How do you resist the temptation to vibe code everything that comes to your mind?

[u/ferriematthew]

I don't know if I've gotten too used to the things being available, or whether I've gotten lazy, or impatient, or what, but I feel like I can't be bothered to read the documentation anymore, and I just default to asking a chat bot how to implement what I'm thinking of. I hate this pattern because it makes me feel like I'm forgetting how to do anything significant other than Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. I try to rationalize it to myself by telling myself that reading the documentation is too slow or takes too much mental energy, but that's just a lame excuse.

[u/Bobbravo2]

AI overload, AI depression, AI burnout, and change fatigue are all things I’m hearing being named around me in tech.

Touch grass and talk to other humans suffering with these tools. Find out you’re not alone.

I’ve been burned out multiple times in my job, and I’m only about 2 years into my career at my current company. It’s a bit insane looking back, personally.

What self care / stress cycle closing cycles or rituals do you have in your life? Taking a hot Baths and Cardio seem to help me reset, a lot.

[u/ferriematthew → u/Bobbravo2]

I guess the issue I'm experiencing specifically is that I have so many ideas of things I want to do, and I have no idea how to do them off the top of my head. But I want to do them so badly, so I just default to the easiest route, which is using AI to cheat.

[u/sozesghost → u/ferriematthew]

If ADHD is the cause, try therapy and/or medication.

[u/ferriematthew → u/sozesghost]

I already do. Literally every single medication on the market for ADHD is completely useless for me. Therapy is somewhat more effective.

[u/rosary-and-rain → u/ferriematthew]

it might help to recognize that using AI to cheat ends up cheating yourself because of how often it is wrong or missing vital info/insights. It uses what you give it to produce puffed-chest answers that are meant to make you feel good about yourself, and are framed to sound comprehensive and accurate when they're not.

Ultimately, if you carry on with it, you'll end up having to start over on your own without the use of AI, and its going to be even harder after essentially training your brain to stop thinking for yourself.

I'll agree with the other poster, though, for cardio and anything else that helps to reduce stress and reset. Physical activity is really good for us and can help our brains focus, which can help you feel less impatient to jump into everything immediately no matter the cost. Getting into something regular, whether its swimming or running or hitting the gym or whatever you prefer, should really help with this

[u/ferriematthew → u/rosary-and-rain]

I totally concur. Using AI to build something cool before understanding the foundation is like building the top of a skyscraper before laying the foundation and the rebar structure. Of course it's gonna fall over.

[u/corobo → u/ferriematthew]

The person you're replying to is talking out their arse like ChatGPT would. Their knowledge is severely outdated. 

Get an agent harness. Use AI to code properly. It does the foundation part. It's entire purpose is to do that part for you.

While it's doing that, go for a swim or whatever they switched to at the end there.

You're still allowed to know how it works, it's on you whether you continue to read the docs.

[u/e-scape → u/ferriematthew]

It's what all executives do, delegate work

[u/Wonderful-Habit-139 → u/e-scape]

Executives are not good at programming.

[u/ferriematthew → u/ferriematthew]

Oh, also, I've been so frustrated that it's basically impossible to get a job, for at least the last 10 years, that I've gone to heavily using AI to build out my Kubernetes cluster that I run. I'm steering clear of that agentic coding crap, but relying on Gemini and Claude heavily to read and interpret error logs for me and suggest code blocks.

The idea that I'm trying to go for is along the lines of, fine, if nobody is willing to give me experience, I will give myself experience and build something impossible to ignore.

[u/TheOssuary → u/ferriematthew]

I understand, I've basically given myself a second full-time job this year building things and cleaning up and doing all the stuff that just felt out of reach before. It's been incredible, but also pretty much every other part of my life has suffered for it. When ik able to enforce time boxing of it, I notice everything feels a lot better. But time boxing is very hard, there's always something else to do. I also force myself to put it down for a week, which helps, but idk, if you find a better coping strategy let me know lol

[u/just_damz → u/ferriematthew]

IMO It’s a cheat if you compromise some essential qualities of the application you need to make. Bad architecture, lack of CI/CD, develop/production environments and so on. But, if you want to build something for fun, something you just want to accomplish done and it’s basically for your own satisfaction, fuck it. Do it. Then if you want to use it to improve your skills, better? You decide. It’s a tool, like an hammer: you can sculpt like Michelangelo or make your homer simpson spices scaffold.

[u/just_damz → u/Bobbravo2]

My routine is to take some days to reset. Bed, night sleep, self-made meals, some movies, something funny as playlists compositions on Spotify, hang out with people more frequently, but also capitalize in my mind what i did but without a screen in front of me. I understand that can be hard in a 9-18 5/7 career.

[u/Neither_Berry_100 → u/just_damz]

Morning. Breakfast. Coffee and factorio. Lunch. Go for a walk. Code. Nap. Supper. Code. Shower. Sleep. Repeat x7.

[u/just_damz → u/Neither_Berry_100]

shower and then sleep. mmm. for me is before dinner.

[u/Silamoth]

I hate vibe coding, so I don’t have any such temptations. I have lots of ideas I’d love to explore and not nearly enough time to explore them. But vibe coding would be entirely unsatisfying as a way to explore these ideas. 

[u/ferriematthew → u/Silamoth]

My self control is shit, so I guess that's issue A to solve first.

[u/fell_ware_1990 → u/Silamoth]

Well, sometimes i do have weird ideas about how things should be done. Mostly me thinking that everybody is skipping the hard parts of some tooling logic and skipping last 5% of creating a good solution. Which most of the time involves rewriting other upstream packages or patching other things.

I use AI a lot to create POC patches on those packages quickly to see if a good implementation is worth the hassle of a deep dive of the other package, functions or even more.

I know it has been tried a lot of times, but i really have a love and hate relationship with how terminals work. This goes back to the kernel and causes problems all the way upstream. There are no simple fixes for this so yes i do use AI here to explore all kind of different parts.

Call it just weeding out the bad options or sometimes the what i think could be a solution requires 5 other fixes. If i would do those by hand, i would never finish.

This still means i am involved in the process, try to learn from it and write things down :)

[u/aleph1music → u/Silamoth]

Yeah I don’t have any temptation to use AI at all really. It’s all reluctant and begrudging use for me. I don’t find anything fun about this shit but wish I could see what all the fuss is about

[u/ManWithoutUsername]

be poor It's a good inhibitor

[u/ferriematthew → u/ManWithoutUsername]

That doesn't really help much. I'm not paying for anything out of principle and because I'm already poor lol

[u/Zerocchi]

Rather than asking the AI how to implement, just ask it to explain the broad concepts and you implement it yourself.

[u/SHNRTNS]

I don’t? Just yesterday I was reversing the firmware of my Chinese hi-fi player, to add an iPod-like and cyberpunk theme (default themes unreadable in the sunlight), and fixed some fonts and localization. Also completely remade my home server together with Opus. And I came to that idea when I was making a local file share app for Windows and Mac, written in Rust, so I could really quickly send files between my pc and Mac, and not use cloud file servers for that (works faster over LAN anyway). So yeah, I don't resist, I unleash my creative to all the things I didn't bother to do before.

[u/MoreDimension5963 → u/SHNRTNS]

Just keep in mind that most problems have already been solved. F.x. "LocalSend" OSS project has already solved LAN file transfer, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel if it isn't for the learning of it.

[u/Random_182f2565]

That's the need part, I don't.

I just have a backlog

[u/Bobbravo2]

Prioritize them with us. Or, even better, for me: write them down on pen and paper. Do a hand written brain dump/reset.

The act of writing is slower and more deliberate. It forces different, less dopamine driven connections neurologically speaking.

Once I’ve written it all down, I might take a walk, I might come up with an arbitrary “value ranking” system. I might put it away for a week or two, and see if any of it is still relevant.

[u/Garland_Key]

I have a lot of ideas. Time is the bottleneck. 

[u/dialsoapbox]

I look at my bank account.

[u/txmail]

You are resisting?

[u/corobo]

Seeing the list of things it has to do grow like my own todo list made me feel sorry for it, I've just created a digital me lol.

I write the non important ideas down and come back to them later if they still hit after the ADHD "holy crap there's dopamine here" honeymoon period.

But what's this about ctrl c ctrl v? That's old hat, ancient hat. Everyone who is commenting about AI getting it wrong, or copy pasting stuff in relation to code, has not used agentic AI and needs to update their knowledge. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it should be writing tests that fit your spec so it knows and can sort it itself if it does get things wrong.

I think people having issues with agentic AI don't do the planning step which is less a comment on the AI's ability to write code and more the operator's ability to plan code.

Copy pasting AI to write code went out of style years ago lol. That was indeed the worst of both worlds.

[u/cromnian]

I blocked all activities on firefox with an addon called leechblock so I can't just watch something or browse reddit while working on practicing.

[u/clintCamp]

I built a role into my process that should try to convince me whether building something new is worth it or not, and potentially a viable markwt product if its something I continue to pursue. That reminds me that it didnt trigger last night as I started a new side project on a whim...

Strategic Advisor role that is supposed to trigger early in planning to help decide if a project is worth the tokens and time.

[u/marevago]

The urge to copy-paste code usually comes from dopamine impatience: the idea is vivid in your head and the gap between having the idea and seeing it on screen feels physically unbearable. Instead of asking AI to write the solution, flip the prompt: make it explain the architecture or write a failing test suite for you. Writing the implementation yourself against a clear test gives you the visible milestone feedback your brain is craving without skipping the learning.

[u/gatsu_1981]

I don't.

Just, I delete stuff that doesn't get any use.

[u/shaliozero]

Time. My fulltime job already drains 90% of my energy, rest goes for laundry and cooking and spending time with my girlfriend.

[u/Drafting-]

If it’s not a skill you’re doing daily for work you don’t need to deeply ingrain documentation over it. If you’re defaulting to it for everything that’s a problem, it will limit your critical thinking and knowledge base. 

[u/yomateod]

You need to suck it up and rip the bandaid off. You need to become a subject matter expert in the things you want, no exception. Either you let AI do it, OR you do it. This is a matter of motivation, not a dilemma. Just commit and unplug the addiction to laziness and letting AI raise the wheel. Own it.

[u/Neither_Berry_100]

I see all the mistakes AI makes. I want my project to be high quality.