AI Coding Is Making Me More Productive and Slightly Unwell
AI coding tools make development faster, but they also create a strange pressure to keep agents running when humans should rest.
This post is written by hand.
I feel like I need to say that now, which is probably a bad sign.
I have been absolutely hammering AI coding over the last couple of months. Client work. Side projects. Home server migration. Internal dashboards. Half-finished ideas that have been sitting on the shelf for years suddenly becoming possible again.
The productivity is real.
So is the weirdness.
The “just one more prompt” problem
Anyone who has gone deep into agentic coding will probably recognise the feeling.
You get so much done that stopping starts to feel like losing time.
You go to lunch and think, “I could leave an agent running while I eat.” You go to bed and think, “Just one more prompt, it will run for ten minutes and I can check it in the morning.” Then you lie there, hear the completion ping, and suddenly you are negotiating with yourself like a lunatic.
Stay in bed. Get up and run another prompt. Push the branch and let a cloud agent continue.
Completely normal behaviour. Nothing concerning here.
The workflow has changed quickly
When I first started AI coding, I was copying snippets into ChatGPT and pasting answers back into the editor.
Then Cursor made repo context feel normal. Then Copilot inside VS Code made AI editing feel like part of the environment. Then instruction files started reducing repetitive prompting. Now I am automating chunks of development rather than manually walking through every file and folder.
The progression is obvious in hindsight.
At first AI helped with lines of code. Then files. Then projects. Now it is starting to help with workflows.
The danger is not laziness
People worry AI will make developers lazy. I think the stranger risk is the opposite.
It can make you feel like you should always be doing more because the machines can keep going when you cannot.
That is powerful, but it needs boundaries. Otherwise productivity starts behaving like a drug you cannot say no to.
The trick is not to avoid the tools. That would be pointless.
The trick is to build systems that let the agents work without turning your life into a queue of unfinished prompts.
AI has changed how I code.
Now I need to make sure it does not quietly change how I rest.