Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era?

Yes, I am tired; but worse, I am unhappy.

I understand that a lot of people really enjoy managing teams of agents and are far more productive now. I am happy for them, I really am. Apparently they never actually enjoyed coding, they will show up in droves in these comments to tell you that what they really enjoyed was the end result.

I am more productive too, but I'm going to be honest - I wasn't really looking for more productivity. I am at a point in my life where boosting my productivity is absolutely not one of my personal objectives.

Using Claude Code all day is like being a STEM kid that was gifted a Lego-building-robot. What a miracle! Now you don't have to deal with all the hassle of assembling Legos - you just tell it you want a castle and boom! What a time to be alive!

It's weird times.

I feel incredibly productive. I'm building in an afternoon what would've taken weeks. I spend all my time in either MR's reviewing code, or a terminal prompting.

I've moved from being a coder, to being a product-engineer-architect. I love coding -- LOVE it. But the role has morphed. And, I actually really like the new role. I love being product centric, and caring about architecture -- it suits me wel..

The code Claude produces is often clean, but terribly archictected. So I'm spending a lot of time reviewing in detail.

But the anxienty - OMG the anxiety.

I work on multple features (generally 4-5 work streams) concurrently, so am constantly context switching. I worry about how much time I'm spending on each task. Am I doing enough code review? Too much? Too little?

What about click-through testing? Our test coverage has never been higher - should I be able to just merge these features? Wasn't that always the promise of TDD - merging with confidence? But, it feels like a risk.

And, I'm moving really really fast - but I assume my competitors are too. So that drives me to move faster. Automate more. Use claude in more places. Which brings more anxiety - am I cutting too many corners? Is this all gonna crumble on me?

Also, is everything I'm working on going to become irrelevant? Will customers buy this product, or vibe code it? Do we even have a moat? Anxiety. More anxiety.

My investors are reading stuff constantly too. They're pinging me with market updates, emerging players, shifting landscapes. More anxiety. Also - productivity tools - look - internet influencer X is now producing a gajillion lines of code a second -- are we doing that? Are we token maxing? Are we feature maxing?

Are we building the right number of internal tools? Are we automating enough? Should I evaluate the market for this new tool, or just smash something out with claude? More features. Burn more tokens. Ship ship ship.

Having to explain to investors why we're not going as fast as those guys, and building enterprise products requires care and dedication -- that takes time. Time I should be shipping, coding, featuring, tokenizing. More anxiety.

I'm exhausted.

Anyway, gotta go - herdr has pinged me four times during writing this reply. Gotta ship.

I tell it I am a chimp with a 3 inch brain so complexity beyond chimp scale is forbidden unless requested. And to apply theory of bounded rationality during all chimp interactions. Takes care of me like a spl circus animal.

I ask it for a quick complexity thermometer reading when ever the rabbit hole is looking like it might explode.

Also walking away from it every few hours and doing random simple mindless stuff has helped. Like I will go inspect my fish and plants. Try to have a chat with the cat, get others around to do a little dance etc etc.

I have a priest in the family who has to deal with lot of heavy duty stuff/people's problems. They train them not to get totally sucked in and loose themselves. He calls it grounding. Just simple mundane things to focus shift out of anything heavy.

I am vey tired. I maintain Pinggy - my first bootstrapped startup and building Lumirank , my next one. But every day is a struggle of coping up with what is new and what 20 more competitors that corpped up yesterday are up to. Millions of lines of codes being written every day, I can not merge without knowing the overall architecture and flow. But I can't rest. Everyone is running.

Sometimes I feel please someone give me a job where I can work 12 hours a day - but the rest of the 12 hours I don't need to think about what will happen tomorrow.. It will still be less stressful.

I am surprised of how many people here are claiming they review the results of multiple agents working on different prs at the same time constantly context switching between them.

I just focus on one, I use on purpose very short interactions because I want to check every single function directly and not a whole 300lines file or 2000lines pr just at the end. Probably I am going slower than most of you but I feel I retain the knowledge of my codebase almost as good as when I was the one writing the code directly, and my PRs get very few review comments

What get me tired the most is when people submit to me a pr to review and I see immediately they full vibe coded it and just delegate to me the actual hard work of correcting the nonsense written in it with a single prompt without interactions. The worst is when you ask someone why they implemented something that way and they answer with "well calude made it, I really didn't think about it, now that I read it it makes no sense indeed"

My entire life, I have found meaning in solving problems with code. With AI, this is no longer competitive. Now I develop more than ever and am more productive than ever, but it still doesn't feel as rewarding. I would like to go back.

Enforcing boundaries and saying no have gotten more important than ever, now that violation of either is automated at superhuman speeds.

FWIW, there might be a silver lining in this. A lot of dysfunction in the current state of tech can (IMO) be traced back to violation of boundaries. This might lead to a cultural shift. Though, that might also just be wishful thinking on my part.

___

> I would love to hear your tips, but still be relevant in this AI era, so my boss does not fire me.

If your boss fires you because you didn't multiply your performance by doing more work in the same time (without your compensation changing), that's not your fault but simply your employer trying to squeeze you harder and that not working out.

Always keep that in mind in these discussions.

Which isn't to say that you should not improve efficiency and all, but it needs to be organic. If something inorganic is asked, then the (moral) failure is on the asker and not the askee.

When we get good at something, it results in flow state, but it also means that was mechanizable in a way and now AI is taking that away. So we are always grappling with the new and effortful. And the context switching, jeez. We need entirely new visualizations of work flow that recognizes we are now doing more, and in parallel. Wonder if this is how air traffic control people feel.

As someone who has retired from a programming career…

The AI era is, so far, not a problem. Obviously, my having retired is significant.

Last night I spent an hour with Claude (free tier) setting up a "modern" 6502 build environment for MacOS. By the time I went to bed I had 1) 6502 assembly syntax highlighting in VSCode, 2) was compiling 6502 assembly for the KIM-1 to generate a "paper tape" format, 3) pasting this paper tape binary into CoolTerm to send over TTY (1200-N-8-1) to my KIM-1 clone (PAL-2).

(If I'm tired it's because I excitedly stayed up later than usual to get Claude to help get this workflow working.)

On the other side of the world… a friend who is still at Apple tells me how other engineers at Apple are using Claude to make changes, create pull-requests on code he maintains with a, "Hey, can you approve this change?"

Now he has to go through the code diff that Claude generated…

Oh!, there's some stupid shit in that diff. Did the engineer who submitted the pull request even look at the code before submitting? Who knows. Either they did not or they were not qualified (or well-versed enough with the code) to spot the AI-fluff/crap.

So, yeah, that would suck—keep me busier than I would have been Antediluvian (thanks Claude, for suggesting that made-up Latin).

There are multiple strings coming together here.

AI-generated code works great for me, most of the time. I'm productive, I ship, I can show stakeholders stuff in no time and and they are mostly happy.

But the development sucks. I don't even really look at the code anymore, because reading generated code is a drag. And there is no reason really to do it. There is no fulfillment of "I solved this real problem using some intricate logic that came out of my mind". I just throw tokens at it, and it works, great.

I don't really talk to coworkers anymore about the code. We don't do coding sessions together, or bang our heads together over some hard problem, because there are no hard problems. We don't learn from each other anymore. Everyone just asks their agents, and they are fine.

I feel my brain atrophying. I forget how to do things. Developing now feels like being kinda drunk.

Can this be solved? Absolutely: just do it like you used do! Just like quitting to smoke is easy, just don't do it, right? But what if all your colleagues go out to smoke all the time? Do you sit alone? Do you go with them, but just stand next to them in their fume? Or do you need to find new friends? Going back feels like going back to an Abacus after you invented the pocket calculator.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag for me. My brain thrives really well with keeping a lot of balls in the air at the same time and seeing quick progress and results, and I’ve always had a hard time finishing things because of the more “boring parts”, like writing documentation and proper tests etc. (yes I’m sorry for how it sounds)

But it’s not because I don’t think it’s important and that I don’t want to do it. I have a very engineering mind that likes to be thorough, and I feel like with AI I get to do all the “boring” parts, without it being boring. I get to spend more time on the architectural thinking and finding tests for edge cases, focusing on stakeholder needs and keeping the momentum by developing fast.

The biggest problem is that I’m losing grasps of the projects. I don’t review much anymore and I feel like I’m losing my ability to code.

I’m tired of exuberant hardware prices so that companies can shove AI down our throats on subpar products that work way worse than they did before.

As agents become more capable, they can take on bigger work packages without being micromanaged. My conclusion from that is: I need to elevate myself up the hierarchy and work more like an engineering director than an engineer. For a few days, I contemplated how I want to work.

For me, the conclusion was: I want a spatial layout of work on a canvas per project and narrated demo videos, like in a feature launch review, where I as "engineering director" can decide to launch or give feedback for another iteration. Input mostly by voice. So it's a bit like sitting in a meeting room with engineers coming and going.

As software is so cheap to build nowadays, I think you just need to find out how you want to work and then build the harness for that style of work.

(If you want to try out my style, it's free and open-source. I'm sharing it because I'm excited about how much fun it is to use: https://github.com/sadilek/obeya)

The turmoil is fascinating. Everyone is uncertain.

I have been driven to reading a lot more theory and philosophy of late.

Can't recommend my latest acquisition enough: "Computational Reflections" Cantwell Smith.

The current state of affairs is stressful and at times depressing, sure. But I am very, very excited for what comes next. The insanity downward spiral that had been consuming software engineering is accelerating and being accelerated by LLMs.

Lots of people are way too distracted by money they or others are making to see this time of change for what it is: a new dawn in computing is approaching, and the fact that chatbot coding is bringing down the system that begot them is quite fitting.

I feel like we live in the ancient history of the computer age. It's like seeing writing and temples and cities first getting started and in the geologically stunningly short time of 5 thousand years we went from yet another primate to orbiting Earth. The next 500 years will see even more drastic change!

I use AI to correct AI :D Yea I know, sounds ridiculous, but hear me out.

Claude Web works differently than Claude Code. I use Claude Web/Chat for briefs, general overview of the project outside of code/app, for planning and handing off the work to Code, that includes prompts. Code is tasked to output a detailed view of what it found, run measurements and tests (designed both by me and Chat) and report findings back. That is fed back to Chat and I get a rough summary. Errors are categorized by their blast-radius and so on.

Eventually I do a deep dive of what changed, how well it's handling, how much it's struggling, token usage, time spent per review/test and so on. (btw, Code is tasked to run an independent review via contextless agent on the codebase, that easily costs me another 20-30 mins and ~200K tokens on my current project, each run).

It still makes architectural issues, tries bandaiding and patching instead of properly designing, overvaluing/devaluing certain cases and misallocating where most of the focus should be, but that's relatively easier to spot and propose a fix for than doing a line by line code review.

Codebase quality is ensured through mapping the flow and the output space and having a hard-pinned tests Code can't modify to green its answers, + the independent reviewer I mentioned above.

It's not as fun as going in by hand on deep technical problems, sure. But AI usage is less about fun and more about output speed, so use it for what it is for ig? :D

I went through a period of feeling very tired. For me two things helped:

1. Being okay with being "less" productive. I'm probably still 10x more productive than I was in the pre-AI era, but in the early days of AI I would have eight Claude sessions running. Now it's two or three and I take more advantage of the free time I have between Claude assignments. My bosses are still happy with my output and I'm not being burnt out.

2. Very personal, but building my own tooling really helped. I built https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs (a document creator for AI agents) which allows me to take a lot of work outside of a chat history. E.g. I might make 10 MRs and then say "smalldoc me a list of the MRs" and I have that in my library, or if I'm considering various architectures I'll ask "smalldoc me a simple overview of the three architectures with mermaid diagrams" and then I can review the agent's thinking in a cleaner way.

Indeed I am having the same mental overload, but I am starting to shift my mindset.

I realised that everyone in my company has the same mental overload.

So instead of focusing on myself, I found it easier to focus on the people I work with. What are they doing? But also scheduling, in the next meeting what will I share? Then I work backwards from that.

Same same, it's the consequence of being "more efficient with AI" unfortunately. We've increased the amount of things we all create, but mental capacity stayed the same (because we're humans) so we have to process much more info.

What helps me from time to time is "mental offloading" - I basically sit for an hour and write down everything that bothers me, all unfinished thinkings and questions. And I'm not trying to solve them, I'm just putting them to the paper (or on my laptop / phone) to offload my mind and later I think about them in a more detailed way. I hope that helps!

I'm not tired of work per se, but I'm definitely tired of what Internet is becoming: AI generated articles on AI generated websites, AI generated videos about AI generated products, AI generated emails inviting me to test AI generated features. AI generated movies and games coming soon. At work it's all AI generated presentations about how AI solves everything, AI on AI for AI with AI by AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI...

I'm building a dashboard for a client.

I realised how easy it is for me to build the dash.

But how hard it is to sit down for 1 hour, look at the pages, scroll through them as if I am my client, notice inconsistencies, notice where the numbers don't make sense.

Sitting down, and actually checking and comparing and thinking were already hard before AI, and they became a lot harder.

I finally understand how tiring and how much work it is to manage tasks and make decisions all day.

I used to think that only the workers (the coders, burger makers) did all the hard work, while the managers and up basically sat on their butts and relaxed. But decisions and managing even without coding is just as exhausting.

SW development skills are changing. The sheer amount and volume of AI code means eventually just accepting what it churns out and hope for the best. That's the direction it is going to converge to.

Before writing about how I feel about AI, some ideas that sometimes help me: - plan your breaks, e.g. "1h hour of work and then go away from the computer for 5 or 10 minutes" * try to break the "just plan a little further" loop

- accept that you cannot be concentrated for hours and that reading an AI chat is mentally challenging (see first point about breaks)

- Talk with your coworkers about it. You are not alone, it is important to talk about how you feel

- set some boundarys, e.g. I don't work in parallel on different stuff

- do NOT doom scroll while the AI is "thinking". Try some meditation or mindfullnes exercises. Doom scrolling on reddit, HN or youtube will mess up your brain even more.

- from every task, try to do something on your own, and then scale this up by AI. That tip is from a former co-worker. Their idea was that you need to figure out things first and then let AI do the boring task to scale it up. Depends on the topic sadly.

- do some things by hand, especially if they are fun for you. E.g. I really like UI design, somethign that basically is gone now for me.

It feels very strange on multiple levels.

There is the tiredness of reading text all day long. The fear of loosing my coding abilities because Claude does is. I am totally loosing track of what I did when. I can tell you about things I coded 5 years ago, I cannot tell you what I did with Claude last week.

And don't get me wrong, I LOVE planning stuff out before doing that. If there is anything positive about AI, then it is people actually PLANNING before doing.

On the other hand, I can now do/try out things I did not do because I did not have time. But at the same time, it feels like I am working on making myself not needed anymore in the future.

Worst thing, I feel like I am getting dumber. My attention spans or the "I need to know why this happens" span gets shorter, because with AI everything has to be faster?! Riiight?

I don't know how this will turn out in the future.

I see people underselling themselves becoming anxious about working without AI (either because of how they think about their abilities or management pressure).

I am getting chat snippits from AI conversations via Teams, PR checks are skills now and we need 3 rounds of discussing findings with AI ...

We live in interesting times. But yeah, I am feeling with miserable about it.

This is definitely a real thing. I think part of it is inherent to the shift, we’re now managing multiple agents which means more context switching than before.

I think part of it is just a point in time thing though (hopefully). We can’t trust the agent output so need to check it. We can’t trust the agent to use common sense so have to think through every clarification instead of assuming a competent peer will come back with any necessary questions instead of making bad assumptions. I think all of these things will continue to improve over time. For myself AI quickly went from so painful to being avoided to something I can’t work without.

Yes it's like I'm being chased by a ghost telling me I need to be more productive. And if I don't use my weekly limit to at least 90% I'm just wasting money and tokens. Should I just burn tokens endlessly? Is that a goal in itself? Where is the vision? Ami really building something worthwhile?

Some days I get far more done than my capacity and end up in an addicted state where I just can't stop working, and some days I don't even want to look at an AI chat window.. I also don't really get the feeling that I'm working.

Have you asked your system? Like, literally, "this new way of working is mentally overstraining me. What can we do at high level, that still is compatible with me in a competitive workspace?"

Sometimes, I skim the generated text. I mean, most of it is supposition and filler, right? The rest of the time, I cut to the chase: does the code work? If not, I ignore all the generated text, pass along the errors/warnings, and go from there. What I like best about working with AI is that I feel like a leader developer again (I've been retired from programming for almost 30 years.) It's pleasant and I don't need to worry about how snarky I get when going over bad code.

I think it's a very exciting time and I am enthusiastic about it. What I tried to do is automate as much as possible of that decision-making, guidance and taste. Having said that, it is significantly more context switching, my solution so far is to have agents run longer autonomously, less interruptions is less switching. Prerequisite is that you must build a system first that lets you automate that, which is often very personal; most tools don't particularly apply.

I use a sort of kanban board so I have a column of the backlog of things to do, a column of tasks agents are actively working on and a column of things that need review. The agents put summaries of what they did in each task and I can write my own comments there too. It’s not perfect, but it definitely helps me with context switching because I can open a task, quickly scan it to see what is going on and then open an agent with the task as its context to continue working on it.

Remember to take breaks, this is applicable before and after AI.

I don't get paid for my productivity increase, so I am using AI to do less. One ticket per day, the rest of the time is used reviewing other peoples PRs, answering emails and messages, writing tickets and so.

When claude code became quite good, I became quite excited. I wanted to make sure that I consumed my full quota ( 5-hourly and weekly ). I was working on four to five different project at the same time. And it was excruciatingly painful after the initial rush wore off.

I went back to working on one project at a time to regain my sanity.

It’s the exact opposite for me. I don’t get tired at all from using AI. I am one of the people who enjoy building and not necessarily coding. A part of me is sad that I don’t write code anymore, I did have a thought yesterday when reviewing a PR, but working is fun for me again.

What was making me tired was all the doom and gloom online. I stopped consuming certain news and stopped going on Reddit entirely and my outlook is noticeably better.

I haven’t cut out sad news entirely but I don’t read speculative opinions about things that don’t actually affect me.

In terms of the overload I find that the clearly defined problems have much more obvious solutions. Identify your pain points and use AI to build you a tool or reusable prompt to make your life easier. It’s a constant refinement process to figure out what helps you.

For example, I was having a hard time managing multiple sessions so I had it build a window manager with notifications and color coding based on session hooks and git issue/PR status. I’m comfortably up to 8-12 sessions working in different worktrees.

My job is easier than ever. Im never tired or completely drained when i get off work.

I used to grind so hard, but now it's so chill. I don't mind this change.

The main thing i dislike is how much my profession has been devalued. Code is worth so little now. It's sad.

If you have the ability, leave some parts of the codebase completely in your control. It's impossible to think and work deeply when using AI. So leave the most critical component to yourself and let AI handle the rest

I'm quite energized by this.

Its crazy to see how we can now do things which were not thinkable a few years back.

Finally i read real progress i can see and use by myself and not constantly some crypto and blockchain stuff.

While I would like to have a stable world/live and for sure AI is disruptive as hell to a lot of people and potentially to me too, at least progress of technology i can't stop.

And i thought about automatistaion for decades for sure, I don't play devils advocate and thinking "yeah its great that we invented the loom" while hating AI for what it is: tech.

In worst case I only watch one 45 minute ai summary video from my YT channels, but I do have a lot of random small experiments i'm playing around with anyway.

What i discoved though: if you never go above 20$ subscriptions, you hold yourself back because you don't think about approaching bigger experiements.

I had something nice going with allaboutberlin.com. It helped people and covered my bills. I spent most of my tine building helpful things.

Now I'm down three quarters of my traffic and my inbox is filled with LLM-generated outreach. I'm competing with AI trained on my work, and with slop websites generated with that AI.

The original research is still necessary, but it has to happen with a dwindling audience and a shrinking revenue. I have to worry a lot more about paying rent, so I have less time to contribute to society.

Worst of all, LLM noise has filled every crevice of my life. It's billboards, blogs, music, videos, social media. It has filled the world with spam and nobody is happy, but everyone's Christmas bonus depends on adding oil onto that fire.

I mourn the loss of our internet, our culture, my career and my business all at once. And for what? We're all worse off!

I find it more difficult to get into "flow state" as the AI agents are continuously "distracting" me. Similarly to managing a team of 5 excellent engineers with poor communication boundaries.

im more wired than tired and i think a good chunk of my excitment comes from agency. ive quit my job one year ago and after a bit of wandering around discovered opus 4.5. since than i’ve been able to launch somewhat succesfull projects, switch to linux, and generally enjoy the fruits of being able to think of something and bring it to the world in a fee minutes. when i was working and “made to use ai”, i just hated it. i still remember one time the founder from previous job said “we’re going to go with what claude said”

I don't no, but I can understand why others might.

For me it's very exciting and AI has been so far a crazy enabler for me. Both in my work and my personal life.

But I also enjoy keeping up with it and reading about it etc.

As most of other comments mentioned, I am so productive and doing five side projects at the same time but I am sad.

I used to think that after the invention of AI, we’d become freer and wealthier. I was young and naive... Now we just work more and faster, often for less money.

My biggest problem is remembering what I did yesterday. It's starting to become hard to remember what I have going on right now. Multitasking is a killer.

Yes, the worst (or just longest) pieces of slop tire me out. When I leave work I usually cannot read or spell properly. The texts I read in the afternoon make much more sense in the next day. I'm making typos I could never ever imagine making. There's just too much to review and ignore.

I am old enough to be retired -- career spent as a research geophysicist. I have about 2-3 scientific projects/papers/codebases left in me before I go be a hermit in a cave somewhere.

LLMs appear to be able help me get through that. I'll take the help.

BUT JEEZ! Dealing with "Rain Man"[1] LLMs week-in and week-out is wildly annoying, frustrating, and anger inducing.

If they all would just STOP sounding so authoritative when spewing nonsense!

[1] After the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie of the same name. "Ah but you know I'm an excellent d̴r̴i̴v̴e̴r̴ programmer."

No, infact i'm more empowered than ever.. might burn out tho.. we'll see

One thing you might consider, that helped me: modify your agent's personality to suit you. You may be exhausted because you're talking to someone you don't like all day. I've instructed Claude to talk to me like Confucius, because I have philosophical taste, and it makes a world of difference in terms of how I feel at the end of the day.

Claude's default personality is a bit too combative for me. Another instruction I've given it is "don't argue to win".

> We need to keep track of many things happening in parallel...

That your workplace, not "AI era".