The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, and recreation).

When friends start dying within 10 years of your age, it's a hell of a wake up.

"I wish I'd made more throw away apps I never use" ... said no one on their death bed, ever.

I don't thing the problem is AI, but the mindset and trainning. I have probably as many or more AI projects that this man has but they are extremely useful, even if most of them I won't even sell.

This is like a kid playing videogames instead of studying, you take the console away and force the kid in front of a book and the kid will spend most of his time looking at the wall and dreaming.

I am engineer with very deep programming background that have managed people, with real experience in the real world.

One of the best things about AIs is that you can test crazy ideas and create prototypes very fast. Only one in a hundred will work great in the real world, but you have to create the 100 before to know.

Creating the 100 before AI was extremely expensive, and took so much time.

For me it is liberating and gives me focus because I can spend so little time testing prototypes and spend real time in what is really important and works.

This is something I learned from game developers: If you are going to create a game, you spend a weekend testing the dynamics and the gameplay of your prototype to know if is is fun. You use boxes, no textures, no complex sounds of music.

Then if it works and is is so fun, you create the game! You can spend 2 years creating the game after that.

You don't spend two years doing a Game only to realise later that is not fun, and you either spend 3 more years or abandon it at this moment.

Only mentioning this because the OP did - but for me (also ADHD) it's kind of the opposite. I'm finishing side projects for the first time ever because I can actually get them working before I get bored of them. My projects are more infra-leaning, and not all of them get much use, but some do. Others let me explore certain ideas and then sometimes serve as a reference point later when I run into something that reminds me of that.

> Generically, it's about a unit time of life and how it is spent meaningfully

technology has generally flooded us with more speed, more choice, more entertainment - even the introduction of bicycles caused a similar outrage response, that we're moving too fast and should be slowing down to take in the world around us

the paradox is that choice is both great and awful for us

the one skill to hone / develop in the last couple of decades (way before AI) is the ability to focus, filter, discard, and choose a direction to move in (whether its hobbies, career, apps to build, social media to consume, etc etc etc)

Wow. To me the point of code has always been the crazy ideas and playing around. I love to create just for me and every once in a while for others is ok too. If you only think of code as 'a tool to build useful things' and everything else as wasted then sure, this is the philosophy for you. However, creating a bunch of random not going to follow up on it but I explored and played moments seems like a plus and not a negative to me.

Sounds like internet addiction with new programs/features being the high you chase instead of new tweets, articles, or videos. It's beyond clear that we all need to be cutting back on our computer/screen usage.

I don't really understand; the author first describes a personal planning / management issue, and then blames a particular technology for it. Apparently the author seems to think that the technology is the cause for the personal planning failure. But to be honest, I think the technology just exposes it. The underlying problem was there all along, just because of AI this problem is becoming very clear.

I can provide a data point for what the article calls pseudo productivity: I extensively use LLMs as semantic search engines or expert systems (but not as agents). Recently I asked one how to consume a Google Pub/Sub topic using Python (context: I come from an C++/Java/JS background with some Python knowledge). The LLM gave me a good intro and some code. As it usually happens, I had a few follow up questions/clarifications, and then had to clarify the intent behind the code I requested. After a few relatively effortless rounds of back and forth, I got what I needed. It felt productive. But looking at the clock, about 20 minutes had passed without me even realizing it. Then I went and looked at the official overview page for the Google Pub/Sub Python client. It had everything I needed (including the code), in a more condensed, well-structured form. I could probably have arrived at the same outcome in 5-10 minutes. The only difference was that the latter method required some focus/discipline.

I'm wondering whether this is what they call pseudo-productivity: a lot of low-friction back and forth that feels productive, and perhaps even enjoyable, but in objective terms, takes longer?

Author sounds like they are missing meaning in what they do. If they had a life mission, AI is just an aid in accomplishing that mission, and they wouldn't get sidetracked by all the unfulfilling projects (modulus the ADHD, that has its own bearing on the experience using AI, and is the most interesting part of this post to me).

Perhaps at a population scale AI inhibits people from finding fulfillment.

But on an anecdotal basis, "just go find something meaningful". For some of us that "hate the AI timeline", we are still finding purpose and fulfillment by applying AI toward our personal missions.

It puts me in mind of making a jig when woodworking. Make the thing when you need it. You don't need to maintain it, you don't need to sell it. It does it's job and you move on. If it does the job really well maybe you keep it around for next time, maybe you refine it if you use it often.

Never be ashamed of making useless things, the really useful things are hiding amongst them.

If having fun is interfering with your productivity, that isn't necessarily a problem, it is only a problem if it interferes with your livelihood.

If Robots are to take all our jobs, we need to retain our livelihoods. Then we all could perhaps have fun making the things we want to make for the pleasure of making them.

I too have ADHD, perhaps it is different for me because I began medication about the same time the models got good, but I have worked on some individual projects for longer than I could have earlier.

I don't spend all day typing prompts though. It's more of a step in, do a thing, then think about it while doing something else.

I've been having the opposite experience; I've been GAINING focus through AI use.

In my day, when there's something that is distracting me from moving my objectives forward, I'm asking "Can AI help me automate this?" The answer is surprisingly often "yes". I call these "rough edges" and have been doing a lot of work over the last few weeks to "file the rough edges down".

Chatbots are social media of work. In Meta’s platforms you can pretend to be social and chase meaningless dopamines hits that appear similar we get from genuine interaction, whereas with AI agents you get dopamine hits from similar to doing good work and achieving your goals, while actually you just fried your brain doing making money for huge corporations. Similarly both you can use for genuinely good things, but one has to be extremely disciplined to do it and conscious of the trade off.

I think the answer is simply to not use LLM’s to generate much anything at all. When writing code I only use Claude chat (in separate virtual desktop on a browser) only when I can’t grok the documentation or the bug really kicks my ass. I rarely want it to even write the code, just to explain what I am doing wrong.

When I write the initial idea might be just me having a discussion with Claude (“What exactly was Marcia Williams’ hold on British PM Harold Wilson”) about a topic I am interested in and want a quick overview of the literature, but if I end up writing about it none of it is generated.

Claude just helps me to refine my thinking like a rubber duck that has in its palmate tips most all of information saved online. It is simply an extension of my intellect. The thinking and the work remains my own.

> In recent times, at least once per month someone sends a screenshot for an awesome tool they are working on. I'm like whoa, that's really something and the sender is obviously proud and enthusiastic. I try not to ask, but am always thinking "and where will you market it?"

What a strange perspective. His dismissal of the long list of projects at the top is also odd.

What's wrong with making something cool and functional (if not "useful"), even if just for yourself, without any profit motive or plan to turn it into some huge business?

I spent the last weekend vibing some plugins for Quod Libet -- a custom bookmark/preview function, a click-to-jump lyrics sidebar, thinking about a search-within-lyrics thing now. It all works beautifully, but I have no illusions about it being some kind of moneymaker -- heck, I doubt it's even worth the time beautifying/minimizing the code to get it acceptable to submit to the Github. But it makes me happy and makes using my library more enjoyable. Isn't that enough? Do they go around asking garage tinkerers and hobby crafters what their marketing plan is, too?

AI reduces the time cost of making the initial product, bypassing the need for genuine commitment, investment, strong interest, and dedication - which are vital in keeping a project alive.

Every time you need to make an update, you need to bring up the old context, or otherwise get the AI up to speed, which especially if you're using one of the frontier models could be a significant financial drain long term.

You don't get the same dopamine hit too, because you're just making boring updates to something which you threw together in 5 minutes with zero effort. The time and financial cost of building all this stuff may have been better spent on one, good, properly architected project.

Maintaining the project manually also assumes you can quickly understand the codebase which has been produced, otherwise you're completely dependent on Anthropic and them maintaining prices which you can afford. Bearing in mind that as you add new features, the cost of getting the LLM to understand the project increases, right? I might have a naive perspective here.

All that being said - sometimes there really are one-off niche things that are just for personal use that you do continue to use long term. Usually the simpler stuff where you can easily grasp the codebase at a quick glance. It's also great for debugging back and forths.

Personally I just run my local setup with a bunch of MCP stuff and the primary way it helps me is to keep me functional and on task. In some ways it's good if the AI can supervise you as opposed to you supervising it - at least from an ADHD perspective.

It's an interesting idea for sure, I like this article and agree with it.

I'm increasingly over it. Don't care how good the model/harness gets, the second I can't hold every bit of the mental model in my head is the second it's all over. And that's a very fine line and very easy to cross

The lucky normies have work to do, and they use their attention to meet the challenges. Us unlucky different-brained folks operate more like we have a lot of attention, and we have learned to fill it with computer stuff. AI is great for filling it but it’s often ultra processed weirdness and doesn’t seem to leave a trail of learning and productivity.

What wasn't build with AI is that webpage and it's tiny non-scaling text.

Your car can drive 100+mph, but it’s probably not a good idea to drive around corners, in town or in your neighborhood at top speed. LLMs are the same. They can go 1,000+MPH, but what you need and what’s safe is 20-80mph. Practice restraint and focus and LLMs will make you more productive and give you some good results.

What if you then use AI to try and maintain only one, a single product into which you’ll put your care and craft to try to make something that’s better than “some dopamine hits”?

Wrote about what I think is the root cause of all the mania the other day [1]: we're addicted to speed, "moving fast," and anchor it all to a vague sense of "productivity."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326501

> On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated "projects" they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.

This part reminded me of a recent article and it’s interesting that he brings up ADHD because that’s probably the bigger issue then. Because what I got from the article and the related conversation, specifically the top comment:

> > Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.

> It reminds me of something my old CS mentor, now elderly, had said about LLMs a few months ago: "it's a force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply."

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254336

The fact that it turned out that “Human Bottlenecks” post was written by the same person who wrote “Notes on Managing ADHD” which I had printed and studied for tips not that long ago made sense.

So, to connect the dots, the fact he made all of those things without them being part of a bigger plan is, I think, the problem. In the framework of the above quote, there’s no needle there, nothing to multiply.

I’ve been trying to think more about whether what I’m doing is going somewhere, or if I can skip it and simplify things.

In which a standalone user discovers the Show HN saturation-drawback encountered here in recent months.

"The output was unbridled garbage. Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all. " -- i've noticed that fact first when I started to use linux. It didn't click untill I've built Gentoo from handbook. The commitment: i've asked on Gentoo IRC and it turns out a lot of people had a similar story.

Then, I've built a keyboard for myself and I'm still using it. I liked the process and started to build them basically for giveaway. My hope was that it will help people who eager to switch to ergonomic keyboards but the bar is too high for them to build, to figure out things etc.. But it turned out that people who get it without this effort they just try, fail, and leave it dusting on the shelf. They lack commitment, nothing fuels their enthusiasm.

This actually really resonates with me, particularly the part about his AI tools for blogging and note taking.

I have zero interest in AI note-taking apps. I write notes for myself to process the meaningful outcomes of a meeting. My notes are short, only capture stuff I actually think I will care about in the future, and after I've written them I have a better mental model of the meeting than I did before.

If I gave the task to an AI, no matter how advanced, it would produce much more unfocused content than the focused notes I am used to writing, and I would lose the process of synthesis that helps me absorb the meeting outcomes. More work product, but actually less productivity.

I think they got most of it right. Whenever there is a tool that helps one super active, it is a one off cliff. Smart ones will figure that out and get back to using it for meaningful purpose. A small percentage weaker ones will get addicted.

Nothing different from all innovations.

Quoting:

"Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all."

This is the truth. Otherwise known as "easy come, easy go".

It seems like the author is overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful. He clearly had fun building these products — and in hindsight is disavowing them because they didn’t generate income? An oddly capitalist view of play.

Some really good points on how these bots are incentivized to reward mindless engagement though and the bit about voice transcription not producing useful writing landed. When the barrier to release drops the quality naturally does too.

I think the next stage of us learning to harness these tools is us building the ability to reach for excellence even when we are not required to. To accustom ourselves to going beyond minimum viable bar for functionality and to reach for qualities or standards beyond that which the AI brings to the table unaided. A new kind of engineering rigor.

I move that this was always true and is now only far more so.

We're still in the phase where we're having our first reaction to the software development lifecycle with the help of AI. We're quickly starting to realize what AI is making cheap, and where the new bottlenecks are. How most people are currently using AI is rather naive and superficial. One-shotting only takes you so far.

It seems like there should be a middle ground where you occasionally write a side project for fun, but not dozens of them just because you can?

Also, if nobody uses them, they don't need to be maintained. You can shut them down with no regrets.

This is not an AI problem. Or rather, AI just made it worse. Focus can be hard. The thing is, AI can help you focus, by making code maintenance easier too.

AI makes me far more productive, but I’ve lost quite a bit too. There’s less fun in coding these days, and it leaves me feeling adrift at times.

The point about interruptions is valid.

'Waiting for AI to finish' - even if it's only 1 minute segments, is real, especially if we are delegating. (Maybe I'm interrupted right now!)

But this - it's not the fault of the tool that you're not focused on building something useful, long lasting or material.

That's an entirely different question - and I think if you look into most people's 'experiment' folders, that tendency was always there. Just more code now.

That's on us.

For 20 years, Google had access to infinite amount of human based Phds, and fresh computer science graduates, and effectively unlimited budgets...and have been "hiring the best" for 20 years straight.

This what they have been spending their human tokens on: https://killedbygoogle.com/

They are a decreasing quality searching engine who shows ads. It has never been about intelligence, or lack of resources. Its about incentives and execution.

Your AI wont save you, or make you rich or increase your productivity.

Love the idea of the ADHD amplifier!! It’s so true, being a profound ADHD person i have made many (more than i’m willing to admit) throw away apps with AI. I must say some are pretty useful and i use on a daily basis, but all could’ve an excel heheheeh Love and hate AI

Thats very nice.

I wrote about this a little bit today too. You’re up against a dopamine machine that writes code for you.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-terminal-star

A lot of good comes out but it can be hard to separate from the parts that just take advantage of your brain.

It's interesting to look at a man without ai in 2026

The way I feel about is this:

I've never made more awesome things. And those "things" now matter less to the outside world than they ever would have before.

That sorta sucks. Emotionally as well as financially.

article points out a real problem - simplicity is one of the hardest things to achieve. the act of reduction is important.

buts its a refreshing that there is an initial list of half baked projects, i suppose meant to evoke horror at the untidiness and wasted time. but honestly each of those projects sound cool as hell. not necessarily durable - but who cares. i’d argue there is a skill, one that is different than traditional programming, that the author was building up over that period.

discipline is important. focus is hard. but allowing yourself to play is not a bad thing at all and i dont think building little interesting side projects should be a shameful act.

I have a friend who considers himself very humanist. He is really into UBI and more into socialist than me. He is environmentally conscious, all the bells and whistles. He is also Catholic.

He always asked me to help him build this app and that app and thinks his ideas are million dollar ideas. He has ADHD.

Surprisingly, he really loves LLM. He doesn't care that LLM destroys knowledge worker bargains by stealing work without compensating the original authors. He doesn't care that LLM uses a lot of energy. He doesn't care that LLM will concentrate money in the hands of the few. He doesn't care that the Pope has a crusade against LLM. For someone with humanist tendencies this seems to contradict his beliefs.

All he cares is, "I can make apps now and my 5 year old kids are making games by prompting, and we can make money using this, those who don't will be left behind, including you".

AI make easy work even easier, at the same time it shortens the attention span making it more difficult to do any difficult work. That's why there is so little real progress despite huge productivity gains.

It's pretty much impossible for any positive story about AI to get upvoted here, isn't it? Positivity and normalcy doesn't get clicks

The author has a problem with spending too much time at computer.

I have ADHD, and for the last 2+ years, virtually 100% of my AI-assisted coding has gone into one product, which is a SaaS that supports my family. I have no end of ideas for little side projects, things to spin off, components I can open source from what I’ve built, etc. But unlike when I was younger (I’m old now), I’ve been able to resist the siren song of the ADHD side quest, and instead channel that towards the one project I know I should be focused on.

In other words, the issue isn’t the AI subscription, it’s the ADHD.

Every time I try to let Claude go off and do stuff on its own it’s always pinging me to approve something. Even in auto mode. Impossible to really run at length without either constantly having your focus broken, or just running it with permissions disabled. I do it in a container from time to time, but then by the time I get back to it sometimes there’s just so much slop it’s impossible to reason.

It’s a way of working that I really despise and if it’s the future of the profession I want nothing to do with it.

> It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends.

You make this sound like a bad thing. ADHD isn't always about attention deficit, although it is right there in the name. It's more about attention dysregulation. For those of us prone to hyperfocus, working with AI can provide the kinds of stimulation we crave. I can hardly remember a time when I've felt more engaged with my work, more productive, and more badass.

I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined. At the end of the day I have the satisfaction of browsing the pretty, readable, DRY, maintainable code we end up with after rounds of refactoring and back and forth. I have always employed linters and code formatters, and this is no different, and my standards are still the same. I yell at the clanker about code duplication, hard-coded assumptions, tightly coupled logic, and in the end, while I don't understand the details of every algorithm, I really understand what we've built and the architecture we've designed.

It seems to me with the rise of astroturfing and lies and deceit being more normalized, the benefit of using these AIs goes disproportionately to the AI companies who get experienced senior engineers training data.

And they get to convince people to pay them to give away their most intimate nontraining data and secret ideas to a for profit entity.

maybe this is the future now, your list of achievement could be anyone's list of achievements. heck even the salespersons at work can do this with AI now. There is no affinity to it. Future will potentially be like this, marked will be overflooded by artificiel software.

AI is great for programs but every product ever kinda sucks if you don't understand a lot of things computers are pretty bad at, generally.

I think this blames the technology way too much.

> Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it.

So don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm.

Nobody told the author to sit down and write a bunch of random useless stuff.

This is like blaming your bicycle for enabling you to stop at too many shops that you didn’t mean to go to when you originally meant to ride straight to the grocery store.

> and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.

Why is it wasted? A powerful new tool was invented, and enthusiasts are exploring ways to harness it. They'll come away with the skill to wield this new tool effectively. The programs they're writing are completely secondary.

AI makes single purpose throw away tools easy to create. This is GREAT. I had to migrate an old Windows 2012 file server share to SharePoint. Microsoft's tools don't work on this old OS. Their SharePoint migration tool running on other machines on the local network constantly failed for nebulous reasons. I finally got fed up and spent a few hours with Gemini Pro and Claude and created a sync tool using C# that does the migration and keeps the network share in sync with SharePoint until we do the final cutover. I don't expect to ever use this tool again, and that's totally fine. I'll still put it on GitHub in case someone has a use for it, but I'm not sure why I should lament the fact that this tool exists and may never see another use or the fact that I won't maintain it.

Don't waste your life playing with shiny new toys, sure, but learning how to use AI by creating things is not a waste of time.

what if…

we just used ai to improve products and services

instead of all this wanking off showing how you go through 1 billion tokens a month (not really that impressive)

what would be way more cool is

i made something that reliably saves others 8 hours a month of busywork

>exploring AI as a lens in Marshall McLuhan-like thinking

I would be wary of using McLuhan-like media analysis of AI. His central argument is that media are tools that extend man's ability. A calculator or a spell checker extend our thinking and writing. AI does not extend those abilities so much as it completely replaces it.

The way in which it does resemble media is insofar as it captures the same urge that McLuhan wrote about to see ourselves extended into the world. McLuhan tied this to the myth of Narcissus. The difference is that where Narcissus falsely believed it wasn't him and fell in love with what he saw, we falsely believe the image we see is ourselves and fall in love with it.

[dead]

Cal Newport is a grifter whose one and only output nowadays is posting anti-AI rhetoric.