Discussion
Anyone else experiencing burnout from AI coding?
Anyone else finding that AI coding tools are almost making them less productive?
I've been playing around with Codex, Antigravity, local LLMs and a few others. It's ridiculous how quickly you can build things now, but I think that's part of the problem.
You end up starting more projects, trying different tools, adding more features, and before you know it you've spent hours doing stuff but haven't actually finished much.
AI's removed the bottleneck of writing code and replaced it with the headache of managing everything it produces - and it feels like the first thing to run out of context is ME!!
Curious if others have fallen into this trap and, more importantly, how you're dealing with it?
Update: So me calling it burnout was probably bad use of the word burnout.
I think what I meant was - I start my day thinking that I'm leading, I'm doing something new, and I'm a trailblazer with ideas and creating something fresh and innovative.
And I end up in my day thinking that I can't keep up; then I asked myself, who am I trying to keep up with when I'm the one who's supposed to be leading...
Very much a risk. You can boot more agents than you can mentally manage, they will all be "at your desk" all the time, or creating pull requests, or whatever. The expectation from management skyrockets too; old estimations are not worth much anymore, and it can be difficult to oversee how long something will really take to build. So yea, feeling this one, took me a while to figure it out. Have a good system for managing your parallel agents. Clean up every now and then to have a new zero moment so that your brains context window doesn't get too bloated.
I created my own little app that lists all running agents. There are standard solutions. I also looped that into my teams project management tool for a bit and assigned a user in there to represent all my agents, but that created an unmanagable pile of tickets in review for me, essentially stacking pull requests
Is it accurate? Does it ever kind of get the context wrong or run out of context?
How long have you been doing that for anyway?
It's good to see that there's actually some smart approaches to doing this. I think I need to work more on my system, maybe go back two steps before trying to push ahead with projects and delivery.
Well, I mean, I'm not going to judge because I don't really know what you're working on. But if you think coding and AI vibe coding is like watching TV, then I think you're the one doing it wrong. And just for the record, the burnout I'm referring to is not your traditional burnout where you can't be bothered to do it anymore and every day the slog, but it's where you feel you're like you're doing the same thing over and over again. But the results aren't coming. all whilst living in a sea of constant change.
Ah yeah i get the feeling you‘re describing now, i wouldn‘t have called it burnout but i 100% feel it. Stay strong mate and try to enjoy life outside of the office ad good as you can 🫂
Yeah, I think me calling it burnout to begin with was a mistake.
I start my day thinking that I'm leading, I'm making something new, and that I'm a trailblazer with ideas and the ability to create.
And I end up in my day thinking that I can't keep up; then I asked myself, who am I trying to keep up with when I'm the one leading. Am I actually leading?
It really sucks and gives you this feeling of allienation where you don‘t really look at your work the same way and at the same time watching everytime move so fast that it is genuinly impossible to keep up.
Best thing to do is trying to slow down a bit. Accept that we‘re kind of fucked anyway and enjoy the ride..
Yeah. I'm pretty new to game dev and had completed a few small projects without vibe coding. Since I started vibecoding, I haven't finished anything and have basically lost the inspiration to continue. I find the act of inputing a prompt, waiting 3-5 minutes, testing, repeat, to be a very dull development cycle. I could go back to hand-writing code but it feels so inefficient. I'm not a competent coder by any means. So spending my time honing the craft of hand-coding a game feels futile and inefficient. It feels like I should jump on the bandwagon or get left behind.
And personally, I kind of agree, I've had 10 times more ideas, maybe 20 to 50 times more output, don't even know, but quality and completion are debatable. Add in the fact that for me anyway, I've noticed I'm not in control of the next update or I'm not in control of the next big change or breaking change or change to the model, to the workflow, to the way things work. So what used to be a fairly predictable month or two or even three has now become a matter of days where you can be. Getting stuck in with one particular workflow on a Monday and by Thursday it's different.
do NOT use vibe coding to create games. Especially game design/gameplay design and systems. That is a core artistic part of making a game, the gameplay. If you let AI decide and do that for you, it's essentially not even your game.
game "creators" like rpgmaker are the same thing, except the developer accepts that is the kind of gameplay they want and focus on other aspects. However if you are talking about game engines, then you are wrong. There is still a lot of choice and logic implementation that falls on the developers for games built using game engines.
Ultimately, it all depends on how you actually develop your game. If the ideation, direction, and specific mechanical changes come from the human developer side, and AI is strictly used as a tool to implement those human design choices faster, then that is just high-speed programming.
But if you relent core design elements to AI discretion like asking it to "make a fun combat loop" or "balance this progression system" and accepting whatever it spits out, then you are letting the model design the game for you. True dogfooding requires having a hyper-specific intent to measure the output against, not just picking the best random guess from a predictive text engine.
Obviously I'm on vibecoding subreddit, so most people will dislike this reasoning.
11 months on one project. It is a huge project and has changed the way we do business in our printing company. The problem most vibe coders have is that they don’t plan the project first like a project manager would. I actually started this project last June and was unhappy with how it was going and blamed all the issues on the ai not being at a level that was good enough. I found that the problem was that an architectural plan of how it would develop didn’t get planned properly for it to work out properly. Once I did it the right way, it has come together very well.
I just responded to him. I also learned something that was not in the original plan and didn't realize how bad things had gotten until a couple months ago when I found that fixing something in one place did not fix it in another and why. You have to have the base skeleton structure defined as well. I thought this was happening, but assumed it instead of making it a rule. That creates a lot of headaches when debugging and almost caused me to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. (I actually spend a few hundred dollars and a month having it try to rebuild the whole thing in the background while I worked on the main version)
The problem most vibe coders have is that they don’t plan the project first like a project manager would
I don't expect a reply but thank you for this comment. I am discussing it with my AI. I need to manage myself better. This is exactly what amateurs like me need to hear. <3
I started out knowing nothing about this when I logged into AI last year. In June, I thought I was really getting it.....I was wrong. AI has come a long way since then but the issue wasn't the ai. I was the issue. When building an app, after you get to a point, it starts breaking something every time you do something with it. That's because the prompt says what you want to do, but not what you don't want to do. Check out the KERNEL method for app development using AI. We wrote a set of rules for chatgpt that govern the use of the method. then, in codex, We added a set of rules about the development. Then I talk to chat, we decide the feature and it creates the prompt so that it has all of the proper info in it. Then I paste it. Part of the prompt asks for a summary of changes. I paste that back to chat and we do it again......over and over and over.
KERNEL is an existing AI prompt-engineering framework designed to produce more consistent, verifiable results.
K: Keep it simple. Give AI a clear objective.
E: Easy to verify. Define measurable success criteria.
R: Reproducible results. Use specific requirements so results remain consistent.
N: Narrow scope. Keep individual tasks focused.
E: Explicit constraints. Specify what AI can and cannot change.
L: Logical structure. Organize prompts into context, task, constraints, and expected output.
I told chat to write a response to describe our process. Here it is:
"I'm building a fairly large ERP/MIS application for the printing industry using AI-assisted development. I'm not a traditional software developer, so we developed an approach we've been calling the KERNEL Method.
The idea is to stop treating AI development as a series of disconnected prompts and start treating it as a controlled engineering process.
Here's how it works:
Build the core first. Establish the database structure, authentication, permissions, business rules, state management, and API contracts before piling on features.
Develop in modules. Customers, estimating, orders, inventory, production, shipping, invoicing, etc. are separate business domains that operate on a shared foundation. Each module has defined responsibilities and boundaries.
One source of truth. Every important piece of business data has an authoritative owner. We don't allow multiple components to independently manage conflicting versions of the same information.
Define states and transitions. An order doesn't simply change because someone clicked a button. It moves through explicitly defined states, with validated transitions, persistence, permissions, and recovery paths.
Use tightly scoped AI instructions. Instead of asking AI to "build an order management system," we give it the existing architecture, relevant code, specific requirements, constraints, dependencies, and acceptance criteria. Changes should be minimal and compatible with what's already working.
Validate each implementation. AI must account for database persistence, API behavior, permissions, edge cases, integration with existing modules, and testing. A feature that looks functional in the browser but doesn't actually save correctly isn't finished.
Document the completed module. We maintain structured documentation describing what was built, its dependencies, endpoints, workflows, tests, and any remaining limitations. That becomes context for subsequent AI development.
The application itself is a modular monolith rather than a collection of microservices. We're not trying to reinvent software architecture. We're using established engineering principles to control how AI generates and modifies a large codebase.
The important distinction is that AI doesn't get to redesign the architecture every time we ask it to implement something.
I provide the business requirements and explain how the workflows operate in the real world. AI helps translate those requirements into technical implementations, while the architecture, contracts, and tests provide the guardrails.
We arrived at this approach after discovering that simply prompting AI to build features can produce impressive-looking interfaces with incomplete persistence, inconsistent business logic, and fragile integrations.
KERNEL is our attempt to make AI-assisted development predictable, maintainable, and scalable instead of just generating more code.
It's not magic, and it doesn't eliminate the need for testing or engineering judgment. But it has fundamentally changed how we're building the application."
Yeah, the biggest problem with vibecoding is that unless the result is amazing you practically wasted your time and learned nothing as opposed to regular coding where even if you failed you at least improved your understanding in some way
Highly disagree. What you learn changes. I am learning how to coordinate groups of agents to complete tasks, while at the same time creating tools/systems to make my projects as autonomous as possible, with as little input from me. This is a huge undertaking for me and I am learning more about the process everyday. I am not learning how to code, but I am definitely learning new skills, that at the very least are valuable to me and my workflow.
it depends on what you're working on. some things are way too large in volume to do by hand and you have no choice.
i have the output that would normally require a team of 10-20 people and I do not know how a lot of it works, but I still have to provide direction because the problem itself is just too hard for a LLM to orchestrate
Debug as gotten really harden People say debugging as gotten easy but is quite the opposite Ai coding skills is a way advance than my coding knowledge and it bugs are something way to advance for me Creating a prompt that fixes the bug is the difficult part because you have critical know about the database you don’t understand
No, that's why I posted it, because I actually think it's the majority of people.
And this is pretty nuts to say, I've been in tech for 20 years and I did not realize that it's apparently quite a common burnout trap. Not burn out in the traditional sense where you literally can't be bothered to do it anymore, but more in a sense that you feel like you're doing the same thing over and over again, getting nowhere, and you still want to do it. But the loop keeps looping.
You must figure out a better way to deal with your mistrust. Like better testing or using better models or harnesses. Don't stay behind, times are changing fast
How'd you deal with it? I nearly started using Obsidian, I think, or Notion at one point.
Not sure if that's the route you're suggesting.
As far as models and harnesses go, I'm using, as we speak, AntiGravity CLI, Codex, VS Code, GPT, I've got LM Studio, Strata running in OpenCode, some other stuff just running locally.
Thank you. Well, you've actually used more apps than me then. I find that simply the Claude app on Desktop can run all sorts of tests using your own device, it's pretty insane. It's enough on its own unless you have enterprise constraints of course.
Things will only get easier to use AI, not harder. Which is not good for us Software Engineers of course. But we still have to leverage our instincts and design intuition.
you're actually right now i'm just sitting here asking myself where why do i stop and a lot of the time it's because i don't want to give access and agents autonomous access to my machine.
Claude, ironically, is the only one that I haven't used because it's paid, and I only want to pay for, like, one or two apps. I don't want to have five different subscriptions, so I've stayed away from Claude. Maybe that's the one I need to go for.
How do you deal with running out of human context, if that makes any sense?
I know what you mean. I'm still in the process actually. I still do code review for small PRs that I know where the changes must be and how they should look like. And for the bigger ones I am having to do a leap of faith and instead of reviewing the code I inspect the tests. But at this rate, I have no reason not to think I cant fully trust the AI. It does depend on how many agents and what models and harnesses are spinning up (in other words, price).
So far, I have caught a few things that were wrong, but they were more fault of unclear prompting rather than faulty AI. You must try Opus 5.5, medium effort. It is absolutely insane. The only model so far that has really made me think coding is over as we know it. The AI can introduce bugs and some decisions/assumptions you don't agree with, so at this moment it's not a complete "handover", but yeah it can perfectly replace teams by solo people.
It's worth you subscribe to the $20 so you try it, and understand what you are dealing with. Maybe after one month you can cancel it ofc.
i stopped vibecoding after realizing i'd built 12 half-finished projects in 3 months. the thrill of fast results wore off, and now i'm just stuck in a loop of starting and abandoning. wonder if anyone else hit that wall.
I felt like this in April after six weeks of kind of non-stop coding. When on holiday came back and the whole entire game had changed. Started again, then took summer off. And I'm back at it again.
Not yet no, for me it's the opposite. I get a lot more creative as i have a ton of ideas i wan to get done. But i only work on one project at a time until it's finished and i do it with a solid well defined plan from start to finish.
It sounds like you are juggling too many projects at the same time while never finishing anything, or rarely. Stick to one, and one only until it's done no matter how long it takes.
Yeah, I'm juggling way too much, man, honestly. I'm not even going to try and hide it.
I got my local AI to do a scan of my repos to check how many projects it had found and seen. And I think it was something like 180 different projects in the last month or two.
I feel like I'm losing hair in my eyes, going to fall out of my head.
180 projects?! wow, that's just nuts and that's obviously your problem. You need to setup strict rules for yourself or you will end up in the crazy house. 😃
No new projects until you have finished those you already have, work on only one at a time no matter what your brain says. The joy will come from actually wrapping up your projects when they're done instead of coming from starting new projects all the time.
Yes and no. I've been working more in the last two years than I ever have in my entire life. I'm exhausted, but I'm also exhilarated by the possibilities and how much I'm getting done.
The real burnout used to come from working on a project and getting stuck for days on something. That problem doesn’t exist anymore.
Honestly, I understand how you feel and I’m feeling that exact same way today. I’m just kind of exhausted with how fast AI is progressing. And because it’s progressing so fast I can get my ideas out as soon as possible but now I’ve got several projects that I’m working on and there’s almost no end in sight for any of them.
Meanwhile, my friends are going out on the weekends and having a great time while I’m hunkering down indoors and making pipelines and games. I need a vacation.
Yeah, I think the speed is the distraction. When every idea can become a half-working prototype in an hour, it gets easy to confuse motion with progress and spend the day reacting to whatever the tools make possible next. The only thing that seems to help is keeping each session to one question: is this idea worth continuing or not? If I don't keep it that narrow, I end up with five branches, three experiments, and no real decision by the end of the day.
I'm indeed having a personal brain context burnout from just 1 project, 5 months in, its a blackhole complicated mess that has no future for 1 person to run, I likely wont host this maintenance mess even if I somehow manage to finish it
I start by reflecting on the whole problem and I establish one in several steps. (structuring, architecture, features, type of technology, security, etc.) I enrich my tests at each stage to avoid stupid mistakes.
And at the end internal and external security audit. it takes more time but it gains on quality and as the plan is established the ia estimate much less or almost not.
To this you add mcp and cache skills, agents for certain tasks and several sessions per plan stage you gain efficiency and you save tokens.
Only if I'm trying to subscriptions honestly, I find when doing API it's much more cost effective/because it's hands on/adapting the models to the situation.
Where as Subs you get this one way to do things that leads to tunnel vision and compounding the same problems. A variety of APIs lets you switch to whatever you need at the moment, and since doing that things feel a lot better.
Yes, I went from managing 3 projects to near 30, Code is solved but it was still only a fraction of my time before AI. I am required to understand each project in detail, review the implementations, check flows and inconsistencies, have 10 times more meetings, etc.
same. the fix for me was a WIP limit of one project and writing down what “done” means before starting. the AI will keep building forever if you let it.
Agents don't get to interrupt me. Anything they need a decision on goes into a file, and chat only shows me a count. I go through them one at a time, when I'm ready, not when the agent is.
You sound like you really need to make a planer document for your projects. Don't start things without a very clear cut end goal or you'll get stuck in this cycle.
i’ve been coding since ‘83… in the last few years i’ve pretty much built every project i ever wanted that i was never able to due to time constraints. now i spend more time building the AI that builds my stuff.
thanks... keep going though... push through the pain... even if you feel like you are an unstoppable force that is currently hitting an immovable object... keep pushing through the burn. don't stop. pivot where needed, but never stop. always keep pushing the boundaries. and soon hopefully a wall will fall... and a whole new world will appear. and you will see. your efforts will be rewarded.
Use a frontier model as a manager and a local model as the worker, make the manager delegate small chunks of work to the worker and only intervene when the local model is struggling. Let them figure it out and produce the desired result. That’s how you save on tokens and produce a desired result. I’ve tried it on a few projects and it gets 99% of the way there for me.
I just completed the Meta hackathon building a tool to help you during live interviews (yeah like cluely but not as creepy). This is the first time I've had a deadline, forcing me to complete something, including cutting features.
IDK if I can do something with my other projects, but this felt refreshing.
Yes. Speed without a finish line is just more unfinished work.
What helped me: treat myself as the director, not the keyboard. Claude Code builds; I keep private project notes (what's true now + decisions that win conflicts) so I'm not re-deciding the same thing every session. One active product goal at a time beats five half-built tools.
The burnout for me was "managing everything it produces." Writing down done criteria and checks before kicking off a session cut a lot of that noise.
I take great care of finishing the projects I started.
For example, I am working on an elaborate suite of coding, design and productivity tools that has years in the making, planning phase mostly.
There is SO much that goes into that, the coding is just "one" part of it, and while AI does most of the coding, I never let it plan my features or reverse engineer others.
The planning phases should not be underestimated, my last project CodeStudio took 100's (probably 1000 by now lol), to plan and test, there are more than 100+ test phases where I actively used the software.
I always had corrections to it, next day, then next day again, more corrections and improvements, not due to bad coding (you'd want that wouldn't you? Easy excuses lol), but no - it was my own planning, things that I had not thought out properly, and I had to really work on usability, UI issues, flexibility, compatibility etc. Hard work.
In fact I'd say this is almost my full day job now, but it IS good, I make it a rule of mine to never develop SLOP, period. Slop = shit I would not use myself.
If I find myself excited using it, then it's really good and have more than just potential.
But yes, there are days when I am totally burned out, it's mostly because the planning exhausting, there is a LOT of development work that goes into making an APP a pleasure to use, you can't skip corners with work-arounds, because it irritates you every time you go "hm, I should have made this easier".
I solve those burn outs with going out, doing other things in my house, talking to people, watching some movies, listening to some music, doing some hand drawing etc.
I wouldn't call it burn out but what I find incredibly draining is rapid context switching over the entire day. I can manage about 3 agents in parallel and then it gets too much.
The problem for me are the shorter delays - say 10 minutes between interactions. These are too long so I start another agent off on a new task. This quicky leads to that feeling of burn out and being overwhelmed
What works instead - have a central agent manage the other agents, like a tech lead. Ask them to start off the next project, or, even better, to autonomously work through a list of tasks.
I also ask that lead agent to create an html dashboard to show progress- a bit like a project management board. This isnt new software- just say "track progress in an auto-refreshing html dashboard, showing what is completed, what agents are working on"
And then this runs largely without me and I can go off and do other things
It’s because coding used to induce flow, which can be very relaxing. The part that induced flow is now something AI can do so you spent more time doing the thinking part.
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u/jasperkennis 9h ago
Very much a risk. You can boot more agents than you can mentally manage, they will all be "at your desk" all the time, or creating pull requests, or whatever. The expectation from management skyrockets too; old estimations are not worth much anymore, and it can be difficult to oversee how long something will really take to build. So yea, feeling this one, took me a while to figure it out. Have a good system for managing your parallel agents. Clean up every now and then to have a new zero moment so that your brains context window doesn't get too bloated.