This is real in my experience. GenAI agentic coding is a completely different type of experience from traditional coding.
After a 10 hour 'flow state' deep coding session , you had this buzzing but not unpleasant feeling of needing your brain to fold back into reality. After a 3 hour frantic agentic coding stint, you are just mentally exhausted from the sheer speed and volume of actions and descisions taken.
On top, you feel the perceived 'opportunity cost' of non-productive hours skyrocketed, and everyone that cares feels like they are constantly 3 steps behind where they want to be on keeping up with the latest changes (that are very real steps, not just like the past hype frameworks shifts or language or tool fads).
This is going to end in lots of burnout and substance abuse along the way.
Yes, spending time working with Claude Code leaves me feeling the same way I feel after a day scrolling Reddit and HN - a thin, jittery, frayed sort of weariness. It's almost like gambling, with inconsistent dopamine hits, but it adds an element of keeping track of an ever-increasing number of projects and to-dos.
Humans are notoriously bad at multitasking. In the "traditional" way of writing software, you'd spend hours focused on one or two things. You'd tick one thing off the list and move to another, usually with some kind of logical connection between them. Its similar to reading a novel, one long continuous narrative requiring prolonged attention. It's exhausting in its own way, but it doesn't leave you feeling fragmentation and wrung out.
But whereas that's like reading a book, the way people are using agents is like scrolling tick tock. If you have 6 or 7 agents going, and you want to keep the pipeline full, you are constantly context switching. Your brain never has a chance to get into deep focus mode. Your attention is constantly being yanked from one thing to the next.
The same thing happens to me if I let myself get distracted at work and try to focus on too many things at once (emails, teams, Jira, actual work...). My brain feels like a fractured mess.
There are some good books on the subject if you're interested:
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains — by Nicholas Carr
I don't really feel this kind of friction. In deep coding sessions it usually follows this loop of
1. cook up design
2. coding
3. compiling+running it
4. view the logs, figure out what broke
5. back to 2
AI just makes 2 and 4 happen faster. Which frankly just makes things easier. I don't have to worry about how "modern" my C++ is because it already does it for me. And for debugging, it just does the cmd+clicking through the codebase for me.
So it really just makes it less fatiguing, especially for moving around large bodies of code and renaming stuff. I can spend more time on the essential problem.
I think having multiple of these loops running at once (or having an agent just iterating on its own) is kind of dumb tbh and I don't use them that way. I think having 100 agents running at once or whatever the fuck these people are saying is bullshit. Just using it to speed up 2 and 4 is good enough for me (and also using to explain what the code is doing for building my mental model).
Usually step 3 takes a long time as well, so if claude alone vs claude+me is less accurate, that gets amplified. Another reason why I don't like to let it run all by itself
I mean we could just... not use the damn things. I don't mean completely refuse to use gen AI, but you do not have to be moving at break neck speed all the time. It's okay to let things sit idle, or have one less agent doing shit. Pacing yourself will produce more long term stability and a higher quality product.
A lot of the exhaustion comes from agents that improvise on every task. You give it a vague prompt, it takes a novel approach, you review it, half of it is wrong, you correct it, repeat.
I started using and writing skills for the tasks extensively. PR review, deployment, frontend design, that kind of thing. The agent follows a tested process instead of guessing and leads to fewer surprises.
The tiredness is real. But running every agent interaction as a fresh conversation when you could reuse a workflow makes it worse than it needs to be.
And yet ... all the software I use online still sucks. Honestly, the only stuff in my daily drive that I truly admire are the desktop apps that were years or decades in the making. If everyone is hella productive and 10xing it why are the cloud offerings still such buggy pieces of shit?
Things are too weird now. Alomst makes me want to just teach music lessons again for way less money. Sigh
It’s incredible to come online every day and read breathless articles about how the future is here on the same 5 apps, using the same crappy sources, with the same horrible ad content.
Say what you want about the dotcom bubble at least websites were new. Besides the chatbots nothing feels new or better at all
How "productivity" is measured needs to be reworked in the age of AI.
By the old measures productivity should be through the roof. yet by the most objective measure of the desired outcome of productivity, profit doesn't seem to be budging.
I try not to panic code as my mindset mantra because keeping a good work-life balance is great to preventing the stress from better, faster, more senario.
This is real in my experience. GenAI agentic coding is a completely different type of experience from traditional coding.
After a 10 hour 'flow state' deep coding session , you had this buzzing but not unpleasant feeling of needing your brain to fold back into reality. After a 3 hour frantic agentic coding stint, you are just mentally exhausted from the sheer speed and volume of actions and descisions taken.
On top, you feel the perceived 'opportunity cost' of non-productive hours skyrocketed, and everyone that cares feels like they are constantly 3 steps behind where they want to be on keeping up with the latest changes (that are very real steps, not just like the past hype frameworks shifts or language or tool fads).
This is going to end in lots of burnout and substance abuse along the way.
Yes, spending time working with Claude Code leaves me feeling the same way I feel after a day scrolling Reddit and HN - a thin, jittery, frayed sort of weariness. It's almost like gambling, with inconsistent dopamine hits, but it adds an element of keeping track of an ever-increasing number of projects and to-dos.
Humans are notoriously bad at multitasking. In the "traditional" way of writing software, you'd spend hours focused on one or two things. You'd tick one thing off the list and move to another, usually with some kind of logical connection between them. Its similar to reading a novel, one long continuous narrative requiring prolonged attention. It's exhausting in its own way, but it doesn't leave you feeling fragmentation and wrung out.
But whereas that's like reading a book, the way people are using agents is like scrolling tick tock. If you have 6 or 7 agents going, and you want to keep the pipeline full, you are constantly context switching. Your brain never has a chance to get into deep focus mode. Your attention is constantly being yanked from one thing to the next.
The same thing happens to me if I let myself get distracted at work and try to focus on too many things at once (emails, teams, Jira, actual work...). My brain feels like a fractured mess.
There are some good books on the subject if you're interested:
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains — by Nicholas Carr
Amusing Ourselves to Death — by Neil Postman
Dopamine Nation — by Anna Lembke
I don't really feel this kind of friction. In deep coding sessions it usually follows this loop of
1. cook up design
2. coding
3. compiling+running it
4. view the logs, figure out what broke
5. back to 2
AI just makes 2 and 4 happen faster. Which frankly just makes things easier. I don't have to worry about how "modern" my C++ is because it already does it for me. And for debugging, it just does the cmd+clicking through the codebase for me.
So it really just makes it less fatiguing, especially for moving around large bodies of code and renaming stuff. I can spend more time on the essential problem.
I think having multiple of these loops running at once (or having an agent just iterating on its own) is kind of dumb tbh and I don't use them that way. I think having 100 agents running at once or whatever the fuck these people are saying is bullshit. Just using it to speed up 2 and 4 is good enough for me (and also using to explain what the code is doing for building my mental model).
Usually step 3 takes a long time as well, so if claude alone vs claude+me is less accurate, that gets amplified. Another reason why I don't like to let it run all by itself
I mean we could just... not use the damn things. I don't mean completely refuse to use gen AI, but you do not have to be moving at break neck speed all the time. It's okay to let things sit idle, or have one less agent doing shit. Pacing yourself will produce more long term stability and a higher quality product.
A lot of the exhaustion comes from agents that improvise on every task. You give it a vague prompt, it takes a novel approach, you review it, half of it is wrong, you correct it, repeat.
I started using and writing skills for the tasks extensively. PR review, deployment, frontend design, that kind of thing. The agent follows a tested process instead of guessing and leads to fewer surprises.
The tiredness is real. But running every agent interaction as a fresh conversation when you could reuse a workflow makes it worse than it needs to be.
https://archive.is/vx2rF
And yet ... all the software I use online still sucks. Honestly, the only stuff in my daily drive that I truly admire are the desktop apps that were years or decades in the making. If everyone is hella productive and 10xing it why are the cloud offerings still such buggy pieces of shit?
Things are too weird now. Alomst makes me want to just teach music lessons again for way less money. Sigh
It’s incredible to come online every day and read breathless articles about how the future is here on the same 5 apps, using the same crappy sources, with the same horrible ad content. Say what you want about the dotcom bubble at least websites were new. Besides the chatbots nothing feels new or better at all
They made everyone more productive. But that also means everyone has to do more to keep up with said productivity.
How "productivity" is measured needs to be reworked in the age of AI. By the old measures productivity should be through the roof. yet by the most objective measure of the desired outcome of productivity, profit doesn't seem to be budging.
I try not to panic code as my mindset mantra because keeping a good work-life balance is great to preventing the stress from better, faster, more senario.
"busyware" is a great term
The panic in a bubble.
[dead]