I love coding with AI. I often have several parallel agents, across multiple projects, running off on various coding errands for me. Like Craig Mod, I’m software bonkers: I just can’t stop building software.
But I’m noticing something. After a day of working with Claude, I don’t feel the pleasant tiredness of a day’s work done well. Instead, there’s this jittery craving for more. It’s the same unsatisfied (and unsatisfiable) hunger that I feel after doomscrolling social media. Just one more TikTok, my reward center demands. Just one more prompt!
I’m reminded of a scene in Seinfeld in which Kramer asks George if he ever yearns. George replies that no, he doesn’t yearn, but he craves. He craves all the time! I think about this distinction often. In an ideal world, my work would be driven by yearning — a deep longing to create something useful, beautiful, and right. But, increasingly, the dominant drive seems to be craving — a craving for the next bug fixed, the next problem solved, the next small dopamine hit of a subtask completed. Yearning has a long time horizon, orienting you towards something that you sense is deeper than you can quite fathom. Craving is immediate, targeted towards some discrete unit, and can never really be fulfilled. I have always found coding addictive. But agentic engineering is making the dopamine so readily available that it’s dangerously exhilarating.
For some engineers, agentic engineering has freed them up from the drudgery of writing boilerplate code, dependency updates, repetitive tests, and allowed them to focus on the fun, creative parts. I feel this too! But when even the creative parts are mediated through the same loop, they take on the same craving shape. The fast prompt-response cycle with an eager helper catering to your every whim is the root of the problem — whether you’re using it for drudgery or for creative tasks.
We’re already seeing the most AI-pilled engineers report high levels of fatigue and “AI brain fry.” Our brains cannot keep up. I think that we’re going to see more and more scenes of engineers doomscrolling while their agents work. Not because those engineers are dumb, or lack self-control, but because agentic coding and doomscrolling share the same highly addictive pattern. You scroll, or write a prompt, and there’s a decent chance your brain gets rewarded with a good Reel or a solved bug! You’re pulling the slot machine lever, over and over. In an environment flooded with cheap dopamine, in and outside work, it’s only going to get harder to resist it.
Our curiosity, our ability to go deep, and to do unpleasant-but-ultimately-rewarding things will be challenged every day. Some already argue that the ability to concentrate and do deep work will be a career superpower in the future. That may well be the case. But, more importantly, holding on to our capacity for effort is going to be crucial not only for employability, but for a rich life.