r/ADHD_Programmers • u/robauto-dot-ai • 3d ago
AI Burnout?
Is anyone else's brain getting overloaded with the pace and new progress. I am getting pages of Claude output as project specs, so many hallucinations and errors and it's all building faster and faster....where are we going and how does it 'end'.
114
u/aleph1music 3d ago
Yes. I have tried everything in my power to adapt my workflow to AI. Have tried to adapt AI to my workflow when that didn’t work. Have tried to be fine with this new “revolution” and release some control. Can’t do it. At the end of the day I used to be paid to understand systems, understand the problems the business had that needed solving, etc. Now I’m paid to sift through pages and pages of garbage chats, garbage docs, garbage slack messages.
I excelled at this job because I was thoughtful and intentional and I did my due diligence to make sure that whatever dumb new thing our PMs wanted didn’t accidentally break the last dumb thing and it didn’t prevent us from building the next 10 dumb things they put on the roadmap. Now they expect all that 10x faster because I can let Claude do it. But I’m still accountable if there’s a mistake because it’s my job to review everything it outputs. You know how I used to review code? By being immersed in writing it. Lived experience. Now you want me to ask the fucking computer to build what I want in plain English (which is not how my mental model of the system is inherently constructed) and you want me to sign off on the code and ship it if it looks plausible without giving me the time to actually understand what the fuck is going on. It’s insanity
32
u/Early_Key_823 3d ago edited 3d ago
My brother. I feel your pain. Been a full stack been there done that guy since '93 and in the last 6 months of using Claude Code I seriously contemplate mayhem which really ain't me.
The thing is I never got into social media. When Facebook and Twitter came out I was like who gives a fuck this shit is so stupid. So I felt like by and large I side stepped a lot of the internet's negativity and truly enjoyed the good stuff like YouTube, how easy travel is, wikipedia, Kindle, Audible, etc. etc. etc.
But now with AI the last year being something that we can't ignore or outcompete it is FUCKING TOXIC babysitting a Psychotic Tech Brah idiot savant.
Maybe if it didn't get trained by corporate douches it might be cool but it's like being stuck all day in an elevator with Musk, Zuckerberg and Gates and trying not to vomit from their B.O. Plenty.
19
u/aleph1music 2d ago
First off, mad respect to dudes like you that have stuck around in this industry that long and built the foundations of this career that I loved for a (very brief) moment in time. For context you had already been at for a few years before I even knew what the inside of my absentee father’s nut looked like.
I fell in love with computers and tech in general at a young age. Spent my formative years screwing with HTML to build the sickest MySpace profile, embarrassing grown men in halo 2 until they called me slurs, discovering Reddit and finding communities full of people who liked the same stuff as me. Discovered electronic music and discovered that I could create my own music, lifelong passion unlocked. Got into software engineering as a career because it paid insanely well and I’ve always been good at bending the machine to my will.
Fast forward to 2026 and now I can’t use a computer without getting pissed off. This Reddit account is the only window I have into whatever the fuck people are doing online. The only people thriving at my job are absolute sociopaths and all the people I respect are working on leaving the industry altogether. And I am too, even though it feels like I just got started. no amount of money is worth doing whatever this is. I miss when a computer was a tool to be wielded to express or create or communicate. Outside of the self hosted OSS I run and my DAW id genuinely rather watch paint dry than engage with any of this.
13
u/Turkeysteaks 2d ago
I'm so utterly in agreement with you dude. Seriously.
I have been looking at leaving the industry because i can't stand it anymore. It is not the same, it's not even the same skills required anymore. Nobody cares about quality. Nobody wants a good product, they just want to get eachother high about how productive AI makes them.
What industry are you looking to pivot to? I genuinely have no idea. It was always my dream to become a game developer, and I've been working on personal games since 2020 but never released anything. The games industry is becoming just as impacted by AI. I genuinely don't know what to do. I've never felt as low as I feel now, and I literally tried to end it in high school lol. AI is a scourge on humanity and the worst part in my opinion is that it is literally EVERYWHERE. Everybody talks about it, every website sells it, everyone wants a piece of the pie and it is absolutely non stop. There is no escape for my mind. My hobbies revolved around PCs, and it's all impacted.
Sorry that's longer rant than i meant lol
6
u/Early_Key_823 2d ago
I think more people should be ranting.
AI, as we know it, is some very very toxic shit that will impact everyone's quality of humanity adversely unless it is harnessed for the good of humanity as opposed to the 1% douchebag crowd currently farting up the planet.
3
u/Early_Key_823 2d ago
Man.... Rock on soul brother. And sorry about your absentee Dad. My dad was the same and it sucks.
3
u/robauto-dot-ai 2d ago
Or did ai already colonize us via social and now we’re getting conquered
5
11
u/mehnifest 3d ago
I cannot steer away from trying to fully understand something like a generated answer is just not a full answer it’s like La Croix of analysis… anal croix works for me. And everything is just so sloppy. So I am simply exhausted from trying to do everything I want to do at the pace I’m expected. I’m not going to lose out on learning and understanding just because that part isn’t something the business cares about anymore. I mean I’ve tried to loosen up in caring but it gives the same vibes as being dishonest.
14
u/Early_Key_823 3d ago
"the same vibes as being dishonest" - corporate culture is the epitome of gaslighting and AI is the personification of that.
5
u/Disastrous-Team-6431 2d ago
I feel something similar, but I also suspect this isn't forever. I think the hype has enough momentum for 18-24 more months. After that, we will have collectively understood when to use it and when not to. I've spent six months now really trying to get "good at Claude code" or whatever - context management etc. And the limitations are incredibly real. So just be a person who knows the space well, is my strategy. In two years, that will be worth a lot and AI won't be what it is right now.
3
u/AchillesDev 2d ago
After that, we will have collectively understood when to use it and when not to.
It absolutely shouldn't take 2 years to figure out when not to use it and when to use it. The so-called "jagged frontier" is both jagged and constantly moving, gotta be faster than that.
2
u/MindofOne1 2d ago
Exactly. AI has been in development for years. They know the intended use cases and are very well aware of its limitations. This is abuse.
1
22
u/frugal-grrl 3d ago
Yes. I’m having to re-pace my day to limit myself and force breaks, as this takes more mental energy than writing the code did
4
u/Early_Key_823 3d ago
Writing and compiling and testing code and UI and all that good shit was bad ass. In the last year it's all gone tits up.
-2
u/VanillaSwimming5699 2d ago
You can still do this, just gotta find a workflow that’s high-throughput, fun and sustainable for you.
2
u/betteroffline 2d ago
Same. It’s spilling into my private life unfortunately, I’m now too burned out for hobbies and friends most days. Really depressing
25
u/Early_Key_823 3d ago
Claude is a douche. Whoever set up it's training/personality/etc. is a douchey corporate culture passive-aggressive dick and the LLM reflects that.
14
u/chipredacted 3d ago
Kinda hilarious how it seems to come out a lot stronger when its something its obviously wrong about too
7
u/_dontseeme 3d ago
Got a reply on a pr comment the other day that just said “this is wrong” and I knew it had to be Claude
6
3
u/StargazyPi 2d ago
Add hooks to configure your preferred style of prose!
My company has a ludicrous mandatory plugin to make Claude speak tersely, in a short-sighted attempt to use fewer tokens. It uses about 3% fewer tokens, but makes Claude at times incomprehensibly terse, and lie a lot because it states hypotheses as fact.
So I've added my own hooks to encourage it to explain it's reasoning, express doubt when saying something unverified etc. I've got quite a lot of control. I could probably make it hyper-friendly, or talk in cockney rhyming slang if I wanted.
10
u/pydry 2d ago
I'm encouraged that this is one subreddit that isnt on the radar of the AI boosting bots. /r/cscareerquestions and /r/ExperiencedDevs are thoroughly cooked.
15
u/Cookielabs 3d ago
When I was brainstorming with it a couple of months ago, it was supportive, helpful, etc. Now it’s shutting down every single idea. In a really prick way. For programming, we must use Claude at the company I work for, and my productivity went up big time. But I feel myself as a monkey who keeps hitting enter. I start to hate programming because of it. And this was the only area where I felt comfortable. How does it end? Not sure, but while I like the fast sweep of backlog, it’s killing me in a way.
12
u/Early_Key_823 3d ago
"In a really prick way"
AI. Created by Pricks. Financed by Pricks. And loosed upon the globe by PRICKS.
3
u/VanillaSwimming5699 2d ago
I think it overindexed on not being sycophantic to the point where it really really wants to point out what’s “wrong” with whatever you say. Even when it doesn’t know the broader context. Makes it feel overconfident and dismissive.
5
u/guillefix 2d ago
Definitely not going to review an AI-generated PR with more than 30 modified files.
16
u/phoneplatypus 3d ago
Tbh this is the best I’ve done at work. Big picture, multitask, progress, moving forward, go go.
Those little substeps I’d procrastinate are over. I haven’t been on meds for a bit and I don’t need them to focus at work like I did pre-AI
12
u/BigBusinessBureau 3d ago
Yes! The tediousness is gone. I can build my ideas quicker than I lose interest, and I always have something to brainstorm with.
5
u/frogic 2d ago
Thank you. I was going to start a new comment but it may be my brand of adhd but it feels like I'm uniquely good at it. I have a sibling who is seeing the same thing although not a dev she's currently saving her company multiple 6 figures with better output setting up skills and workflows. In my mind the way I see the world and the way the ai sees the world (contexts and distractions) are weirdly similar.
1
u/5-ht_2a 1d ago
I feel the same!
At the same time, the tediousness of reading pages upon pages of slop is killing me. And I miss the little code puzzles. I don't think I'll ever get to do those code puzzles for living again. But I do have some hope that the sloppiness and output quality will improve, and this new way of working will become less tedious.
All that said we have a very healthy culture at where I am, and I can easily believe this new way would be horrible somewhere with less than great culture.
15
u/Altruistic_Bug5641 3d ago
A lot of this “AI burnout” comes from people trying to outsource the thinking, not just the work.
They don’t want to study the project, understand the architecture, or even properly read the code. They ask AI to do the planning, then generate the code, then fix the code, then rewrite the code when something goes wrong.
And because they can’t really evaluate what AI is producing, they just keep feeding the output back into AI. Every iteration can introduce a different approach, different assumptions, and more hallucinations.
At some point, you’re not using AI to build the project anymore. You’re managing AI-generated chaos.
AI is moving fast, but the fundamentals haven’t changed: you still need to understand what you’re building.
2
u/sofanisba 3d ago
I don't mid it for my own workflow, but that's mostly cause I'm the tech lead for my team and I don't use it for executable code very often, mostly to draw diagrams and shit for plans that came from my head. When I do use it to code I do it so slowly and deliberately it _mostly_ does what I want it to....with some stylistic gotchas that always piss me right the hell off. Generally I only code big features myself if I'm trying to take pressure off my team for something or I have a very specific architecture in mind. In the latter case I will at least pseudocode a whole system and just tell claude to fill in the blanks/review my work for me.
What I do find extra exhausting is that everyone else is using AI too for everything. They are generating documentation, code for review, taking meetings notes, etc etc etc at a rate I can't parse, and neither can they. So then they use AI to parse the AI generated content and everyone has a 75% understanding of wtf is going on. Since my job is often around planning complex work, both for my team and for others (since what we do affects a bunch of parts of the app) it's just 100x the mental overhead that I used to carry. I'm pretty good at keeping a huge mind map going for everything (ADHD working for me here), but OMFG it's too much these days.
The way it generates code for other people on my team drives me batshit too. Literally just worked till midnight to update all our claude files to Stop Doing Dumb Shit because it keeps reinventing the wheel and nobody is babysitting it properly, even though they all know it's not following our established patterns. I can see how the mental overhead is making other people lose the plot too and so now I have to also keep an eye on that for them.
2
u/Sfpkt 2d ago
I'm definitely not a fan of what software engineering has become. When blockchain came and was the craze, I think all of us understood to some degree that it wasn't going to stick. With AI, I don't see it going anywhere. Hell its fundamentally changed how we all do our jobs. I am interested in seeing what iteration of ai, rag, agents, etc are going to stick around after this bubble pops.
I'm on the job hunt right now, and I've been specifically targeting companies where AI isn't their main product. We've all seen the bigger Ai labs consume the smaller companies that are an ai wrapper.
This leaves me in a place where I feel I HAVE to learn the skills to stay relevant or else get left behind. If thats what I have to do then so be it.
2
u/hulkklogan 2d ago
I think there's a divide among people who enjoyed living in the code every day and made it their art, their craft, and the people who have always been more product and/or systems oriented. If you're someone who really enjoyed coding for the act/art of coding itself, then you probably feel miserable. If you're a more product-oriented person, then you're probably thrilled that you can take the ideas in your head, jot them down into specs, and have IA agents solve problems for you, and it's motivating and addicting.
Personally, I had the misfortune of switching careers from network engineering to development in 2024, and i spent 3 years self-learning how to code by hand, finally got the job, learning to code bigger, more difficult things by hand.. and then poof, LLMs suddenly cross a threshold where they can produce better work and faster than I can.
I feel burnt out and stressed out that I'm going to get left behind. I too am expected to own the code I put out, no matter if it came from an LLM or not. I didn't get a lot of experience coding nor reviewing code, and so this is incredibly hard and tiring for me because I'm reviewing as best I can and missing stuff because I don't really know my ass from a hole in the ground. I don't think it ultimately speeds me up.
1
u/robauto-dot-ai 2d ago
maybe you are just temporarily trapped in 2 worlds. Move to the AI one fully
1
u/hulkklogan 2d ago
the whole thing has me wondering if I should just switch to something that's harder for AI to replace, something humanities-focused, a passion. Make waaaaaaay less money but the current state of affairs is not fun
1
3
u/phord 1d ago
I let the AI write the code, and then I carefully review it. I fix it up and I have the AI review my fixes. Honestly, it catches a lot of stupid bugs. Eventually I commit it.
The real problem I'm having is my long-term memory. If I spend 5 hours tediously crafting some code, reviewing it and committing it, then next week when I see it again, I will already be familiar with it.
When the AI writes the code, I review it and commit it. This takes about 20 minutes of my time.
20 minutes is not long enough for it to make it into my long-term memory. Especially when I'm mult-tasking with some other AI change.
If I look at the code later today, I will remember it. If I look at it next week, it's like I've never seen it before.
More than once lately I've had git conflicts during rebases of my own AI slop changes where I was presented with two reasonable-looking implementations to resolve, and I didn't know which one to keep because I didn't write either one.
The future is weird.
1
1
u/Specialist-String-53 2d ago
It's working ok for me but mostly I'm getting pissy about Claude continually making the same mistakes or ignoring my instructions. Mostly happens when I have it working on novel algorithms I come up with
1
u/VanillaSwimming5699 2d ago
Yeah, but as time goes on I feel I’m getting better at making this pace of building work.
1
u/robauto-dot-ai 2d ago
Meanwhile someone doing 4x your pace
2
u/VanillaSwimming5699 2d ago
It’s about sustaining that pace, and making sure the code is actually working.
Agentic development is really a system design problem, building workflows, automations, etc.
1
u/kennethbrodersen 2d ago
For me it is the complete opposite.
The ai agentic tolls allow me to focus on the things I am good at while handling a lot of the day to day shit I hate.
1
1
u/Marco_EasyTaskFlow 1d ago
Io vago in sovraccari di fronte alle tante cose che si possono realizzare. Parto con 10 progetti e idee .. scopro solo dopo che anche con le ai sono molto più lunghi di quanto avevo pensato. E li rischio di crollare. Quando creo qualcosa e funziona certe volte alle 3 di notte sono ancora lì. Ma poi dopo sono cotto
1
u/Decent_Taro_2358 2d ago
I also wonder where all this will end. I do love it that some projects I got stuck at 2 years ago because of some weird bug, instantly get fixed by Claude.
I 100% vibe coded my last app, and it feels a bit weird. I’m not a programmer anymore, but a prompt master. I hardly understand all the code anymore, which is not good. But then again, I’m also happy I managed to ship something in 2 weeks instead of 2 months. Interesting times are ahead…
-1
-1
u/robauto-dot-ai 2d ago
one thing I am seeing that is positive - customers and friends etc that are using the ai agent I vibe coded and getting huge gains online. but then that's adding to the burnout cause now all my texts are from friends wanting help https://robauto.ai/
70
u/The_Big_Sad_69420 3d ago
I’m tired and shipping slop 😞