#programmer-health

Three months into AI-assisted development, the author finds the fatigue has shifted from wrestling with implementation details to constant architecture-level decision-making, since the AI is ready to implement whatever is chosen the moment it's chosen. Also flags a code-review blind spot: you can't interrogate an AI's reasoning after the fact the way you can ask a human collaborator why they made a choice.

Referenced in George Hotz's "I love LLMs, I hate hype" as a caution about AI-assisted coding increasing cognitive fatigue.

ThePrimeagen argues that AI-driven FOMO — the fear that not "token maxing" today means falling permanently behind — is structurally similar to past hype cycles (React server components, early ChatGPT 3.5) where the specific skills people rushed to learn turned out not to matter a year later. He shares his own history of anxiety-driven overwork while starting a company, and reads from George Hotz's "I love LLMs, I hate hype" on companies profiting from users' fear of being left behind.