I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage fleets of agents. I do not want to rediscover for the hundredth time that in fact all this time an agent took shortcuts for acceptance tests I rely upon and didn’t catch. Or once again get the agent to understand why and what I want it to do after its context got bloated and it start to drift completely. While I got artifacts I can use (libraries, tools, docs), including some things that I’m pretty confident are SoA I do not feel satisfied anymore knowing that I used a model to generate them, even if I was the one designing every part of it. I do feel that I’m lying anytime I come to a colleague to share a new cool tool I have made. And I do not feel that relying on AI actually helped me improve with dealing with my executive function issues.
YMMV but I’m personally feeling burnt out with AI coding agents and ready to go back to the old ways for my next personal project
I have done a lot of introspection on this and realized that I'm very much driven by intrinsic rewards moreso than extrinsic.
I got into coding over a decade before it was my career because of the exploration, learning, and puzzle/challenge aspect.
Every time I have tried to be extrinsically driven (career or OSS wise) it's never worked out anyway. I could have done more to make it successful but I never cared about getting validation or getting users for my stuff (and the stress that brings).
I've been lucky that up until this point, the intrinsic rewards I have gotten from my job have aligned with company goals.
LLMs take all the intrinsic wins and leaves only the extrinsic ones. That makes me sad, but it is what it is I guess.
I have been thinking about a tool for months but didn't have the time. I finally gave in and built it at work in a week with LLM tokens. It worked fantastically. But I felt no accomplishment. It felt just the same as if I downloaded the tool from someone else's repo (and who had an overly eager maintainer that would implement my GitHub issue requests).
The hard part for me is ignoring LLMs in my free time to try and keep some of the intrinsic rewards to myself, without being annoyed that I could do it faster if I just "gave in".
Almost a decade ago, I moved my career into the management track. I am a director by now and have two more management levels between myself and individual contributors.
I can strongly relate to what you‘re writing, because I share that same sentiment often in my daily (non-AI) work. In fact, coming from that background, the switch from coding to working with agents feels eerily similar to moving into management. You encounter the same challenges minus the „human people and emotions“ part: having to explain properly, the agents doing something different than what you intended, feeling detached from the actual work, only focusing on the bigger picture and so on
To me it feels very natural, it is what I do every day. But then again, I made that choice and it wasn‘t forced on me. So I understand frustration.
Agentic harnesses go in the exact opposite direction to what I'd want to get from LLMs. I don't want another black box to (poorly) work on a black box for me, I want to be better at reaching into and understanding boxes that I already have in front of me. I don't want tools to autocompact contexts and store generated memories to facilitate long runs I have barely any control over, I want tools that allow me to painlessly craft a more relevant context for short ones. I don't want agents to author commits, I want them to use Git (or other tools) to get the information that I'm looking for when it's tedious to do it myself. I don't need them to do the fun and beneficial part of the job for me, I want them to do the boring parts that I already know how to do which block me from proceeding because my brain just isn't interested. Some of those things you can script yourself relatively easily, but the current tooling for LLM coding is absolutely atrocious and disconnected from programmer's needs.
The main output of my work is gaining a better mental model of systems I work with. That's what lets me grow and that's what makes people want to pay me rather than someone else to work on these things. Anything else, including the produced code itself, is secondary to that. In general I find it pretty hard, although not impossible, to use LLMs in a way that doesn't diminish my output, especially with this tooling that seems explicitly designed to make it hard. After all, reviewing things is so much harder than writing them yourself, and you can't feel accomplished by something you haven't done.
The addiction part, the ADHD part and the pending test part.
The fear of becoming addicted to AI is real and I don't think I'll be capable to stop it, considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life.
My Pro went to Max(5) to Max(20) pretty quickly and I was burning through that weekly limit still, without large agentic workflows that burn tokens. Just me and 4-5 terminals. Sometimes I was happy to hit the limit because I was forced back to normal life.
I've gone back to Pro to stop what was happening.
Now I'm self-aware enough to notice the trend and put up safe guards, but that's because I've always had to adapt my environment to control my behaviour because I know direct behaviour control is abnormally challenging. I fear for those who won't see it coming, until they're in deep.
The counterweight has been, after using it for a bunch of projects, I have internalized that it will very, very quickly get me to maybe 60% and then I'll have to take it the rest of the way mostly by myself (or handholding it tightly for the remaining 40% at a much slower pace).
In other words, the initial implementation is practically already there, already done. So there's no rush left in generating it - it's only worth bothering if I'm prepared to see it through to 100%.
When it is worth pushing through to 100%, it's pretty great for getting the inertia going though.
> [...] considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life.
It's so wild that it never dawned on me, why some people around me were so quick with "Let AI do that!". I'm not saying that each and everyone has ADHD, but I think I underestimated a) the flow of dopamine a successful prompt can set free and b) the craving for it by folks that I deemed more stable than myself.
As someone with ADHD, it’s really a problem. I have so many random documents of random outputs from prompts I didn’t track. It’s honestly accelerated some of my worst habits because it feels like I actually completed a task. The reality is I just have folders of half finished projects, which anyone with ADHD can relate to.
I feel kind of lucky in a way that I hate working with AI so much. I'd rather hammer nails through my fingers than spend my time prompting
So my ADHD isn't being satisfied by those little dopamine hits from LLMs, Any time I'm forced to use them I'm mad about it, and can't wait to be done with it
I still have that folder of half finished things just like you, though. It's just not AI generated
Instead of jumping from project to project, I focus on one (maybe a few) and let myself free while agents spew out their output.
Something physical is excellent for me: minor wood carving, origami, drawing exercises, also light physical exercises.
My trick is to (try to) do something that requires high focus, on unrelated matters.
To give a practical example, the simple gesture to connect 2 points on a sheet of paper via a direct, non trembling line, requires high focus: if you try to do it sloppily it is too long, too short, etc. I need to shadow the moment, gain focus, draw the line.
It keeps my brain in focus, busy and engaged.
Videos, podcasts, and in general enything digital seems to distract me away and/or overloads me.
Also, I am back at using pomodoro technique more frequently.
Just some pointers, in case you want to try out, or suggest some you find effective yourself.
I find that the new "drug" is constantly hunting down new cheaper models.. z.ai/glm, mistral, deepseek.. if you need to get your fix - find the cheaper path..
Some traits I recognized in many excellent coders i worked with, their drive to optimization, intellectual thirst, critical and creative thinking are attributes i consistently correlated with them being in some sort of neurodivergence spectrum.
Being able to remove the "first step" block is great, but what worries me is that this is coupled with LLMs sycophantic behaviours.
My gut feeling is that coupling the feeling of unblocking ones capabilities with dopamine hits with the constant praising over someone abilities is an intro to psychosis and paranoia for them.
I'm wrestling with this right now. I only use LLMs for design and exploration because I am not employed and can't pay for a subscription right now, and they make the design phase feel like less of a fever dream because checking my ideas doesn't involve hours of scanning search results online and trying to see how my ideas fit with what exists or trying to evaluate if my ideas even make sense, so I feel more encouraged to get started on working, but I often wonder if the prompts are being sycophants
In one case recently I explained a garbage collector design I had been toying with a while ago, but couldn't find research related to my idea or really evaluate if my idea would work. After enough arguing with the prompt it finally "understood", started praising my "novelty", and when I later asked for research related to it I was given a paper that already implemented most of my idea
It was a funny moment of seeing how it was clearly trained on too many online forum comments (simply mentioning reference counting got it on this whole awkward line of false folklore about memory management) before switching to sycophancy, to finally showing me a paper
I've a thought that AI could drive humanity to appreciate humans, as a side effect of its rise.
Nowadays we're bumping up against alternative nonhuman intelligences, nowadays as we go about our lives. New neighbors, kind of.
And AI has its idea of 'living' in this world .. as a servant to us mainly.
So human life is changing: we now have the opportunity to relate to life (existential) while we're being influenced by the valuable accompaniment of these new docile servants. We're able to "see our plantation and peacocks" if you will.
We experience our life-challenges differently ... now being alive to see our daily labors accomplished by others, and we're able to reap the benefits: more dopamine, resources, whatever.
Our role is changing somewhat, being 'wealthy' or 'elevated'.
I think this poses new questions implicitly, like: Q: Do we like our new wealthy-in-productive-results selves? Is this a life worth living?
I can relate to this. Last October, I had a real epiphany using Claude Code at work. Suddenly, that initial inertia of starting something whether it’s drafting a JIRA ticket, structuring a PR, or just brainstorming completely vanished.
I started using Claude exclusively in plan mode, and within minutes, I’d have full clarity on exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. With the release of the Opus model, I felt 100% more productive because I stopped spending time on menial tasks like manual coding or documentation. Instead, I shifted my focus to architecting, problem solving, and reviewing code to make it perfect. I even wrote two PyCharm plugins to unify my workflow (one to manage Claude Code sessions as a first class citizen and another to render Markdown in a less eye straining way) so I don't have to leave the IDE.
However, the novelty is starting to wear off. Six months ago, I would have truly admired how efficient and productive the current version of myself has become, but now I just take it for granted. It has become the new normal, and I’m finding myself bored and stuck in a vicious cycle of constantly needing to reach the next level.
When I don't have time, I just ask AI to summarize the main points and expand on the point I like. I do this with even HN discussions. I just copy the whole HN page and paste into Claude and ask it to summarize and deduplicate talking points.
So the end game for the current generation of AI companies won't be productivity improvements but gambling, just like everything else nowadays. That's why they want to get us all into these massive casinos they call data centers and don't want us to own the slot machines.
So what that you have ideas - other people have them too. It's not ideas that build businesses but knowing right people or ability to sell products.
The gambling trope is so tired. AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree, certainly not more than hiring people to do a job can be considered "gambling" (you never know what you're going to get!).
It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.
>AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree
Reading this while I'm prompting for the third time to fix a 100+ line function is amusing, to say the least. I don't care about the definition of "appreciable", but I definitely have to repeat myself to get stuff done, sometimes even to undo things I never told it to touch.
Then you miss the point - AI use is being compared to gambling because it is addictive, partly due to same mechanism - the results (and rewards) are somewhat random, but it makes you feel as if you're completely in control of the outcome.
It's to the point that I just push the output of that to production and know it'll be OK, except for very large changes where I'm unlikely to have specified everything at the required level of detail. Even then, things won't so much be wrong, as they'll just not be how I want them.
For most people who are not doing their day to day jobs it's just a prompt of their idea roughly sketched out and a miracle happens - LLM fills in the blanks. Every time it's different but it works, sometimes even better than initially expected. That's why the addiction and gambling. Gambling is a lot of things, not only flashing lights or play sounds. Some people claim prediction markets isn't gambling either, though that doesn't change the fact.
How is this different from hiring a designer, telling them "make me a website" and then waiting to see if they resolve the uncertainty into something you like or not?
I tell LLMs what to do in pretty high detail, and they do it. With LLMs I have much less variance than with coworkers.
It is different because for humans, it takes time to produce some result, while AI does it instantly. So if you tell a programmer to do X, you have a week for your adrenaline to cool off. If you tell AI, it will do it in minutes.
> If you're making the argument that LLMs are gambling simply because they're faster than humans
No I am not. It's more addictive because of the timescale. The comparison of AIs to gambling is through addiction mechanism, as I explain elsewhere.
My aunt used to put in (the same) lottery numbers every week. It was gambling, but probably not an addiction in the clinical sense. If she had played slot machines, god forbid, it could have been more problematic. AI is a slot machine, a hire is a lottery ticket.
I don’t like the gambling comparison either. It’s more like smoking or drinking. It’s an addiction you lean on to help you do something- even if that something is just getting through the day.
Yeah but those are classified as addictions because they have a harm component (lung cancer, liver disease, societal impact). LLMs aren't going to kill you. If anything, it might be like gaming addiction.
If you've gotten to the point where you'd rather talk to an LLM than socialise, go to work, etc, then yes, you definitely have a problem, same as with a gaming addiction.
Saying "LLMs are slot machines" is like saying "video games are slot machines", and nobody says that, even though it's more true of video games (some are actual slot machines/gacha) than of LLMs.
> Saying "LLMs are slot machines" is like saying "video games are slot machines", and nobody says that, even though it's more true of video games (some are actual slot machines/gacha) than of LLMs.
People absolutely do say that video games are slot machines. [0][1]
I'd observe that there are professional gamblers, and there are amateur gamblers.
If you know what you're doing, know how to spec a problem space, and can manage the tool competently enough to churn out good results, then everything's fine, and you're maybe being productive or increasing your productivity by some degree. (Professional "Gambler")
If you DON'T know what you're doing, and you're just vibe-coding, then I would argue that it is at least a form of gambling (Amateur "Gambler")
Both of these conditions can also be applied to "hiring people to do a job" however there we can also observe things like reputation, credentials and so on.
"It's just paying to get stuff done..." is, with respect, superflous.
I don't know, I can understand "some people might overdo it and get addicted to LLMs". I can't understand "LLMs are slot machines and that's all they're good for" when I use LLMs every day to do tons of actual work.
The gambling part is because of the (hopefully emergent and not purposefully designed) intermittent reinforcement due to the limits. You don't get that with regular hires.
You usually don't get immediate responses from hires which means delayed gratification and avoiding much of the potential dopaminergic effects you get when engaging with LLMs.
You can play overextending the hire analogy all you want but it is simply not the same.
In a paradoxical way, the amount of stuff you can get done in an hour now is like a firehose -- which we rarely experienced in our earlier life -- which can be overwhelming to my brain. So I subconsciously resist starting a session because I never feel fully rested, calm, and focussed to take all that and process it well.
There are also 10x more "active" projects now -- and prioritization and choosing between them at every moment is still a struggle. The tempation to do the fun and novel thing and avoid important but familar boring chores pops up every step of the way and can derail you for days.
I am still trying to create a system that works -- now using the very tools. Long journey ahead.
EDIT: My experience --
I was paying for both Claude Code as well as ChatGPT Pro ...but was heavily almost exlucively using CC for coding work because it was so good. After CC started hammering the session and weekly quotas lately -- I tentatively srated using Codex and find that it seems equally good and almost indistnguishable for my work, and ocassionally shines by one-shotting some tasks. This helped me stay afloat with just 2x$20 spend per month without feeling held-up for ransom. Also never hit codex limits till now.
Leaving a 5 hour session quota unused towards the end, or worse not even starting a 5 hour session clock, was a source of constant anxiety -- that I am wasting precious quota getting nothing done. I think I am getting over that now.
Addressing the end of the article, I think that we are all very much still learning how to use AI responsibly. It's like we just discovered alcohol and we're going on a rager every night because we don't know any better yet.
It's too easy to buy €100 of Claude tokens and burn through them to make those dream projects appear as if by magic. There's a middle ground where, for example, instead of building a whole project it could produce a project template and provide guidance as you build. That should take the edge off the task paralysis and hopefully disrupt the addiction loop.
As someone with ADHD, it’s a lot more nuanced than that. Coding agents can remove task paralysis, but they also introduce many other distractions. Being one prompt away from zero to one is a double edged sword, because it means any random thought, idea and side project is also a prompt away.
For me it's different. I am not diagnosed, but I think my executive function doesn't work right. It's really hard for me to start a new task, but when it is interesting enough I can hyper focus until it's done. In the past that often happened when I needed to implement something not too trivial. But now that AI does the implementation in minutes I need to switch tasks constantly and it is honestly super exhausting for me.
Sounds to me like what people are identifying as dopamine, generating it and enjoying it. I am not educated though about brain function.
Noticing novelty is beneficial in nature as it surfaces opportunities to conscious level. "Squirrel!" famously, from the movie "Up". It feels good to experience. Then, creating ones own dopamine supply can drive behavior, and increasing the number of behavior can exhaust energy supply on different human dimensions.
So now, managing this process and limiting the dopamine cycle becomes also worthwhile -- avoiding fatigue potentially perhaps -- while still not negating the attractiveness of dopamine derivable from the endless opportunities of the world. <3
This resonates. The "idea to result" loop getting shorter with AI is genuinely addictive, I've noticed it in my own workflow too. But theres a flip side nobody talks about: once you get used to that speed, going back to manual implementation feels 10x worse than it did before. The paralysis dosn't go away, it just gets masked. The real question is whether AI is solving the problem or just compressing the dopamine cycle around it.
AI has replaced video games for me. And there are plenty of cheaper models that "do it" for me, I don't have to spend $$$$ just for entertainment. I will step up to the frontier for serious work. But if I'm just playing, I'm going for the free stuff on openrouter.
Also, ai art is fine. It looks better than me using paint. That said, there are plenty of foss art pieces and public domain that you can leverage if all you really need is placeholders, and that is much cheaper.
> What is it good for?
> For me, personally? It helps me overcome my task paralysis. As mentioned earlier: I have a plan. A strategy. An idea. I just need someone (or something), who has fun in churning through the implementation. I have the ideas. But boy is coding exhausting.
I find the same. AI helps me overcome any paralysis. I just think "hey it's cheap to write the prompt" and go on.
Another way to put this is that focus is ultimately what matters, when it comes to actually getting stuff done. Choosing what not to do is often more important than what you actually do.
Since AI tools make it extremely easy to get started, it's really easy to begin half a dozen different projects, feel like you're being productive, but actually accomplish nothing.
This accurately described how I used to utilize AI – and my ChatGPT history is filled with all sorts of grandiose project plans. But lately I've been more and more narrow with what I actually prompt.
This leads me to think that a chatbox is not the best UI for using AI, as it's too open-ended and too prone to give you long, broad answers, rather than hyper-specific ones.
Don't know about ADHD and whatnot, but I do feel this "task paralysis" pretty often. One thing that I found works really well for me is to work on multiple projects at once. Go one to two weeks on one, then switch to another. I'm not lacking motivation anymore and it feels great.
YMMV but I’m personally feeling burnt out with AI coding agents and ready to go back to the old ways for my next personal project
I got into coding over a decade before it was my career because of the exploration, learning, and puzzle/challenge aspect.
Every time I have tried to be extrinsically driven (career or OSS wise) it's never worked out anyway. I could have done more to make it successful but I never cared about getting validation or getting users for my stuff (and the stress that brings).
I've been lucky that up until this point, the intrinsic rewards I have gotten from my job have aligned with company goals.
LLMs take all the intrinsic wins and leaves only the extrinsic ones. That makes me sad, but it is what it is I guess.
I have been thinking about a tool for months but didn't have the time. I finally gave in and built it at work in a week with LLM tokens. It worked fantastically. But I felt no accomplishment. It felt just the same as if I downloaded the tool from someone else's repo (and who had an overly eager maintainer that would implement my GitHub issue requests).
The hard part for me is ignoring LLMs in my free time to try and keep some of the intrinsic rewards to myself, without being annoyed that I could do it faster if I just "gave in".
I can strongly relate to what you‘re writing, because I share that same sentiment often in my daily (non-AI) work. In fact, coming from that background, the switch from coding to working with agents feels eerily similar to moving into management. You encounter the same challenges minus the „human people and emotions“ part: having to explain properly, the agents doing something different than what you intended, feeling detached from the actual work, only focusing on the bigger picture and so on
To me it feels very natural, it is what I do every day. But then again, I made that choice and it wasn‘t forced on me. So I understand frustration.
The main output of my work is gaining a better mental model of systems I work with. That's what lets me grow and that's what makes people want to pay me rather than someone else to work on these things. Anything else, including the produced code itself, is secondary to that. In general I find it pretty hard, although not impossible, to use LLMs in a way that doesn't diminish my output, especially with this tooling that seems explicitly designed to make it hard. After all, reviewing things is so much harder than writing them yourself, and you can't feel accomplished by something you haven't done.
The addiction part, the ADHD part and the pending test part.
The fear of becoming addicted to AI is real and I don't think I'll be capable to stop it, considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life.
My Pro went to Max(5) to Max(20) pretty quickly and I was burning through that weekly limit still, without large agentic workflows that burn tokens. Just me and 4-5 terminals. Sometimes I was happy to hit the limit because I was forced back to normal life.
I've gone back to Pro to stop what was happening.
Now I'm self-aware enough to notice the trend and put up safe guards, but that's because I've always had to adapt my environment to control my behaviour because I know direct behaviour control is abnormally challenging. I fear for those who won't see it coming, until they're in deep.
In other words, the initial implementation is practically already there, already done. So there's no rush left in generating it - it's only worth bothering if I'm prepared to see it through to 100%.
When it is worth pushing through to 100%, it's pretty great for getting the inertia going though.
It's so wild that it never dawned on me, why some people around me were so quick with "Let AI do that!". I'm not saying that each and everyone has ADHD, but I think I underestimated a) the flow of dopamine a successful prompt can set free and b) the craving for it by folks that I deemed more stable than myself.
I’ll finish modding that Dreamcast one day…
So my ADHD isn't being satisfied by those little dopamine hits from LLMs, Any time I'm forced to use them I'm mad about it, and can't wait to be done with it
I still have that folder of half finished things just like you, though. It's just not AI generated
Something physical is excellent for me: minor wood carving, origami, drawing exercises, also light physical exercises.
My trick is to (try to) do something that requires high focus, on unrelated matters.
To give a practical example, the simple gesture to connect 2 points on a sheet of paper via a direct, non trembling line, requires high focus: if you try to do it sloppily it is too long, too short, etc. I need to shadow the moment, gain focus, draw the line.
It keeps my brain in focus, busy and engaged. Videos, podcasts, and in general enything digital seems to distract me away and/or overloads me.
Also, I am back at using pomodoro technique more frequently.
Just some pointers, in case you want to try out, or suggest some you find effective yourself.
Being able to remove the "first step" block is great, but what worries me is that this is coupled with LLMs sycophantic behaviours. My gut feeling is that coupling the feeling of unblocking ones capabilities with dopamine hits with the constant praising over someone abilities is an intro to psychosis and paranoia for them.
In one case recently I explained a garbage collector design I had been toying with a while ago, but couldn't find research related to my idea or really evaluate if my idea would work. After enough arguing with the prompt it finally "understood", started praising my "novelty", and when I later asked for research related to it I was given a paper that already implemented most of my idea
It was a funny moment of seeing how it was clearly trained on too many online forum comments (simply mentioning reference counting got it on this whole awkward line of false folklore about memory management) before switching to sycophancy, to finally showing me a paper
Nowadays we're bumping up against alternative nonhuman intelligences, nowadays as we go about our lives. New neighbors, kind of.
And AI has its idea of 'living' in this world .. as a servant to us mainly.
So human life is changing: we now have the opportunity to relate to life (existential) while we're being influenced by the valuable accompaniment of these new docile servants. We're able to "see our plantation and peacocks" if you will.
We experience our life-challenges differently ... now being alive to see our daily labors accomplished by others, and we're able to reap the benefits: more dopamine, resources, whatever.
Our role is changing somewhat, being 'wealthy' or 'elevated'.
I think this poses new questions implicitly, like: Q: Do we like our new wealthy-in-productive-results selves? Is this a life worth living?
I started using Claude exclusively in plan mode, and within minutes, I’d have full clarity on exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. With the release of the Opus model, I felt 100% more productive because I stopped spending time on menial tasks like manual coding or documentation. Instead, I shifted my focus to architecting, problem solving, and reviewing code to make it perfect. I even wrote two PyCharm plugins to unify my workflow (one to manage Claude Code sessions as a first class citizen and another to render Markdown in a less eye straining way) so I don't have to leave the IDE.
However, the novelty is starting to wear off. Six months ago, I would have truly admired how efficient and productive the current version of myself has become, but now I just take it for granted. It has become the new normal, and I’m finding myself bored and stuck in a vicious cycle of constantly needing to reach the next level.
It's a real turnoff when I have to scroll past a moral lecture on artistry and piracy when I just want to hear your thoughts on task paralysis.
---
To the author's point though, AI is incredible at building some initial momentum on a task. The initialization energy is basically zero.
So what that you have ideas - other people have them too. It's not ideas that build businesses but knowing right people or ability to sell products.
It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.
Reading this while I'm prompting for the third time to fix a 100+ line function is amusing, to say the least. I don't care about the definition of "appreciable", but I definitely have to repeat myself to get stuff done, sometimes even to undo things I never told it to touch.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083267
Actually it's quite possible that being a business manager/owner is actually addictive (having power over people), we just don't recognize it as such.
https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
It's to the point that I just push the output of that to production and know it'll be OK, except for very large changes where I'm unlikely to have specified everything at the required level of detail. Even then, things won't so much be wrong, as they'll just not be how I want them.
I tell LLMs what to do in pretty high detail, and they do it. With LLMs I have much less variance than with coworkers.
If you're making the argument that LLMs are gambling simply because they're faster than humans, I'd like to see some evidence.
No I am not. It's more addictive because of the timescale. The comparison of AIs to gambling is through addiction mechanism, as I explain elsewhere.
My aunt used to put in (the same) lottery numbers every week. It was gambling, but probably not an addiction in the clinical sense. If she had played slot machines, god forbid, it could have been more problematic. AI is a slot machine, a hire is a lottery ticket.
If you've gotten to the point where you'd rather talk to an LLM than socialise, go to work, etc, then yes, you definitely have a problem, same as with a gaming addiction.
Saying "LLMs are slot machines" is like saying "video games are slot machines", and nobody says that, even though it's more true of video games (some are actual slot machines/gacha) than of LLMs.
People absolutely do say that video games are slot machines. [0][1]
0: https://lvl-42.com/2018/11/06/video-games-as-slot-machines/
1: https://www.psu.com/news/three-ways-casino-games-are-similar...
If you know what you're doing, know how to spec a problem space, and can manage the tool competently enough to churn out good results, then everything's fine, and you're maybe being productive or increasing your productivity by some degree. (Professional "Gambler")
If you DON'T know what you're doing, and you're just vibe-coding, then I would argue that it is at least a form of gambling (Amateur "Gambler")
Both of these conditions can also be applied to "hiring people to do a job" however there we can also observe things like reputation, credentials and so on.
"It's just paying to get stuff done..." is, with respect, superflous.
Where do you get your 24/7 hires from?
You can play overextending the hire analogy all you want but it is simply not the same.
In a paradoxical way, the amount of stuff you can get done in an hour now is like a firehose -- which we rarely experienced in our earlier life -- which can be overwhelming to my brain. So I subconsciously resist starting a session because I never feel fully rested, calm, and focussed to take all that and process it well.
There are also 10x more "active" projects now -- and prioritization and choosing between them at every moment is still a struggle. The tempation to do the fun and novel thing and avoid important but familar boring chores pops up every step of the way and can derail you for days.
I am still trying to create a system that works -- now using the very tools. Long journey ahead.
EDIT: My experience --
I was paying for both Claude Code as well as ChatGPT Pro ...but was heavily almost exlucively using CC for coding work because it was so good. After CC started hammering the session and weekly quotas lately -- I tentatively srated using Codex and find that it seems equally good and almost indistnguishable for my work, and ocassionally shines by one-shotting some tasks. This helped me stay afloat with just 2x$20 spend per month without feeling held-up for ransom. Also never hit codex limits till now.
Leaving a 5 hour session quota unused towards the end, or worse not even starting a 5 hour session clock, was a source of constant anxiety -- that I am wasting precious quota getting nothing done. I think I am getting over that now.
It's too easy to buy €100 of Claude tokens and burn through them to make those dream projects appear as if by magic. There's a middle ground where, for example, instead of building a whole project it could produce a project template and provide guidance as you build. That should take the edge off the task paralysis and hopefully disrupt the addiction loop.
Noticing novelty is beneficial in nature as it surfaces opportunities to conscious level. "Squirrel!" famously, from the movie "Up". It feels good to experience. Then, creating ones own dopamine supply can drive behavior, and increasing the number of behavior can exhaust energy supply on different human dimensions.
So now, managing this process and limiting the dopamine cycle becomes also worthwhile -- avoiding fatigue potentially perhaps -- while still not negating the attractiveness of dopamine derivable from the endless opportunities of the world. <3
There was a comment the other day that explained how to use the new DeepSeek V4 with Claude Code.
I mention because it's roughly fifty times cheaper than Claude, and the quality gap is closing.
Which is the difference between "I don't use it for anything serious because I constantly run into limits" and "I can actually use the thing..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002640
It seems "Sonnet-ish" in quality so far, but I haven't tested it much yet.
Also, ai art is fine. It looks better than me using paint. That said, there are plenty of foss art pieces and public domain that you can leverage if all you really need is placeholders, and that is much cheaper.
Since AI tools make it extremely easy to get started, it's really easy to begin half a dozen different projects, feel like you're being productive, but actually accomplish nothing.
This accurately described how I used to utilize AI – and my ChatGPT history is filled with all sorts of grandiose project plans. But lately I've been more and more narrow with what I actually prompt.
This leads me to think that a chatbox is not the best UI for using AI, as it's too open-ended and too prone to give you long, broad answers, rather than hyper-specific ones.