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
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.
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To the author's point though, AI is incredible at building some initial momentum on a task. The initialization energy is basically zero.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.
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.
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.
I tell LLMs what to do in pretty high detail, and they do it. With LLMs I have much less variance than with coworkers.
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.
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.
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.
Straight away: I am not diagnosed yet. So I'm hesitant to say "I have ADHD", because the truth is: I don't know it. There are signs: My siblings have been diagnosed as kids, and I'm personally struggling with tasks that others deem to be "easy". I have a tremendous need for novelty, and I can hardly picture myself doing the same job for the next 30 years.
I'm not kidding: At the moment, I change roles every 2-3 years. This isn't really sustainable. Due to circumstances out of my control, I wasn't able to tackle that earlier.
Also, it doesn't really help if you want to build a career: I can navigate myself around a lot of technical fields, but I have no special knowledge.
Often, I struggle with the execution of a strategy that I successfully laid out. I will simply refuse to do the first step, because everything now feels overwhelming.
So... there are signs. Yes. But that might be another article.
I'm aware that there is something called Analysis Paralysis. But that's different, at least for me and to my understanding. Let me put it this way: When Analysis Paralysis kicks in, my brain will run in circles. When Task Paralysis kicks in, my brain won't run at all. That sucks.
I won't go as far and say that I HATE AI per se. I just shelled out almost 100 € in tokens (Max-plan for Claude) to code a game. And an iOS App. Because I need the latter and want the former. But I see all the negative effects that come with AI: People are loosing their jobs, sometimes loosing themselves. Art gets stolen, and suddenly, piracy isn't piracy any longer once large companies are doing the deed. That feels unfair, to say the least, and strange at best.
(I 👴 grew up in the 2000s, so I have some knowledge about piracy from back in the days, and how copyright holders went after people.)
I refrain to use AI for anything artistic since a couple of months. I either buy it, or try to do it myself "the old way". I can fail, I can succeed - but I did it on my own. That's important. The effect AI has on artists feels just too destructive.
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. As I learned quite late in my life, it is indeed not normal to fight with your motivation to create code every time you tackle a new user story, but succeed once you started.
Claude Code in this case is the something that just helps me getting started. And, lo' and behold, I see myself struggling to not get addicted to that.
What do I mean by that? While overcoming the task paralysis on one hand, it quickly produces really good results. Last time I tried AI was in fall of 2025. It's an understatement to say that a lot has changed. There are worlds between what is possible today and what was possible back then.
That means that the dopamine really kicks fast, because the cycle between "I have an idea" and "This is the result!" is so tremendously short. But Claude has token limits. You can only spend a limited amount of tokens per 5 hours or 7 days. But you can buy additional API tokens. And now you set yourself in a position where you throw endless money at your source of dopamine, like a junkie running to their dealer, begging for the next shot. Or a poor player waiting for the golden ticket.
And, to be brutally honest: I know because I fell for it. After getting the Pro-plan, I added another 20 € for API credits. After that, I realized I should go for Max for this month, and also leverage some tricks like /modus opusplan to reduce the amount of tokens that are used.
But the dopamine feels so freaking good.
Disclaimer: No AI was used to create this article.