In the same way social media doom-scrolling was engineered to keep us engaged through algorithmically dispensing dopamine - AI coding has made me realise it's doing something to me that's equally as addictive... so I thought I would explore what it is, and why.

The Idea & Aftermath

You know the story, zoned out in a meeting, people asking for impossibly outrageous things interspersed with 'just use AI' to make it sound simple, and suddenly... huh, what's that... a thought - related to the meeting? - not an obscenity - hmm, this feels weird... I gotta do something about it.

Hello Claude Code, my friend, my buddy, my abused slave. Hear me out.. what if.. you could meticulously throw together this really amazing thing very quickly, and then I'll take all the credit... oh, and "make no mistakes".

Then it starts asking questions and wanting clarification; which is an instant turn off. I just wanted it done. I type "You know best my little dude, you got this!". Because you really need to keep the little tyke's spirits up while its quite literally doing all the work.

I go back to the meeting just as it ends, "Nothing from me, thanks".

I sigh and prepare to take a moment to recover... suddenly a beep... a flashing icon wants my attention. A fleeting memory flashes in my temporal lobe "Stop your robot noise" - a friend used to shout that at my car when he hadn't put his seatbelt on quick enough.

I don't have time for these needy notifications while I micro-dose an existential crisis (I think Outlook calls it 'Focus Time'), so I close the window.

I'm in the middle of something else now, no brain space for that old thing, Whatever it was..

And with that, I have left another Uno card on the discard pile, a tall stack of very brief and barely noticeable tangential 'million-dollar-ideas'. And the only thing I've wasted is a little time, a lot of tokens, and if the environmentalists are to be believed - maybe a few gallons of water.

'Me time' has run out, and I have to join another meeting with another impossibly outrageous task.

Or, sometimes, it goes the other way...

Hyper-focus and Fascination

type, type, type, delete, type, ramble, "or what if instead we"... (lol 'we')... anyway... type, type... and done.. a perfectly incoherent prompt.

I pause for a moment. Should I read this back to be sure it makes sense?

As I look at all 'teh' typos, wondering if I should fix them... nah, AI models these days are very clever, it'll figure out what I mean quicker than I would be able to type it out coherently.

What was it they use to say? "garbage in, garbage out". Surely not these days. I pop that discouraging bubble. And I hit enter.

It begins... it thinks, it scours the web, it researches, it finally clicks, it's successfully extracted the meaning amongst my obsession with over-punctuation... it constructs a plan, it starts scaffolding, it answers it's own questions as they occur. Oh gosh! It's so decisive and confident, I wish I could be more like that... #swoon

But I don't have to any more, not now my computer can handle all of my critical thinking for me, do I? (genuinely asking, I don't know, maybe I should ask AI).

I lean back, nope, eyesight too bad, I'm old.. I can't miss this... So I hunch forward like a shrimp sitting in an office chair, drawn in by the glow of my LED-backlit monitor (maybe I'll upgrade to OLED when my new vibe-coded app takes off).

I start to feel a little smug with my ability to keep up with the pace the words appear on my screen, without dragging my finger along the line and vaguely mouthing the words as I go... like I did in school... hah, school, I wonder if that was the last time I read a real book? with actual printed pages... those words manifest a song in my head.

"Where's the scrollbar on these ink-dredged pages, I ain't turning this"
- Scroobius Pip, Death of the Journalist

But instead of listening to his entire back catalogue of songs and spoken word poetry, I continue reading the robot's prose as it spaffs it's inner monologue all over my screen. After all, I am supposed to be at work right now, it's only fair I pay attention.

I think I've only experienced this sort of unwavering fascination with one other thing - and that's 3D printing.

I'm helplessly compelled to watch it print, totally uninvolved and external to the creation of a physical object that is literally coming into existence right in front of me, in real-time... well, in a world of infinitely scrolling pre-loaded reels, it's feels slower than real-time, very slow actually, what's taking it so long, damn this is painful.

And then I'm snapped back to realty - I see it, ooh, it's writing a message, it's actually talking to me, it wants to impress, it needs my approval... "yes my obedient agent, you may proceed, master is pleased with your progress".

But it's not good enough, it never is, whether it be layers extruded from my printer, or tokens generated by AI...

...why isn't it finished yet!

The Dead Zone

If you haven't guessed, the reason I came up with the idea for this article is because I'm waiting for some code to magic itself into existence. I kept flicking back to the terminal (yeah, I'm that cool)... le sigh.. it's still not finished.

And then it happens, it's finally completed its' task, and now it's waiting for me again, "don't worry, I'm here"... But how am I expected to remember what I asked it more than 2 minutes ago? Urgh, there's an awful lot of stuff on screen.. it looks like it's explained what it's done... how nice, but that's way too much to read.

It's ok, I'm in control. I wanted this. I asked for it. I.. Am.. Ready..

Or... now, here me out... I could ask it to summarise. Yesss, that’s a great idea! I am a genius. That holds off the inevitable hardship of concentration just a little bit longer.

Now what? I'm left waiting again... I'll could alt-tab for a moment, get on with something else, I gotta stay productive after all!

The time between sending a message, and waiting for it's response. A mere few seconds or minutes, feels like an eternity. Too short to switch context and work on something else, and too long to just sit there like an NPC when the player leaves the room.

That time alone with my own thoughts is not what I need today. Or any day.

The Change

Since 2023 LLMs started to occupy an increasing part of my every-day life, not because I'm lazy and want answers without the effort, and not because I like generating obscure tentacle hentai or whatever it is that 'normal' people use it for. Mostly because I am, and always have been, inquisitive.

But why? (see what I did there?)

It's never enough for me to know how something works, I have to go at least one level deeper, to understand the things that ALLOW that thing to work.

You see, before AI, people had to use this thing called a Search Engine, and then they couldn't even speak to it normally, they had to speak in keywords and phrases, and then click through the vaguely related websites it returned trying to spot the relevant text by it's shape alone, because reading everything would take too long, and I'm only on page 4 with 52,122 more results to go through.

If only I could just find that one paragraph that explains exactly what I'm after...

But now, I can get exactly that - I ask AI and it's summarised, consolidated, and presented in an easy to digest format... and yet it still feels too much to read as it’s presented instantaneously before my eyes.

It's bizarre, it’s almost as if instant gratification isn't actually gratifying. And instead it's just become the minimum that anybody expects these days.

My Origin Story

As a person tainted with ADHD and very likely touched by the 'tism... Having access to AI is an addictive thing that's equally crippling and empowering. I'm able to do so much, both in terms of time and scope. I can ask it anything, like a child asking 'why' a thousand times a minute, but it never breaks a sweat, and unlike the previous victims of my inquisitiveness, it doesn't wish I'd never been born.

A thing about me... I've been programming since I was at school, various languages and platforms, and on some occasions in later life I can legitimately claim to have done it professionally. But am I a 'programmer'? no. Did I enjoy it? Absolutely!

When I was young and undiagnosed, I spent countless days attempting to learn things, such as learning to program in assembly language, through trial and error with nothing more than a book from the library and some source code on a floppy disk that I ordered from a public domain software catalogue to help.

I leant how to invoke Mode X graphics (320 x 240 x 8bit colour), how to rotate a point cloud in 3D space and then project it to a 2D viewport to display on the screen.

I learnt how to calculate the 'normal' of a surface so I can shade it based on it's angle from a light source. I even figured out how to create fire (a video effect, and not the one in the park where I was allegedly seen skulking away from, it was never proved).

I also 'reverse engineered' the process to create magic eye pictures, which are actually called stereograms 🤓 , by horizontally shifting pixels left or right in a vertically tiled repeating pattern to hide a sailboat.

Yes, I was one of the cool kids. The secret is out. I can no longer hide that fact.

Every idea, every project started, allowed me to latch onto a goal and combined with the freedom of my youth... I had the time to dedicate to it. Which I now know was a very common ADHD symptom - hyper-focus. And through my sheer determinism, stubbornness, and crippling fear of failure - I couldn't have given up even if I wanted to.

That is the secret of how I managed to learn a whole load of useless things.

10,000 hours to become an expert

But exactly what am I becoming an expert in? Talking like AI, fuck that!

I'm not sure if it's classed as an addiction, or just learned behaviour... where if you do something often it starts to feel normal - and even to the point where it feels strange not to do that thing. And then before you notice, you start to miss it?

I'm going somewhere with this, bear with me...

The effect is called 'game transfer phenomena' (do doo, dah do do). Which comes from the well known and studied 'Tetris Effect'.

The Tetris effect occurs when someone dedicates substantial time, effort, and concentration to an activity and thereby alters their thoughts, dreams, and other experiences not directly linked to said activity.

So, if you've spent an evening playing 'Need for Speed: Most Wanted' and then got in your car and seen the "3, 2, 1, Go" flash across your vision.

Or a weekend of playing GTA 5 and then thumped a prostitute. You'll know exactly what I mean.

It happened to me recently (No, no that, I didn't thump anyone). I was in my garage looking for a pegboard to hang up in my home-office, a rare moment of motivation to tidy up, and I found the bracket to hang it on the wall, but not the actual pegboard.. my instinct in the moment was to reach for my phone to ask Claude where I'd seen it last. And as I caught myself in the act, I thought to myself... I'm a fucking idiot... my brain has changed.

Why?

That's a good question... Is it because AI is somehow playing all the right notes in my neurodiverse brain (but not necessarily in the right order), or something more widespread.

Here's the strings it's pulling...

Wanderlust - meaning the strong desire to travel and see the world. But in this instance the world is the endless possibilities to play, discover, get answers, experiment, learn, and create. I would even go so far as to say that what AI provides, tickles my deep itch for self-development and growth. Fundamentally I want to achieve more in life. But instead of getting more time to do it, I get the promise of doing things faster to save time...

Dopamine mining - If you've played a game or scrolled social media until your eyes are heavy, yet you say to yourself 'just one more block', 'one more raid', 'one more turn', 'one more reel'. It's the same feeling with AI coding. The rush of dopamine from the anticipation of it working, or breaking something else, or being close but not quite right... will this next prompt be the one that fixes everything?, will it work this time?, I must find out. Two steps forward, and one step back. Try again, a new prompt, a new model, a new hope, a new gamble.

Omnipotent - AI coding has removed a lot of the constraints that have held me back all my life, the ability to turn intent into action (or maybe it's just my medication that does that). Time no longer matters, AI coding is supposed to be fast. Researching topics beforehand no longer matters, AI can read the documentation as it goes. Suddenly every single framework, package, library, and even language is suddenly within my reach, just for the sake of asking.

There is a genuine feeling that anything is possible. But what do I do with that ability? - other than feel the crushing and enduring pressure to constantly use it.

Indecisive Perfectionist

"I don't know what I want, but it has to be right" - I'm pretty sure I came up with that saying, and I've used it many many times in self-reflection trying to figure out why I never seem to be able to start things (pre-ADHD diagnosis).

I have always believed that I could do anything I put my mind to, indeed I believe that anybody has the capability to do anything... with the tiny caveat of 'if they wanted to'.

I try to cling desperately to my belief that there is no topic or idea or concept that is beyond any individual, given time & the right teacher, and obviously the drive to learn.

As a self-professed capable individual, I could do anything, but what would I want to do? Well, that was easy, what would I have time to do? given the constraints what would be the most rewarding? what would help me or others? what do I actually need?

So What Have I become?

I've spent quite a while trying to figure this out, has AI beaten me into submission, is it the captain now?

Am I addicted to this new and tantalising thing? And I am not using the term 'addicted' lightly here, it really is something that many people seem to be struggling with, losing sleep over, ruining relationships, and you've probably seen the stories of people with full blown psychosis who have lost their grip on reality because a chat bot told them to kill the Queen, or the man who lost nearly £100k on bad advice end up in hospital three times, and attempted suicide.

I'm certainly not that far gone.. how can I tell? Because AI manages to piss me off every single day. Yet I go back for more...

Do I have a heavy sense that 'downtime' is the ultimate sin?

Do I feel uneasy if I leave my agents aren't whurring away?

Do I fantasise about my next prompt being correctly understood? Like Sam Becket hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap home?

I'm not alone

Some Instagram rando made a pertinent post along the same lines of the addictiveness and the sense of increased self-imposed demand that AI coding has brought to their life - these are some of the comments.

Do they resonate? Yeah, weird isn't it.

Conclusion

I don't have a conclusion, or a bright and bubbly closing statement for this article like I usually do. If I figure it out I'll let you know...

I have to go now, I've got 3 new projects on the boil and it's only 2am. And I'm not using any tokens while I'm talking to you.

So I'll leave you with this quote as inspiration...

The horrors persist, but so do I

And so can you, stay in there, and may your context window never be full.