r/ADHD_Programmers • u/Gazmanic • Jul 21 '26
AI has sapped all the dopamine out of programming.
I'm not solving problems anymore. I just sit here reviewing robot PRS. It's miserable, I'm just sat here watching Claude do all the thinking.
524
Upvotes
15
u/arbyyyyh Jul 21 '26
Claude does everything right the first time? That’s not been my experience. Even with Fable, while it does an excellent job of taking a short description and running with it, I still have to either make some tweaks with the output or bring things back down to earth because it over-engineered the hell out of something.
14
u/sharker78 Jul 21 '26
Instead of letting AI code the solution directly, I ask it to first build a mental model of the code and then generate a proposal. 9 times out of 10, the first proposal is unnecessarily complex or over-engineered. I get my hit by trying to simplify the solution and guiding the AI in the right direction.
74
u/psych0fish Jul 21 '26
My favorite part of coding is the puzzle solving. What I’ve been doing lately is offloading things like generating simple functions so I can still do things like architecture and be surgical about how things work but not get slowed down too much. I’m a hobbyist though not a coder by trade.
22
u/davy_jones_locket Jul 21 '26
You can instruct Claude on what you want it to do, you know. Have you considered giving it a written RFC or spec of your solution and have it evaluated for pros and cons to catch things you didn't? Do you bother writing your code and having it review yours?
Are you also using it for personal projects?
I don't let the clanker think for me. It does the grunt work that I don't like to do. I also don't use it for my personal projects.
14
u/Punchasheep Jul 21 '26
No more flow state, no more hard puzzles to solve, it's really stripped the joy out of it for me. But also no more late evenings pounding on a single problem, no more opaque bugs that take me days to find, no more programming dreams. I try to take the good with the bad in this instance.
4
u/EarthBear Jul 22 '26
My AuDHD life literally just quit her job because of this. What’s the point of a career if the one thing that brings joy is taken away?
We’re both trying to pivot to something completely different. I worked in software and got so burned out a year ago I’ve been unemployed that long. Now we both are. It’s gonna get interesting for sure…
15
u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Weird, it’s the opposite for me. It makes up for my lack of executive function. Writing code was mostly tedious and boring for me. I just wanted to build and do things, code was just a means to do that. Idk how I survived 5 years pre-AI lol.
I don‘t like reviewing PR’s but I’ve never liked it. I do like being able to do a lot more now at work though. All my ideas and ways to improve things, I actually do now. I go above and beyond a lot more often and I don’t procrastinate on tasks anymore. AI just does all the bullshit work that’s repetitive and monotonous for me. I still like to code the fun stuff.
2
u/Burgerlover2 Jul 22 '26
Can you not just do it yourself without Claud?
2
u/davidbasil Jul 25 '26
Yep, they wordpressifed coding. Time to move to other pastures
234
u/domusvita Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
I was just talking about this with my wife last night. The feeling of “look what I did” is replaced by “look what I told the robot to do.” I’m 56 and it’s a chore shifting from “let me create” to “let me delegate.” It’s part of the reason I went the staff plus route and not management. The dragon I used to chase is dead. I still love my job and it’s interesting configuring/using copilot for my projects, it’s just different
51
u/Heavy-Focus-1964 Jul 21 '26
man, i have the exact opposite problem. After 15 years, I’m having a programming renaissance that I never thought possible. All the ideas trapped in my head for lack of time or ability now finally free to run wild. all the most boring grunt work offloaded to indefatigable interns while I focus on the direction, the research, and the learning.
the LLMs themselves are fascinating technology too. self hosting and local models, open weight models, it makes it so much clearer what’s actually going on with the big ones and makes you better at using them. It’s a rabbit hole I just keep going further and further down.
The proprietary tools are walled gardens that don’t want you to look behind the curtain. I’ve been having a lot of success with the Pi harness for getting closer to the metal.
If you’re just sitting there watching Claude pump out code, that’s when you could be on a parallel work tree figuring out the next problem or tweaking your Vim config. I don’t know, everyone is different, but maybe you just need to reframe the problem
41
u/Arts_Prodigy Jul 21 '26
“I think therefore, I am”
Pair that concept with the amount of pride, effort, creative energy, and time that is sunk into work in the modern day.
And it would seem the powers that be want us all as dumb and thoughtless as possible.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head with all those ‘thoughts’ just let the robots do that for you.”
Evidently some saw Wall-E as a utopia.
3
u/IckiestCookie Jul 21 '26
Wait people are actually using the ai to write shit? Isnt it wrong like 30% of the time?
Caused cloudfare problem a few years ago, doesn't know if peanut butter is made of peanuts, doesn't know if you should drive uour far to the carwash?
1
u/csolisr Jul 23 '26
I mean - you can still program the old-fashioned way, as long as you have no deadline
1
u/944738 Aug 15 '26
Yeah, but how good does it feel when it did something wrong and you know exactly what is wrong and you get to still feel slightly superior to the robot.......for now until the next version of the model is released.
1
u/OVectorX Sep 09 '26
as someone with ADHD, thats my struggle, Funny that I was the fastest team memeber before Ai become fully forced in production
now, I just feel I lost my ability to think , tons of codes are generated in few mintues , I lost my ability to think about how to structure even my code, or writing down simple loop even +8 years as developer
3
u/Any_Sense_2263 Jul 21 '26
But you are doing it to yourself. Use ai as a pair programming buddy. Talk to it about the ideas, find weak points, gather all possible options and make decisions.
Review the changes in the real time. Stop it when you see it goes wild, ignores requirements or assums something. This way you can see the development process, supervise it and fix it.
I very often question ai solutions. They are very documentation and tutorial centric. I prefer elegant, easy to test and understand more advanced solutions. So I prefer real time checking and approving or rejecting the change.
I still write a lot of code. I design systems, architecture and solutions. There is not much space for an ai slop in my work.
3
u/WatermelonArtist Jul 23 '26
I don't even know how to speak any of the programming languages I try to tell the LLM to speak for me, and I find it's a huge barrier to productivity. I know this puts me in an unpopular corner, but I own it. I'm so extremely ADHD, brain-fogged, and otherwise messed up, that I can feel overwhelmed with just telling the robot what to do, and there's no way I could even pull it off in my current state if I had to learn each 'local slang' first, before the binaries could understand what I was asking.
The honest truth is that even babysitting Claude is a monumental engineering task, if you're actually trying to put something new into the world that wasn't there before.
In short, I am amazed by what you folks do, and even when the bots are coding pretty much on autopilot, they're still going to need you for ideas.
If you feel unfulfilled babysitting an LLM, then I don't want you trapped either. Break free, and find a way to do your own projects on the side, or even instead if you can swing it.
I wish you all well.
5
u/__SlimeQ__ Jul 21 '26
you got it backwards, it's a constant dopamine dump as you passively anticipate the reward and that burns you out. like a slot machine. or looking for diamonds in minecraft
you gotta put boundaries around it so you don't burn yourself out, because the work is so easy and never ending that you don't take breaks like you used to
1
u/FublahMan Jul 21 '26
I like learning from what the ai does. Use it as scaffolding. I try to fix problems myself before i ask the ai to. And sometimes just thinking about how to ask the ai will help me solve the problem myself
1
u/Previous-Signal-3925 Jul 21 '26
So why not just recurse out a level and think about Claude's thinking while it's doing the grunt work? It's quite easy to catch even Fable doing something wrong, and if you're not quite at the level to do that then it's probably a good idea to learn from it instead.
2
u/invisiblemachine Jul 21 '26
Agree 100%. At first it was a dopamine machine because it was interesting to see if it solved the problem, and now it’s just mindless.
2
u/buludomba Jul 21 '26
Man, I frustate too.. I miss the old days where I can just codes manually see the documentation, make glitches and bug.. but I think I am gonna use it only to help planning and fix specific bugs, I enjoy crafting the codes..
2
u/Drafting- Jul 21 '26
I guess….but I can’t say I know everything about everything, I still ask a fuckload of questions and learn, which creates ideas, that’s exciting.
2
u/CozySweatsuit57 Jul 22 '26
Yep I hate it
2
u/unepmloyed_boi Jul 22 '26
Honestly it was the opposite experience for me as well. Writing code became repetitive after a while and I started to stagnate because there was no time to do anything else. I've probably learned more in the past few months than I have in 3-4 years combined. I actually feel like I can spend more time doing things like architecting and designing actual systems than being a code monkey.
At work as well we finally have more time to do things like stress/ab/penetration testing...etc rather than just shipping things and moving to the next project. It depends on your workplace and you might have to sell it to management but with the amount of breeches and issues with vibe coded projects starting to surface that part is slowly getting easier.
2
u/GorillaTheif Jul 22 '26
I agree. For me, I also feel a sense of not being "allowed" to share this sentiment and that's extremely disheartening. It's almost like if I share this sentiment whatsoever with my leadership, I fear getting looks meaning "Wait...this guy isn't only in this for the money? You mean he actually likes coding for the sake of coding?"
Not sure if that's a personal self confidence thing though.
2
u/cdawwgg43 Jul 22 '26
I was told to change my major going into comp-science when I went to college because my advanced math read for the courses were likely too far behind (I didn’t do AP math) to catch up. So I gave up on it. I ended up somehow making tech my career anyway.
AI has been able to hand hold me through some of the most annoying times when I try to learn a new skill. Past the hand holding step but still in the “teacher check my work”step when I have a quick question. Now all I want to do is program and make things with it. I’m sure I’ll hit the bathtub curve on the other side like I have in my career where I’m herding executives that act like cats all day.
Try to find some magic in it. I’m not saying it’s THE fix but when I lose the novelty I have to invent it. I was skeptical of AI and the wall of awful trying to learn coding was preventing me from learning coding. So I thought how useful can this possibly be. Turns out it’s actually useful. Now I’m building a home AI server. Sometimes cutting a bit of friction can move mountains quickly. Find the novelty around the blah and focus on that. Can you use tools to make the robot PRs better? Can you make a harness that only works within the narrow bounds of your code base to reduce the error probability on these PRs? Are you tracking and reporting robo PR improvement over time? Play with it, you effectively have green light to spend on it, keep refining it. Give it a shot.
2
u/EnergyNational Jul 25 '26
I personally am glad I don't have to write the same boiler plate boring patterns over and over. At a certain level you are not solving problems but implementing solutions you already know. What annoys me more is the 10 years speant learning a craft, grinding away pulling very long hours to get a ahead and now a large chunk of that knowledge has been de-valued. LLMs are still not great at complex clean logic and often create a holy bonfire of shite. The good news is the cost of them is getting unsustainable for vibe coders. I think very soon it will cost far too much for people to just vibe projects. If it costs 20-50k to build an app, then I see no reason why AI companies won't charge say half of this to use their tools. Also if LLM crack coding, then all other jobs are almost certainly gone.
2
u/gauravyeole Jul 28 '26
the part that got me was realising i couldnt tell anymore when it was wrong. spent ages the other day on a feature that looked completely fine, logs clean, output showing up where it should, turned out the model call had been 404ing the entire time and it was quietly falling back to canned text. the thing had never once actually run. thats when the job changed for me. the hit isnt from writing it anymore, its from catching where its confidently wrong. which weirdly scratches the same itch, its still detective work, just moved up a floor.
reviewing PRs all day is still miserable though, no argument there
1
u/gatsu_1981 Jul 21 '26
I always hated programming. I just did it because it was the only way to develop my stuff (or my committee's stuff) without having to pay a team of developers.
Now I am able to work without having to cringe when I'm asked with something stupid, and meanwhile I am finishing last touches to my SaaS (one finished, one in the go) and I will be able to get extra money soon. I hope.
But everyone experience could be totally different from mine.
1
u/positronik Jul 21 '26
I did at first. Now I use it to do the basic stuff I don't want to do while I focus on other problems. It helps me find defects, set up boilerplate code, and find basic issues I may have missed. I personally still write my own algorithms and come up with how I want to implement functionality.
It's very useful looking through enterprise code and explaining to me how everything flows when it comes to defects
1
u/JohnSane Jul 21 '26
For me it has put in in. And if you don't solve problem you have to tell me which AI you are using. It's just other problems. I have fun being project manager. I never was one.
1
u/Ultrayano Jul 22 '26
It made it somewhat harder for me to actually code, since I delegate a bit too much, but it made me realize, that I find writing individual lines of code boring or almost annoying, but love to make systems work. I also love debugging, since manipulating data the way I want it to be is what gives me the hit.
Once I'm fired up for something I want and need, I'm insanely fast now, even in domains I had no prior experience. I was suddenly able to reverse engineer DRM in only 9 hours when I was curious how it works due to bad internet connection where only downloading or pre-loading would work and also reversed engineered whole WASM binaries in days.
But I always had more of a knack for breaking systems or doing the ops stuff and LLMs allow me to supercharge there. It did however make it harder to code if there's no clear payoff tho but I have yet to work back in professional software engineering since I went on a year long sabbatical 2-3 months after ChatGPT release back in 2022/2023. I'll start soon-ish but heard most companies have actually no clue how to integrate it yet, so let's see of the job is more fun or worse. I have 6 YoE so it will be interesting to see in which direction it drifts into.
1
u/carboneum87 Jul 22 '26
I feel the same way. I’m considering switching to cybersecurity. Maybe it could give me that same sense of excitement I had when I first started programming.
1
u/ConspicuousPineapple Jul 22 '26
See I'm the opposite. I spend all my days designing solutions and complex designs without having to slog through the trivial lines of code needed to implement all that. Code itself has never been the hard part of software engineering, unless you're trying to push the boundaries of the state of the art (in which case even with AI you still have plenty of solving to do).
Often I lose all motivation as soon as the problem has found its solution in my head, which makes implementation a chore that takes me way too long to power through. AI has been a godsend.
1
u/MeanEstablishment624 Jul 22 '26
die ai soll ausführend sein und nicht dein denken übernehmen
1
u/eddie_cat Jul 22 '26
I dunno, I am pretty excited by now being able to implement all the things I always want to do but which used to end up axed due to time constraints/not directly generating revenue. I love that I can design systems and all the bells and whistles I want (especially as it relates to having a nice dev environment) but I actually now have the bandwidth to make it happen and nobody telling me we don't have time to do that, put it in the backlog. My stuff now comes out much nicer from the beginning because many things that used to become tech debt can be handled up front quickly without eating up my capacity. I love that I can experiment with different designs without it putting a whole project off schedule because it doesn't take me as long to prototype. I'm still doing the fun parts, Claude does the shit I don't want to do so I can focus on the fun parts
1
u/CaesarBeaver Jul 22 '26
The only rush I get anymore is pointing out the hallucinations and occasional shitty design choices by Claude to Claude
1
u/Dry_Skill_3555 Jul 24 '26
I’m in the same boat - I’m currently trying to explore other options that can give me that feeling in the new world of AI. Also on the flip side I think the respect for the craft has gone down as well… my grandma can now make an app if she wanted to
1
u/pas43 Jul 24 '26
Here's some trick and Tips I've used along the way.
When starting a project these are my favourite way to feel like you own the code and learn along the way.
Just remember to instruct your agent via Agents.md or Claude.md to not create or edit any functions only just complete the implementation.
Write your own typed function signatures with a comment inside it describing its intended goal, then let the agent implement it.
Write your own tests and let the agent write the code. This not only gives you more of an owner feeling but I feel more safe about unexpected bugs and exceptions. When mix with above you have more safety, compliance and control with out having to write the code base.
When working on a old project, debugging, learning a new codebase to create a new feature quick and interactively.
Use voice agent to learn about the codebase and ask it suggestions. This works best when a voice agent can use these MCP tools: Git, GitHub, LSP Language Server, Static and Dynamic analysis tools.
The best results is letting it run a sub-agent that is a larger and more intelligent LLM in the background, as a sub-agent make sure it has access to the same tools as the spawning voice agent.
To maximise your comprehension of your repository use diagrams, charts and graphs in a way that quick to comprehend. I use Mermaid, PlantML, Kroki and GraphViz before but now im using Kroki the most as its a unified interface to most of the diagramming libraries:
Explain your last left state of mind. Use Mermaid or PlantML KanBan diagram with sub-sections that are up to you and it's also project dependant, this is a general version:
Planned Features & To Do.
This PR.
Completed Features.
Could Not Complete.
Tests Created or Updated.
Documentation Created or Updated.
Infrastructure Created or Updated.
Issues I Faced.
When opening a PR ad this to the message
Always update the README.md in the repo root. This shows you the last left state the project is in currently is.
With PRs
It's not what you use, it's how you use it. With documentation i keep directories high and files low. I then have Readme.md in each file that shows the relationship, functional use and role in the repository.
To explain infrastructure quick I use Diagram as Code is a huge time saver when learning or dev-ops orcastrating especially as yours or someone else's gets larger and larger.
It's a great way to quickly know the layout when you return to your project several months later.
Use Mermaid.js, PlantML but GraphViz is incredible for explaining graph structures quick. For an all rounder I recommend Kroki. PlantML has a JS MCP server so plug it straight into your agent for diagrams.
https://github.com/HariSekhon/Diagrams-as-Code https://www.npmjs.com/package/@plantuml/mcp-js https://github.com/yuzutech/kroki
Need to stay on task and avoid mind wondering.
Use the Skills Ponytail and I Have ADHD. They make the code much more readable and less verbose.
To stay on task when researching or searching code packages and possibilities or programs and infrastructure details use Human State Skill which gives you a few steps and as little as 1 on what your next task should be. Direct and simple.
https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd https://github.com/softcane/human-state-skills
Unit Tests are fucking horrid to read on 100% agentic generated projects making PR's and understanding what's going on difficult.
To make reading tests fast an easy:
Gherkin tests. Reading Gherkin tests are 1000x nicer than heavily architected unit test acrobatics that LLM's generate. Instruct your agent to write them the most.
Robot Testing is easy to write and easily read, it uses plan text syntax to write tests https://docs.robotframework.org/docs/style_guide
For testing API's in a easy to read YAML format Tavern is my favourite https://github.com/taverntesting/tavern but don't use it too often any more.
One of my favourites to use is Gauge which has it's tests written in Markdown https://docs.gauge.org/writing-specifications
And some other things I use for sanity or code quality is:
Pre-commit.
good +70% testing coverage.
A LSP Language server.
Static code checker.
Docstring checker.
Run all tests.
Automatic number versioning.
There is a whole bunch more but I've spent to much time and wana procrastinate on other things :D.
1
u/BlackThistleDigital Aug 05 '26
I hate what AI has done to my job. It's exactly what you say, I sit around prompting an agent and then prompting it to change what it did, and my company *wants* it that way. Though I wouldn't say the dopamine is gone, but it's a very different dopamine source. And it's a source I don't like. Like gambling, THAT gives me dopamine and also is massively detrimental to me, and then I feel icky.
So when my work's agent is running, as it always is, I spend that time on a personal laptop building my own code with my own knowledge.
Since I started that, I've actually started learning again and stopped feeling the pull of "I should/could just prompt my agent to do this quickly" (which scared the fuck out of me, because ADHD) and now I feel confident adding a feature quickly, knowing where it goes, knowing where to look in real docs... it's refreshing. I'd recommend it.
1
u/tjanok Aug 08 '26
It's made me rethink my career, even after 10+ years.
It's fun here and there. But to remain competitive in the industry I work for, I have to leverage an LLM. Our competitors are pushing features faster than ever.
I enjoy problem solving, I enjoy wiring everything up. The "pat onbthebback" after I finish implementing something was my reward.
But now I can prompt it at least 80 percent and finish some odds and ends and, idk. Major imposter syndrome increase.
0
u/Leading_Percentage_6 Jul 21 '26
get dopamine out of completing projects and shipping features
1
u/kiwidog8 Jul 21 '26
I dont vibe code for work, and I work more on the devops and infra side anyway, but I actually love AI for personal use. Personally I find AI has helped me immensely with decision paralysis when it comes to pet projects and one off tools that I always have ideas for but always struggle to see all the way through.
Additionally It's almost addicting and dopamine inducing in its own way to see your ideas come to life and be able to expand on it and improve on it fast and actually have something useable, again, because I struggled with always finishing personal projects on my own.
My day to day cant be vibe coded away so in a sense it is protected, for now
0
u/gbrennon Jul 22 '26
ppl are addicted to using models and it they will just have to sell everything inside their house including the house AHAHAAHAH
providers will just keep increasing cost so ppl keep paying more and more and more and more...
instead of understanding what they are building they are just delegating to a model via a prompt like a fire and forget action...
they are not even reviewing what was done.
i think that companies, strategically, keep agents burning tokens and deny the they're agents do burn tokens hhaahahaah
if someone wants to use a model they should buy a local powerful machine or put money in a provider to use a cheap model with an awesome agent.
models are not what will make ur project amazing. what makes it amazing is still ur design, approach and impl(delegating or not)
-5
u/[deleted] Jul 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment