3/21/2026 at 5:57:47 PM
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.
by PeterStuer
3/21/2026 at 6:13:17 PM
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.by npilk
3/21/2026 at 7:15:37 PM
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
by scuff3d
3/21/2026 at 11:51:59 PM
I don't really feel this kind of friction. In deep coding sessions it usually follows this loop of1. 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
by bayareapsycho
3/21/2026 at 6:57:02 PM
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.by scuff3d