No Sloptober: A Month-Long Fast From LLM Tools
No Sloptober challenges you to abstain from all LLM-based tools for October—no AI search summaries, chatbots, code review, or agents. The goal is to train your own skills, avoid becoming a "Meat Proxy," and rediscover flow and joy in your craft. The site offers a hardcore approach, suggestions for what to do instead, and tips for convincing your manager to run a cost-risk experiment with reduced LLM usage.
Agents can only maintain or INCREASE entropy in a system. Humans are uniquely capable of decreasing it.
- sitzkrieg
instantly headshot by HN. says a lot
- gcampos
A few months ago I had an idea of doing a no LLM hackathon for fun.
The idea was to keep the coding skills sharp and have an excuse to not use Claude.
- lukeify
This author would've also presumably been the creator of No-Stackoverflow-September and No-Manual-March?
Either way this person has a wildly different take on how they think decent engineers are utilising LLMs in a professional capacity.
- jjcm
I just got back from a 2 week trip to China. I was in some of the more remote parts and my cell wasn't able to connect to their towers in that area, resulting in me not having the tourist VPN.
The side effect was I was fully cut off from my AI tools for those two weeks. I was coding "manually" during that time, and I think I accompished in two weeks what I previously had been able to do in a day. I'm not gonna lie, it was very, very stressful as a solo founder.
The industry moves so fast these days, that the only way to keep up with the speed is to leverage them. While I can appreciate the push of this to help your brain think independently/critically, the opportunity cost of a month of development without LLMs is too high a price to pay.
- Fraterkes
The responses here, and discussions on hn more broadly, make me feel like ai use is something that people are uniquely insecure about.