alt Hacker News~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like.
I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.
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> I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like.
just.. uninstall it? i've removed all ai tooling from both personal+work devices and highly recommend it. there's no temptation to 'quickly pull up $app just to see' if it doesn't exist
This is definitely the feeling i get. Sometimes it works amazingly well that I think "Oh may be the hype was right all along, have I become the old guy yelling at claude?" but the other times it fails spectacularly, adds a really nasty bug which everyone misses for a month or cant even find the file I find by searching.
I am also now experimenting with my own version of opencode and I change models a lot, and it helps me learn how each model fails at different tasks, and it also helps me figure out the most cost effective model for each task. I may have spent too much time on this.
The gambling analogy has been brought up before.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gam...
It feels like this to me too, whenever I give it a try. It's like a button you can push to spend 20 minutes and have a 50/50 chance of either solving the problem with effortless magic, or painfully wasting your time and learning nothing. But it feels like we all need to try and use it anyway just in case we're going to be obsolete without it somehow.