A New Type of Addiction

I built 3 prototypes and automated a handful of routine tasks with Claude Code last week. Some shipped. Some didn't. Didn't matter. The feeling was the same - what now?

Vibe coding has this pull that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't tried it. The gap between "what if I..." and a working prototype is now minutes. So you never stop. One more thing becomes another dopamine hit, another moving target. You tell yourself five more minutes - and four hours vanish.

The mechanism is the same as scrolling TikTok. A burst of dopamine every few minutes, just enough to keep you going, never enough to feel done.

Traditional coding had built-in friction. Setup, debugging, config - all of it forced natural pauses. Those pauses are gone now. And nobody's replacing them with anything.

But there's a second thing that's harder to notice while it's happening.

LLMs have a context window. Humans don't. Every response dumps paragraphs of code, explanations, suggestions, alternatives. Your brain tries to keep up with all the decision-making - what to accept, what to reject, what to rethink - and at some point it just... stops.

Every other tool in your stack is designed to reduce cognitive load. This one multiplies it. Good UX simplifies choices. LLMs generate them faster than you can process.

I've started calling it cognitive overload. You're reading more than you're thinking. Absorbing without processing. And that eventually leads to burnout - not the "worked too hard" kind, but the "made too many micro-decisions" kind.

So you end the day having built a lot and understood little. Productive on paper, empty in practice.

I don't have a fix for this. I'm just noticing it - in myself, in conversations with other devs. Reid Havens and Kurt Buhler have been touching on this recently too.

The tools are incredible. The pace is unsustainable.

Anyone else feeling this?