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".
Now I can step through everything in a way that it feels like a super power. I have enough sense and knowledge to I think intuit whether the solution being provided is bloated or perhaps even unnecessary and I can reiterate over it. I've just been using Cursor for work as I adopted a personal restriction to only use AI I can run on my own devices for personal use, but if I'm getting paid and the tools are provided I'm going to do my best to solve the problems that I'm confronted with and so far the LLM connected IDE has been helpful.
It's best in my experience when I use it as a tool to augment trouble shooting and brainstorming but when you are fixing one liner bugs in other people's side it's not like me typing the fix is very different from a machine auto completing it.
It might feel like cheating on a crossword puzzle but that is also something I do if I get stuck and the fun of solving the problem has become a time sink.
I think the real risk is if you don't understand conceptually what you are commiting anymore and I've tried to make sure that I always understand what and how the code is working and also understanding the pitfalls of being able to propose bullshit hypothesis that the agreeability of the LLM will go along with.
I've yet to seriously use a LLM for a personal project and when I tried to use Devstral that ran on my Nvidia 4090 it hallucinated so much that it wasn't super helpful but it still shot out boiler plate code that I could then spend time fixing and helped me overcome my own task paralysis regarding initiating.
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.
100% agree, neither do I, but I see this as an opportunity to think "how can we gain trust in the outputs AI produced for us?"
Is it about tests, reviews, some methodology? Better observability? Formal specification? It's really interesting to think how you can relieve this pain. I think the answer to this question will show the path ahead for agentic coding.
Now I am just a monkey thats: 1) add enough context, description and harness to an agent 2) review ouput and repeat 1) if context is lacking
It was bottom to top: from understanding to implementation. You were the owner. Now it is top to bottom: get implementation first, try to get understanding later. Thinking is also delegated. "Think" nowadays is "reformulate,answer questions, add context, try again". This doest feels like I am doing the work, this feels like I am a limiting factor here
Another side effect is that any code now have 0 value. No one evaluating how you guided an agent, what decisions you took. People seeing your work and think "ye, I could vibe code that too with enough time" even if this is not true
And my work isn't css and html (with all respect). It is mostly high performance clusters, parallel computing, OS, low level, SOTA online llm inference etc
Now I am seriously considering blue collar job, as I have more joy building stuff with my hands than to be a passenger/context generator to an ai. I am not a business driven person, I don't really care how much money my company earns (sorry). I just like to solve technical puzzles and think hard
P.S. yes, there are corner cases ai can't do well: non trivial, highly specific algorithms and implementations; complex patches to gigantic multi domain proprietary code bases, but that's like 5% of my work
I find some solace in electronics repair, sadly there isn't much money to make in that.
Oh, don't worry. That part is coming. It might be a cynical read, but the matured version of the field will have a ton of after the fact reviews ( especially in more regulated parts ) and you will hate it.
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.
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 that the rush is more frequent, addiction intensity scales with dose and frequency.
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
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.
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.
One of the big issues I had to overcome was realising that theres nearly zero value in a solution I dont understand. And my understanding is woefully incomplete.
For instance, I have started doing a lot of personal electronics work. Its easy enough to request a circuit diagram and a BOM. but, the work still has to be done with my hands and crucially, the parts are purchased with my money. So I see a circuit diagram and I go "Hey why does this work" or "Uh shouldnt the added resistance between these components send the charge straight to ground" and by the time I have asked 100 questions, I have either established dominance (proven that the original diagram was incorrect) or learned some valuable information. And the questions I ask I can be generally assured are not worthy of being answered by skilled electrical people, and they definitely arent awake/wanting to answer my annoying questions at 2am or whatever.
I have done this for years, when I started I approached it as "Hey ChatGPT, teach me python" and its been really good.
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.
I've found the best results from letting GPT 5.4 code and then asking Opus to do code reviews to a file. I do the review in a different agent session so it's "fresh". Then I review the file, edit until I agree with everything, and let the existing GPT agent session address the items in the review file. I've found Clause agents don't perform as well for me in coding for whatever reason. They feel more sloppy.
I've also been doing a very organic spec-driven development process where I have a md file for each non-trivial project update and use that to define the task and address questions or problems the agent has.
I've also found I can give agents conditional instructions which they will usually use like skills. This gives me a way to easily distribute my instructions to any agent/model on any machine with a single AGENTS.md as the entry point:
https://github.com/rsyring/agent-configs/blob/main/default.m...
This has all been very effective, more than I would have predicted a year ago.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
It's absolutely awful. It's not a novel or entertainment. Don't "foreshadow" or "set the scene". Just get to the fucking point.
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
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?
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.
I have learned how to hide my stupidity from AI's all-seeing eye and the result is the best I can expect from a tool that helped me become 100X more productive, I can't be happier.
Now I am recontextualizing the past experiences as the feeling of moving toward my goals at a speed I am not accustomed to, rather than being exclusively a drug effect
> 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.
This is nothing I couldn’t do on my own, and in fact, it’s a lot slower than just manually editing files myself. But: this way it’s actually getting done :)
There’s too much hyperbole on this subject, so I won’t add to it; but it has solved a lot of very-long-running problems of mine.
It's wonderful if you do the things you enjoy by hand and delegate the "buhhh" stuff to AI. This approach also circumvents the need to review massive PRs (you're only ever concerned with the individual feature, not the whole farm).
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.
- good for me in the short term (e.g., I can fulfill what my company asks from me)
- good for the company in the short term (see above)
- bad for me in the long-term. E.g, I'm starting to become more and more replaceable at my job; I don't have the same depth of understanding of the systems we're building as I used to; my peers and I collaborate way less now (instead of talking to each other, we just ask claude directly); and there's not much to be proud of in my day-to-day work (we're not building CRUDs, but we're not building netflix either, it's something in between). The compounding effect worries me too: every shortcut I take today is a piece of context I'm not internalizing, a debugging instinct I'm not sharpening, a tradeoff I;m not learning to weigh. The skills that used to differentiate me are slowly atrophying. We're all individually more "productive" on paper, but collectively i think we're gonna end up with a codebase nobody fully understands and a team that barely knows each other
- good for the company in the long-term: they can fire me easily, they don't need 80% of us anymore. They can just pay anthropic for the agents instead. They don't need people to maintain or read the codebase either: agents do that now. And executives never really cared about us in the first place, so that part hasn't changed I guess. The math is simple from their side: headcount is the biggest line item, and agents don't ask for raises, don't burn out, don't go on leave, and dont push back when leadership makes a dumb call. We're the worst part of the business on a spreadsheet, and the tools to replace us are finally cheap enough that someone is gonna pull the trigger
I'm not a superstar engineer. I know that. I'm probably in the 80% bag of engineers out there. Some of you may be in the top 20%, and you probably gonna keep your job somehow (or not, who knows). But for the rest of us, I think we simply cannot compete anymore.
I regret every single time I've used AI so far. Nothing good has come from it for me; the feeling is so different from any other technology I've used in the past (frameworks, languages, libraries, whatever): it used to be fun, it improved my career prospects, it expanded my knowledge. AI/LLMs are precisely the opposite: it's not fun, it's making my career worse, and it's not expanding my knowledge.
I CANNOT UNDERSTAND HOW MOST OF US, ENGINEERS, ARE OUT HERE VOUCHING FOR AI. WE ARE LITERALLY CHEERING ON THE THING THAT IS COMING FOR OUR JOBS, AND WE'RE DOING IT FOR FREE, POSTING BENCHMARKS AND EVANGELIZING IT TO OUR MANAGERS LIKE WE'RE GETTING A COMMISSION. WE ARE NOT. THE LABS AND THE EXECS GET PAID. WE're HANDING THEM THE ROPEI would add these points to negative long-term personal effects:
- potential for cognitive impairment / deficit from long-term AI use.
- lack of diversity / creativity / heterogeneity / outside the box thinking of any sort in work going forward.
My questions are: will the AI get to be above our level at creating grokkable source code before it comes unmanageable? And even if not: will the models' ability to understand and modify slop outpace it's ability to create it?
For our jobs, I hope neither is true. But we'll see. Even in the best case we'll have a lot of cleaning up to do.