I am a Prompt addict
I used LLMs long enough to notice some concerning symptoms.
The other day I had a nightmare. I woke up in the middle of the night, my heart was pounding. In my dream, Anthropic released Claude Opus 6. The problem was that it was much worse than Opus 5.5. I was so terrified, I didn’t know what to do. How will I develop software now?
For almost a year now, I have been leveraging LLMs during my work and while developing my side projects. At first, I was hesitant to use LLMs, but then I gave in to the vibes, embraced exponentials, and forgot that the code even exists. 1 I still go back and forth between whether AI is good, or I’m simply digging my own grave. And despite the fact that I can finally build the things I never had time to build, I keep reflecting on what LLM usage does to me.
The first, and most obvious change is that despite the fact that AI promised less work, I work much more. Recently, I saw a blog post by Orestis Ioannou titled AI Promised Less Work. I Have Never Worked More, and I agree 100%. It’s just the nature of the work changed. As Orestis said in his blog, in the past I used to focus on 1 big task, and a few small quick changes or bug fixes. Yes, there was always context switch, despite the fact that I think it's evil.
However, the nature of the work today is different.
I have 5–7 agents running in parallel: one doing a big feature, another fixing a big, one is doing research for another feature, one is running tests, etc.
Every time one of them finishes, or needs my input, I get a ding and a notification on my Mac.
I worked so fucking hard to disable all kinds of dings and notifications from my life, and yet, here I am, using Claude to help me set up a macOS notification through tmux for an agent running inside a VM.
And so, every time I come back to one of them, it requires a lot of mental energy to remember what was it doing, why, what has been done, and why am I needed?
Moreover, because coding became so cheap, I found myself using every minute to code. In the past, I wouldn’t dare to take out my laptop during a 15-minute train transfer on my way to the office. What can you possibly do in 15 minutes? It perhaps is enough time to understand the context again, and start writing code. But now? Now, 15 minutes is more than enough to write a good prompt and finish a decent chunk of work. I prompt Claude while cooking breakfast or lunch. Basically, every free minute I have, I try to give Claude some work.
And this leads me to another symptom I noticed — I get exhausted at the end of the day. In the past, my evening energy depended a lot on the day. Some days — when things were calm, and I was mostly doing coding — I had a more calm mind and relaxed state at the end of the day. On days when I was more engaged with people, solving production incidents or writing complex designs — I felt more exhausted. Today? Every end of day I feel exhausted and just want to throw the laptop away. Because I get a lot of stuff done — while having absurd amount of context switch — I just feel like a squeezed lemon by the end of the day.
My mind is also less calm. I never did drugs, but I think I know how it feels like. I’m addicted to results. Prompt → Result. Prompt → Result. It’s so cheap. In one prompt, I can redesign the whole website. Not good? I redesign it again. It feels like nothing is a challenge anymore, and I’m just addicted to shipping stuff.
In one evening, I migrated from Plausible, to Liwan, to Umami — with full self hosted setup and full data migrations. This is fucking insane. Migrations like this used to take months in the corporate world. I did it in few hours. Prompt → Result.
I still think it’s wrong. I still feel like you need to put more effort than writing a few sentences in order to get a result. But maybe I’m wrong? What if this is the actual productivity hack? What if code truly doesn’t matter anymore, and we need to focus on shipping-shipping-shipping?
I don’t know. It seems like we all are lost, and trying to find what is the correct path nowadays.
On the positive side, I feel like I want to channel my energy to difference places.
And I feel like I want to get away from my computer much more.
But I can’t, because I think I’m addicted to Prompt -> Result.
Footnotes#
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Karpathy on Vibe Coding: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=en ↩