designing for dummies includes nobody, and it deserves to be destroyed.
And 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Learning a new language by Googling your way through a project teaches you your old languages again, not the new one.
You 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Leaning on AI trades knowledge for speed, and the price may be a generation of programmers in which juniors stay juniors forever.
Sometimes 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Reading code and writing code are separate skills, and being able to read a language is no evidence you could write it.
At 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
A speed difference between languages that share the LLVM backend measures the benchmark author, not the languages.
It'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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
A project only shows you whether your design decisions were any good at around five to ten thousand lines, and that is where the most learning happens.
There'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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Learning to touch-type and to know your editor without thinking is worth it, because every glance at the keyboard spends attention the problem needs.
It'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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
For an experienced programmer the bottleneck is usually not thinking but typing, getting what is already in your head into the editor fast enough.
Most 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
The editor does not make the programmer, but never learning your editor well says something about your character as one.
The 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Sticking with Neovim is not loyalty to the editor: if an AI editor like Cursor met the same needs, switching would be easy.
I 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
AI helps exactly as far as the work is predictable and well documented, and stops helping on anything cutting edge.
Okay, 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Coding with an AI assistant slides from copiloting into autopiloting, and the bugs that follow are hard to trace.
For 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Without hard skills of your own, your ceiling as a programmer is whatever the LLMs happen to be capable of.
And 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Every improvement in computing so far has produced more jobs, not fewer.
there'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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Letting more people write software in natural language does not reduce the work; it snowballs the amount of software that has to be maintained.
I 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
If AI can make you irrelevant, what you were doing was work slightly too complicated to automate before, not programming.
And 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
What an LLM cannot supply is caring about the craft: it completes the task, where a person goes back and makes the thing better.
It 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
The next attack on open source is denial of attention: LLM-generated fake bug reports that exhaust and demoralise maintainers.
I 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
VS Code and Copilot are loss leaders in an embrace-extend-extinguish play, raising the switching cost until nobody can leave.
Whereas 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 #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
Hate sticks for a lifetime, and forgiveness is its only cure.
I couldn't let myself be angry or consumed by that kind of stuff because hate is so sticky, it sticks for a lifetime. And there really is only one cure for hate, which is forgiveness. I just don't think you can get rid of it without that.
ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461 Said 22 Mar 2025
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 3 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Uses tmux
And then when it comes down to using, say, Tmux, I have all my terminals into one single terminal. And now I’m able to kind of switch between there. Prefix one goes to my Vim editor.
lexfridman.com 23 Mar 2025
Loved Kinesis contoured keyboard
I’m technically sponsored by Kinesis, so it’s hard for someone to believe someone that’s sponsored by it. But I did use it before I ever became sponsored. They’re the only sponsor that I reached out to and said, “I need a sponsorship from you. I’m going to use you either way. You can say no, but I really love it.”
lexfridman.com 23 Mar 2025
sponsored
Loved Neovim
And then Neovim is obviously the next big one. I love Neovim. Reason being is that I think you can make all the arguments that you want about which editor is the best. I do not think you can make an argument that Vim motions aren’t superior.
lexfridman.com 23 Mar 2025
Where they publish
x.com @ThePrimeagen Posts.
Recent
- "you will own nothing and be happy" 2 Nov 2026
- Don't get black pilled It's truly not worth it 1 Nov 2026
- Upon further reflection, I hope reddit lives a long life so that we may have a stable quarantine 31 Oct 2026
Show 17 more
- The most toxic / black pilled place on the Internet is reddit. I think it's good for human kind if reddit were to die 31 Oct 2026
- Don't get mad at me Google cooked with Argon 4 31 Oct 2026
- Today I start the funnest part of Omarchy QA. Agent directed walks. This will represent the largest part of QA and likely the hardest part to get right Will update on Monday or Tuesday with (hopefully) long runs showing features are working! 31 Oct 2026
- People have said I look like Gene Wilder for years... 30 Oct 2026
- Remember when I said we should only look at output and quality. If you make good stuff, then people should not care if you do or don't use AI... Or how you use it, or when you use it... 29 Oct 2026
- How do solve a Millennium Prize Problem but cannot have a working UI? OpenAI, seriously... So many little broken things. Which makes it feel like everything is broken. Dont even get me started on deep links. 29 Oct 2026
- bro RIP Patrick 29 Oct 2026
- I think anthropic will do just fine with their IPO. I don't see any reason to be freaked out 29 Oct 2026
- 1. should I try this 2. do you want a video on my experience 28 Oct 2026
- Ok, I think I have my first hill climb idea for an agent. Kind of excited 28 Oct 2026
- typecheck 27 Oct 2026
- Yeah everyone, I am with FireFox, how is the internet circa 2006 more private than now?? 26 Oct 2026
- Every piece of candy my kids give me, I give them 25c Easy way to avoid the candy while allowing the fun 25 Oct 2026
- weird scroll effect in vim when presenting new functions and yapping code 24 Oct 2026
- WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY BOI 23 Oct 2026
- turns out bend was ahead of the curve 23 Oct 2026
- Turn's out JavaScript rendered as a person is also currently the state of the internet as well 23 Oct 2026
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
YouTube ThePrimeagen Streams and talks.
Recent
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
GitHub @ThePrimeagen Code and the configs people ask about.
Recent
- refactoring.nvim — The Refactoring library based off the Refactoring book by Martin Fowler 29 Oct 2026
- dev — my next gen build for starting my system 15 Oct 2026
- jarl — Just Another Results Library for TypeScript 30 Sept 2026
Show 13 more
- init.lua 2 Sept 2026
- shooter-js 10 Aug 2026
- prime-agent 11 Jul 2026
- 99 — Neovim AI agent done right 12 Jun 2026
- esp32-template 19 Apr 2026
- skills 27 Feb 2026
- vim-royale-2 29 Jan 2026
- first-deno-project 20 Jan 2026
- interviews — Don't confuse with intercourse, which is the distance between two college classes. 20 Jan 2026
- 99-behaviors — Behaviors for 99 16 Jan 2026
- theprimeage-com 14 Jan 2026
- fem-git 11 Dec 2025
- harpoon 31 Oct 2025
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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