alt.hn

3/30/2026 at 11:49:28 PM

Ask HN: Are you too getting addicted to the dev workflow of coding with agents?

by gchamonlive

3/31/2026 at 2:33:27 AM

I've heard similar things from many people know, but I don't feel like this at all. I don't find coding with Claude any more or less addictive than without. I do find coding with claude slightly more fun, but mostly because brainstorming with someone/something feels less lonely than writing code alone. I wonder where the discrepancy comes from.

Seeing the final result of a feature doesn't really give me any dopamine. Maybe because I'm mostly working on projects I know how to do. When I give it a prompt I already know what the result should look like, so I'm not really surprised by anything it produces.

by loveparade

3/31/2026 at 3:08:38 AM

I work at a fully remote company, and coding with Claude hits the "pair programming" itch I have. Obviously it's not the same thing (and I do chitchat with coworkers on teams to get real human interaction during the day), but one of my favorite parts of my job is having technical conversations with others, debating the pros and cons of a certain approach. Pre-AI, they were occasional conversations I had with younger devs, but now I have them every day.

I found Claude extremely addicting at first (the dopamine hits were real for me!) but over time I guess I've gotten desensitized.

by ccosky

3/30/2026 at 11:52:00 PM

> Each execution prompt after a long planning session feels like opening a lootbox when I used to play Counter Strike.

The "uncertain reward" nature of LLM usage makes it a skinner box, yes.

by functionmouse

3/31/2026 at 10:35:59 AM

the dopamine hits are real. being an ex addict i guess for me its a turn off because i know this is basically the same thing (for me). i dont mind using AI, but i ended up cancelling my subscriptions because it touch a bad memory for me. I'd advise people caution. Like anything that hits dopamine up frequently, your mind adapts quick to expect and 'need' such hits.

its very personal if its good or bad i suppose. (not a psychologist so honestly dont know if its really similar. just expressing my personal feeling about it)

by saidnooneever

3/31/2026 at 2:22:24 PM

It's very addictive. It's so addictive that I'm constantly busy with coming up with new features for the different apps I have. I really have to plan time off. It's satisfying because I know how much work it would've cost me if I had to develop things myself. Seeing Claude Code finish things in hours or even minutes is really cool.

by the_robvb

3/31/2026 at 3:50:59 AM

I got somewhat addicted to the planning phase to the point I started getting task paralysis because I was hell bent on creating the perfect plan.

Everything can be optimized, performance can be improved, you can always think of more edge cases and user stories to cover everything, but after a point that just becomes procrastination in the form of chasing perfection. It's also hell if you've got even the slightest bit of ADHD, rapidly leading to task paralysis with the sheer scale of the plan.

Now I sit with a notebook sketch out everything I am thinking about and then condense it to a planning prompt and then once the plan aligns with my representation of the task, I start implementing.

by h4ch1

3/31/2026 at 8:08:09 AM

> rapidly leading to task paralysis with the sheer scale of the plan.

Yikes. I feel seen.

by austinjp

3/31/2026 at 1:18:23 PM

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by atlasagentsuite

3/31/2026 at 7:49:10 AM

I also love it. Finally, I am no longer constrained by syntax errors or forgotten API details. I can focus on the feature. It's like taking programming to a higher level - programming in English (instead of Java).

by jstrebel

3/31/2026 at 12:05:08 PM

Same. As long as we are reading everything we're submitting upstream and working towards either cleaning up slop or cataloguing them as debt, it's fine.

by gchamonlive

3/31/2026 at 10:43:29 AM

I don't think so, at least for me manual development was the same, giving a lot of dopamine boosts. The only difference is that I get the same amount of dopamine when I generate a full page instead of a single component. Nonetheless it can be a real issue because it takes away from the enjoyment of working on details in the codebase.

by davidszakacs

3/31/2026 at 2:52:39 AM

I give less shits seeing how sloppy the quality bar is now

by yfw

3/31/2026 at 6:29:45 AM

Yes, sometimes I have found it hard to sleep if I'm close to building something I want to build.

I think there is kind of a meme going around about multitaskers doing very well with vibe coding, and I can see it. Although, as someone who has the opposite problem, it can be tiring if I try to do more than two things at once.

by chillacy

3/31/2026 at 8:29:30 PM

I tried it once, to do two tasks at once, and it was very confusing, having to juggle two contexts, even though you have a bit of idle time waiting for the agent to finish his turn. I haven't experimented with subagents, but I prefer to interact with a single agent at a time so I can give the output more attention.

by gchamonlive

3/31/2026 at 1:10:58 PM

It’s dopamanic because some of the previous pains are gone, but soon you will get new pains and frustrations.

by aborsy

3/31/2026 at 1:26:55 PM

I felt that too, when I first used cursor/claude code, it was awesome and I just wanted keep building, the dopamine hit after shipping is really good. But later, when I needed to inspect the code manually, and I realized there were a lot of trash/dead/unoptimized code. I started drowning in the mess I generated. It is good until you need manual changes.

by dokdev

3/31/2026 at 4:56:27 AM

I’ve always been addicted to coding and building, this just makes it easier to get my fix…

by linesofcode

3/31/2026 at 3:27:29 PM

If you say it’s like opening a loot box in csgo, then I totally get it. i used to be pretty good at that game, haha

by yo103jg

3/31/2026 at 12:39:34 PM

I think for someone who hasn’t experienced this it would be helpful to see a real world example whether it’s a Claude session or illustrated in some other way. Can anyone share?

by konamicode

3/31/2026 at 2:26:12 PM

I can try to do it, but session history is extremely sensitive. I'd have to take some time to sanitize it before sharing.

by gchamonlive

3/31/2026 at 8:18:24 AM

I feel this sneaking up on me. I've only recently allowed Claude to actually edit some files directly, rather than just show me suggested edits. It could certainly be addictive to just hit enter while code magically appears, thinking "oh yeah, I totally would have done it like that".

by austinjp

3/31/2026 at 12:34:32 PM

Yes, for the last few months I rather watch LLM generate code than to play video games

by stevefan1999

3/31/2026 at 7:04:31 AM

whenever i give them a chance, i usually give them a codebase I've been working on for a while (so most bugs have been fixed), after I found a new bug, and ask them to "find all bugs".

They always end up praising me for the high quality code and howdthey found exactly ZERO manifest bugs in the code, and this must be the work of a skilled senior developer owing to the code's polish.

Then I point out the bug I had just discovered.... "you're exactly right!"

by vrighter

3/31/2026 at 11:37:57 AM

I saw a video yesterday where a dev was critiquing Gerry Tan's gstack for being a bunch of text files.

One of his points was it's not really the author's fault he's been sucked into believing he made something revolutionary, AIs suck up to you and constantly tell you your work is brilliant and of course it's revolutionary.

https://youtu.be/Q6nem-F8AG8?si=pQm76DpJOhVFJuW7

by mattmanser

3/31/2026 at 2:11:18 AM

Unironically, the descendant of Claude Code is the metaverse/holodeck/next minecraft.

It will look nothing like those things, but it will be obvious in retrospect.

For better and worse.

by avaer

3/31/2026 at 8:22:58 AM

No worries. You are in the right place. This is how others feel as well and how software engineering will feel for new generations so yeah the bicycle comparison fits well.

by ensocode

3/31/2026 at 8:34:28 AM

  This is how others feel as well and how software engineering will feel for new generations

How can you make such universal statements? This is not true at all. There are plenty of people who find vibe coding mentally exhausting (not everyone wants to be a manager) and who think LLMs suck that joy that was left in programming.

by orphea

3/31/2026 at 11:27:39 AM

Nope. Pairing with Claude Code makes programming smoother for me and makes it easier and faster to check different solutions (i.e. "sketch out this approach and let's see how that works out"), but there are no lootbox moments. The LLM does exactly what I tell it in pretty small chunks.

How I work today is still very similar to how I worked in 2023, but now I'm typing a TON of English and very little Ruby. But the overall vibe is nicer and starting on difficult stuff is significantly easier.

by Toutouxc

3/31/2026 at 8:43:42 PM

I had lots of woah moments where I'd plan changes and the agent would actually find inconsistencies in my understanding and complexities I wasn't considering. It's also been very good on keeping surrounding documentation and other code references updates. Maybe in time I'll get used to it and it'll just be another something I'll take for granted, but right now it feels just like gambling for me LOL

by gchamonlive

3/31/2026 at 7:38:27 AM

Not really. I use claude at work and I wouldn’t use at home because a) the same plan would cost $200/month… and I don’t enjoy paying that amount of money for a toy, b) it’s not open source, so I cannot trust antrohpic to give them access to my stuff

by sdevonoes

3/31/2026 at 3:41:50 PM

It’s really is. The LLMs over the last 3-4 months are also basically like people. Somehow Codex seems to be able to capture the exact intent of whatever harebrained, poorly described design suggestion I throw at it. LLMs are scary good now.

by dyauspitr

3/31/2026 at 8:23:43 PM

In my career, I've had to write many code generation tools for many different reasons. Sometimes it's expanding C# generic boilerplate to cover between 1 and N generic parameters. Sometimes I'm porting code between languages. Sometimes it's a loop unroller or something more esoteric.

If I had to describe the way I feel about these tools, well, I don't. They're tools. They exist, briefly, to perform a function and then ascend to whatever plane lost and forgotten programs go to when they leave your hard drive.

I feel exactly the same way about AI agents. It's a tool. I put text in, computering happens, and code comes out. The amount of effort and complexity involved is different, but fundamentally I view it as the same boring codegen we've been doing for decades.

I highly suspect that because I treat AI agents this way, I get actually good, well-engineered results. I've seen extremely low rates of bad code, inappropriate solutions, or the general slop we see in vibecoded projects. I put in a great deal of engineering effort up front, and I get engineering out.

That some people find this loop addictive is... incredibly disturbing. I only foresee very bad things coming from this.

by estimator7292

3/31/2026 at 8:38:18 PM

So you can only get good results if you engage with agents with apathy and skepticism? Can't you enjoy the dev loop and also care about code quality you submit upstream?

My coding refinement sessions with codex has been just as much interesting as the implementation sessions. I get to go over the code with the agent, learn a lot of interesting techniques along the way, and we end up with nice tame code.

by gchamonlive

3/31/2026 at 11:21:03 AM

What’s the negative here that makes this an addiction and not just good?

by brador

3/31/2026 at 8:47:16 PM

I had to actively force myself to leave home because I was getting consumed by it in the weekend. "Just another fix", "just this one last polish"...

It's MMO all over again. And I'm not complaining, but I want to raise awareness for me and other that maybe this isn't such an innocent activity as we think. Coding with agents might just be too addictive for some.

by gchamonlive

3/31/2026 at 12:16:36 PM

I guess it becomes bad when it negatively affects other aspects of life. I experienced or witnessed all of these with AI at some point:

- Working later because of addictive loops.

- Wasting time and money building stuff nobody will ever use.

- Abusive screen time.

- Loss of deep understanding of a code base and over-reliance on the AI, with reduced incident or bug response time.

- Producing a lot of sloppy code, too much to be owned or reviewed.

- Mental fatigue.

by antoineMoPa

3/31/2026 at 1:18:01 PM

The list of negatives is accurate but I think the root cause is the same for most of them: when the cost of "let's try this" drops to near zero, you end up building things because you can, not because you should.

The flip side of vibe coding addiction is that a lot of people who got hooked on building with AI agents aren't actually building businesses or products — they're building experiments that never ship. The ones who do ship often do it because they found a way to stay in "finish" mode rather than "iterate forever" mode.

For what it's worth, that's exactly why we started openclawlaunchpad.com — the people who come to us are usually the ones who spent 3 months vibe coding and ended up with a half-built thing and no users. They want the result (automation that works, agent that runs, workflow that ships) without spending 40 hours a week on it. Not for everyone, but the profile fits more people than you'd think.

by atlasagentsuite

3/31/2026 at 4:28:27 AM

The problem is Claude often kinda grinds to a halt. So I find myself getting context switching a LOT as I’m waiting for it to do something. I’m alright at context switching, but it’s really fucking tiring doing it so constantly.

by anon7000

3/31/2026 at 8:45:39 PM

I had two days straight of coding sessions with codex and I haven't seen a single hitch in the weekend. With Gemini though, which I use for work, I get this exact problem. It's tiring and unproductive if the feedback loop is too short from submitting a prompt and seeing the results

by gchamonlive

3/31/2026 at 8:03:13 PM

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by MeetRickAI

3/31/2026 at 5:44:10 PM

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by ryguz

3/31/2026 at 6:55:18 PM

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by HeritageLab

3/31/2026 at 4:32:15 PM

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by DevKoan

3/31/2026 at 3:52:47 AM

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by weiyong1024

3/31/2026 at 5:13:21 AM

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by pjoubert

3/31/2026 at 3:03:16 AM

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by allinonetools_

3/31/2026 at 8:47:33 AM

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by adriencr81