Ask HN: Are you too getting addicted to the dev workflow of coding with agents?
It's becoming an extremely dopaminergic work loop where I define roughly the scope of my task and meticulously explore and divide the problem space into smaller chunks, then iterating over them with the agent. Rinse and repeat.
Each execution prompt after a long planning session feels like opening a lootbox when I used to play Counter Strike.
It's really fun to code like that, it's like riding a bike after a lifetime of only knowing how to run. But I'm really wary that's addictive for me. Wonder if there are more people here that feel like this too.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 69.0 ms ] threadThe "uncertain reward" nature of LLM usage makes it a skinner box, yes.
It will look nothing like those things, but it will be obvious in retrospect.
For better and worse.
Seeing the final result of a feature doesn't really give me any dopamine. Maybe because I'm mostly working on projects I know how to do. When I give it a prompt I already know what the result should look like, so I'm not really surprised by anything it produces.
For me it's always magic to see it work, even if it's a tiny change I'd need to do. To be able to ask "add an opt-in flag for this part of the script" and see it work, updating documentation and asking follow-up questions when instructions are vague it's impressive...
Everything can be optimized, performance can be improved, you can always think of more edge cases and user stories to cover everything, but after a point that just becomes procrastination in the form of chasing perfection. It's also hell if you've got even the slightest bit of ADHD, rapidly leading to task paralysis with the sheer scale of the plan.
Now I sit with a notebook sketch out everything I am thinking about and then condense it to a planning prompt and then once the plan aligns with my representation of the task, I start implementing.
I think there is kind of a meme going around about multitaskers doing very well with vibe coding, and I can see it. Although, as someone who has the opposite problem, it can be tiring if I try to do more than two things at once.
They always end up praising me for the high quality code and howdthey found exactly ZERO manifest bugs in the code, and this must be the work of a skilled senior developer owing to the code's polish.
Then I point out the bug I had just discovered.... "you're exactly right!"
its very personal if its good or bad i suppose. (not a psychologist so honestly dont know if its really similar. just expressing my personal feeling about it)
It's MMO all over again. And I'm not complaining, but I want to raise awareness for me and other that maybe this isn't such an innocent activity as we think. Coding with agents might just be too addictive for some.
How I work today is still very similar to how I worked in 2023, but now I'm typing a TON of English and very little Ruby. But the overall vibe is nicer and starting on difficult stuff is significantly easier.