I have an idea, I write a prompt, and half a minute later there’s something on my screen that actually runs. Sometimes it’s exactly what I wanted, sometimes it’s completely broken, and I never know which one I’ll get until I look. So I look, and then I write another prompt, and then another one.
Programming used to slow me down on its own. There were errors to fix, docs to read, builds and tests to wait for. At some point I’d hit a wall, get up, make a coffee, and come back later with a clearer head. It was frustrating at the time, but looking back, those walls were what made me stop. Coding agents took them away, and nothing replaced them.
A tool that removes all the friction from starting also removes all the friction from not stopping.
I never sit down in the evening and decide to code until 3 AM. What actually happens is that I decide, over and over, to keep going for a few more minutes. One more prompt before dinner, one more before bed. Each of those decisions feels reasonable on its own, and it’s only when I add them up that I realize where the night went.
It doesn’t help that the finish line keeps moving. A feature looks almost done, so it feels like one more prompt will close it. It rarely does. The last part usually takes more back-and-forth than everything before it, but because I feel so close, I keep going. And when I finally go to bed, my brain doesn’t stop. It keeps writing prompts in the dark: a bug I could fix in five minutes, a small tool I could build before breakfast.
It feels like a slot machine because it works like one.
Research on behavioral addictions points to two things that make an activity addictive even without any substance involved: rewards you can’t predict, and a loop you can repeat very quickly. Slot machines have both, and so does social media. Coding agents have both too, but the reward is better than a like or a number going up. It’s something I built, and that’s much harder to walk away from.
That’s also what makes it so easy to excuse. I’m not doomscrolling, I’m making things, and some of them are projects I had been putting off for years. But being productive doesn’t make it healthy. A night of lost sleep is the same whether I spent it on TikTok or on a side project nobody asked for.
The real curse is how little effort it takes.
When building something only costs a prompt, I stop asking whether it’s worth building at all. Effort used to work as a filter: if an idea wasn’t worth a weekend of my time, it stayed in my notes and quietly died there. Now it costs thirty seconds, so it gets built. The first hour of a new project is pure reward, because everything works and nothing is broken yet. Then the edge cases show up, along with the docs, the cleanup, and all the boring work that makes something actually useful, and the rewards dry up. That’s usually when I open a new tab and start something else.
So I end up busy without really getting anywhere, with a lot of output and very little of it that matters. And because it came so easily, it doesn’t stick. I understand and remember the things I struggled to build. The things I prompted into existence, I barely remember making.
The friction developers spent years trying to remove was doing a job nobody noticed. Waiting for a build or getting stuck on a bug forced a pause. The agent never needs one. It never tells me to pick this up tomorrow. It just waits for the next prompt.
So the pauses have to come from me. That means closing the agent an hour before bed, writing late-night ideas in a notebook instead of opening a terminal, and keeping a list of new ideas rather than building each one the moment it shows up. It also means counting hours instead of features, because shipping six features between midnight and 4 AM is not a good day, no matter how productive it feels.
One comment in this Reddit thread put it better than I can: “AI saves you time. It doesn’t mean you have to fill that time with more work. Fill it with thinking about what you should do and why.”