> I felt that one in my bones. I was up until nearly 2am recently, prompting, because I was so close to getting a plan right. Or so I thought. [...] And it's addictive in a way that makes the isolation worse.

Right, it's more like pulling the lever on slot machine. Oooh, 677, bad luck, do a ritual and try again, and maybe this time...

Sure, regular programming also has a feedback loop, but normal errors are--as much as possible and by design--things that happen consistently for reasons, reasons that force you to engage you mind to discern them and then eliminate them (hopefully) forever. Experienced developers don't just try something random, hope it works, and if it works you just dismiss it as unknowable.

> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part.

Unless, perhaps, you were already fatigued trying to deal with many stakeholders who can't agree what the system even is. :p