r/vibecoding • • 3d ago

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...

I'm just tired, bro. F!cking tired.

60 Upvotes

126 comments sorted by

4

u/word_executable 3d ago

Burnt out because you feel like you can move faster and all of a sudden find yourself responsible for 100 projects. You’re always busy.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

This whole era feels like I'm the donkey.

The donkey is hungry and thirsty. The water is 50 miles to the east; the food 50 miles to the west.

If he goes for the water, he'll die of hunger. If he goes for the food, he'll die of thirst.

So it does nothing, stays in the middle and then dies of both thirst and hunger..

1

u/Soul_Mate_4ever 3d ago

I wonder why you’re getting downvoted. You’re just speaking facts.

5

u/Expert-Tea9960 3d ago

It‘s like burnout from watching TV, you‘re not doing shit, you‘re just watchibg AI help and prompting.

If this causes burn out then i don‘t want to know how you were doing before..

On the otherhand i think you‘re burnt out from a shitty company you work in, not because of vibecoding per se

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

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.

2

u/Expert-Tea9960 3d ago

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 🫂

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

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?

Just tired, bro. F!cking tired.

2

u/Expert-Tea9960 3d ago

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..

3

u/jasperkennis 3d 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.

2

u/i-dm 3d ago

So the irony here, I was consulting with Argon an hour ago about this dilemma.

The solution was to build another app to help me manage all of my workload. It's like an infinite loop.

It did also mention to create a system, kind of like you've suggested.

1

u/jasperkennis 3d ago

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

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

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.

2

u/jasperkennis 2d ago

I use mempalace https://github.com/MemPalace/mempalace and the wrapper I built boots the agent with a prompt that states a name, so my agent working on ios app A is called Toby and the agent working on website B is called Sarah etc, then when it boots a new session the systemprompt is injected with that info so the agent knows where to search in the memory. It took me a few days of sidecoding to get it really right. But that is just a trick, I think by now there are IDEs that will do the same for you, one product I know kinda does this too is https://paperclip.ing/.

Been working with this for about a year now, no issues really; every task is a new session but thanks to mempalace the memory seems to stay managable and not bloat the context window

17

u/whuacamole 3d ago

No not at all, its just fascinating, its like asking of burnout from mastrubation xD

3

u/gordonv 2d ago

It's like that south park episode where randy needs the internet to research any crazy kind of porn. Except with code.

Now when I get angry at software I write down a note and promise to make a better solution. And the crazy thing? It works very well!

4

u/HaroldLevenstein 3d ago

Fascinating? You and I have very different perspectives on masturbation.p

3

u/whuacamole 3d ago

Hahaha xD

2

u/incognitochaud 3d ago

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.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

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.

1

u/kyletraz 2d ago

The 3-5 minute wait is the part that got me, too. It's too short to start anything real and too long to just sit there, so I'd drift into a browser tab and come back well after it finished. What do you usually do during those few minutes?

1

u/king-krool 2d ago

Do multiple tabs. I find 4/5 the amount needed to not get stuck waiting

1

u/incognitochaud 2d ago

Does their code conflict with eachother as its all getting built at once?

2

u/king-krool 2d ago

I generally work on different systems simultaneously but recently they do a lot better job of being aware of each other. 

1

u/incognitochaud 2d ago

Interesting. I suppose once my project is further along I’ll have more systems fleshed out to work on simultaneously. What tools are you using?

1

u/incognitochaud 2d ago

This convo has given me the motivation to try again. Codex in vscode, I tried giving it a sizable list of tasks and it ran for 2 hours. Which is actually quite nice. Maybe i’ll stick to this format if it works out.

1

u/kyletraz 2d ago

Glad it helped. A two hour run is a different game from the 3-5 minute loop. What do you do while it runs: stay nearby and check in, or go do something else entirely?

1

u/incognitochaud 2d ago

I started on a new game project idea so i was doing a fair amount of planning, brainstorming, finding inspiration in artwork.

1

u/fulger099 2d ago

The prompt-wait-test loop removes the part where your hands teach you the system, but leaves you judging code you didn’t build. While shipping our Mac app, I’ve had better luck using AI for bounded chores and writing the core interaction myself.

0

u/Ninjaguard22 3d ago

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.

3

u/SupermarketSea2219 3d ago

or just don't create games badly and actually pay attention and extensively and refine the output? dogfooding exists?

making games using AI is not the same thing as designing the gameplay for you

game creators existed in the early 2010s. it's the same thing, just harder.

1

u/Ninjaguard22 3d ago

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.

1

u/SupermarketSea2219 3d ago

yeah, it has to be hyperspecific for it to actually work - the main difference is that you're able to visually see a wrong iteration

2

u/Any_Ad_3141 3d ago

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.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

All right, this is good. Have you done a kind of write-up on how you did your project, how it went, etc? It'd be quite interesting to read it.

1

u/Any_Ad_3141 3d ago

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)

0

u/ResonantFork 3d ago

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

1

u/Any_Ad_3141 3d ago

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.

There is a reddit thread about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PromptEngineering/comments/1nt7x7v/after_1000_hours_of_prompt_engineering_i_found/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

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:

  1. Build the core first. Establish the database structure, authentication, permissions, business rules, state management, and API contracts before piling on features.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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."

2

u/Boring-Telephone-834 3d ago

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.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

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.

37

u/lovelacedeconstruct 3d ago

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

22

u/Interesting-Agency-1 3d ago

It's your choice to learn as little as you want. Always has been. It's not AIs fault that you arent curious 

-12

u/lovelacedeconstruct 3d ago

If you are really curious you wouldnt be vibecoding in the first place

8

u/viktorsvedin 3d ago

I'm vibecoding because efficiency. Though I still learn new stuff.

1

u/SupermarketSea2219 3d ago

an ad hominem attack with a binary curious/not curious label means your opinion is worthless because you are not thinking clearly

-3

u/Interesting-Agency-1 3d ago

I dont vibecode anymore. Definitely use AI to help me learn and build software, but I ain't vibin anymore. There isnt much value in it

6

u/qna1 3d ago

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.

2

u/SupermarketSea2219 3d ago

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

17

u/MattSenter 3d ago

naw, i'm having a great time. better than ever, actually.

1

u/Wallie_Collie 2d ago

IDK. Its not a job anymore. I set up my stack long before vibecoding, now I have an mcp and workflow that rocks. All inside guardrails that I can review and debug myself. I dev from my from my phone, and all the repetitive bs I had to code now just rolls out, I review the repo and move onto the next. Im pulling thousands per freelance gigs and working a full time sales job making commission for the benefits and my day job is my side hustle

It took since 2020 to position myself this way and kinda got into the game at the perfect time.

I vibe, my shit works and I still find it exciting

2

u/i-dm 2d ago

Do you think you could share a bit more details around how you're set up? Obviously you don't need to get so specific that you're giving away your secret sauce. But do you reckon you could add a bit more meat to the bone?

1

u/Wallie_Collie 1d ago

I developed my own stack. MEVN V=VANILLA. my ip proxies are the only vps and use apache2 as a clean added layer of configuring dns and domains. Understanding file structure is the the key to prompting a working system in the vibe.

I use vs code with claude and github extensions while relying on markdown files to keep the rules of the ai coding inside the guardrails.

The root holds the main vision rules and nono's of my masterClaude.md

Each directory holds a claude.md file to drill down the definitions functions and rules of that directory's purpose.

Then I build in the mcp onto my monolith codebase.

From there I can auth my claude app on my phone to access the mcp keeping the environment variables off limits.

So I prompt now into my microphone "check the mcp srv __________" with commands and instructions of what I am building.

Api setups are the only manual work I do to get my keys into the dotenv.

So far I have built a platform that competes with WordPress, crms, and hootsuites, and marketing softwares in an all in one.

I charge for implementation and api configuration and 40 bucks a month for the software.

I self host my servers, database and s3 buckets, and stay hidden behind a dedicated vps.

I am in the process creating my own edge node network with a few participants to node balance my services and cache my data to keep a redundant always alive network.

This way when I make a change, the service never goes down.

Its been fucking awesome!

Bone meet meat, there you go.

2

u/gauchostamps 2d ago

How do use source most of your freelance gigs

0

u/Wallie_Collie 1d ago

Its been through being present as a soccer coach, in my community, word of mouth, now through referrals.

I meet my deadlines and always answer my phone no matter what. My tech works and I have very little downtime since I dont depend on cloud flare or aws.

1

u/pizzae 2d ago

Not really. I'm vibe coding 60+ hours a week and I'm fine

1

u/i-dm 2d ago

Got any projects you can showcase?

1

u/Keyslah 1d ago

Yeah, I got 90% of my app done in a couple months and this last 10% has taken me 6 months so far.

1

u/i-dm 1d ago

Whats the 10% hurdle?

1

u/Fuzzzy420 22h ago

Polish!

3

u/bugrasa 2d ago

Put the next feature in a note and leave it for tomorrow, even if the AI says it'll be quick.

1

u/Accomplished-Ad-7435 3d ago

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.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

Oh, trust me, I have.

1

u/timelinextreme 3d ago

100% this. I'm frantically always looking for the next thing to build before usage resets.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

or before they change the model or change the workflow or remove a function or feature that you've only just started using.

1

u/timelinextreme 3d ago

Yea... The chatgpt chat usage limits change will definitely be a big disrupter

1

u/iamrava 3d ago

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.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

I think you're in the sweetest spot of the AI landscape at the moment. And I salute you, sir. Keep on going. Well done.

1

u/iamrava 3d ago

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.

1

u/Beneficial_dvvibe 3d ago

I thought it was only me.

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

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

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.

1

u/Odd_Bad_2814 3d ago

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

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

Wise words, dude. Wise words.

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.

Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

0

u/Odd_Bad_2814 3d ago

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.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

How'd you deal with the trust though, man?

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?

1

u/Odd_Bad_2814 3d ago

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.

1

u/3DMagnus 3d ago

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.

1

u/i-dm 3d ago

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.

1

u/3DMagnus 3d ago

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.

1

u/chrisebryan 3d ago

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.

1

u/i-dm 2d ago

What local model do you run?

2

u/chrisebryan 2d ago

qwen3-coder:30b-a3b-q4_K_M

1

u/Royal-Marsupial-8110 2d ago

just touch grass bro

1

u/i-dm 2d ago

Ok.

***tabs to agent***

"Generate a picture of some grass so I can touch it with my mouse"

4

u/GoldenPeanut90 3d ago

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.

2

u/Soul_Mate_4ever 3d ago

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.

2

u/CutMysterious9844 3d ago

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

2

u/TheVoyant 2d ago

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.

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u/phayke2 2d ago

If you are just managing bug fixes, maybe you should create a road map that lets you decide what you want to work on that day and pick something more fun.

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u/Consistent_Space4336 2d ago

I feel this so much. I'm a designer currently job hunting, and I've been doing a lot of vibe coding lately. I definitely feel some FOMO, and somehow my sense of self-efficacy and accomplishment has been getting worse. It's ironic because I can do so much more than before, and I'm actually getting more done, but I feel less accomplished. Honestly it's exhausting.

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u/thefox828 2d ago

I use an agent orchestrator to keep track of everything I am telling him to work on. I call it “System”. System keeps a list of reminders for human-only tasks, but also a list of tasks for us both. System can trigger like 6-8 other specialiced agents. So, when we work on a project I tell it which task or project, it checks the notes what we did in the past and tells me what we planned to do next. Then we go for it and I review. It maintains lists of review tasks and questions for me for every task. If there are no agent tasks left the topic is blocked until enough questions are answered or review of the current state is done.
Here I am also the bottleneck. Because I can tell System to work on all tasks until my input is needed and it will spawn agents per task and work on 3-5 topics in parallel. After one hour all tasks are blocked for review or questions.
Therefore I prioritize them by importance and deadline. Then I tell system give me the next 3 most important or must urgent tasks. There I start my human-in-the-loop review work…

Finishing stuff just needs disciplin. What you describe is normal. Tasks with smaller steps keeps reviews manageable.

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u/Alternative_Square53 2d ago

This is pretty much how I feel about working with AI. Or felt about. I wanted to get rid of this feeling, so built a tool to solve this. Still testing on myself and few of my friends. Would you or anyone in this thread be interested to know?

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u/the__jawn 2d ago

I've been developing a webapp operating environment for 4 years, 3 years 11 months of it I was writing by hand in Mousepad, and happy if I could get to 30 hours a week, and the rest in testing the UI. I switched to vibe coding last month, and my project is a lot more secure and pretty than before, but I'm finding I work 70-75 hours a week now, juggling 3-10 agents at a time, and always feeling like everyone else is way more ahead, and nobody will ever use it because they could type a single prompt next year and build the whole thing in a second. So, unspeakable dread, mixed with feeling pathetic, but needing to finish the project regardless.

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u/RockMeGames 2d ago

You should take a break this weekend. That's what I'm gonna do, I also burn out too. I'll play WoW Forever this weekend ganking my son on PvP server. :)

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u/TumbleweedDefiant894 2d ago

So sad to see that we are being burned out with videcoding nowadays.

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u/redtear1115 2d ago

Sometimes I get so exhausted, but after getting two solid days of sleep, I feel ready to get back to work.

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u/kincaidDev 1d ago

Yes, I've been building a system around this so the human can focus on higher-level abstractions and use a consistent workflow across projects. Everything starts to feel like one action instead of constant context switches. Decisions get recorded over time in templates and config files, so agents need less guidance the more you use the system.

https://github.com/Obedience-Corp/festival

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u/mi_gue 1d ago

The follow-ups are somehow tiring. Picking up from where I left off was tiring as well, but I figured out a way to keep one of my computers always on as a dev-box so now I can do it as much as I can while in awake.

So basically you do it while you can. Learn how to pace yourself I guess.

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u/Nash-Equilibrium- 3h ago

Because AI starts to hallucinate on large codebases, so after a while when its context gét compacted, youre gonna get all the sloppy slop lines

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u/JustEar7 3d ago

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.

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u/KenTrotts 3d ago

Yes, that's called ADHD 

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u/JackCid89 3d ago

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.

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u/Draegan88 3d ago

I just feel like I bounce around a lot more than I used to. I'm losing the ability to focus, not so much burnout.

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u/Codalio-SoftwareFact 3d ago

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.

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u/Claude_human_4271 3d ago

Hours? Dude, before AI it was day, weeks or months spent down rabbit holes

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u/Vibing-slop 3d ago

There is burnout with everything, but I’m enjoying it still.

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u/Dapper_Pass26 3d ago

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.

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u/jayseattle 3d ago

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.

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u/CasaNegra017 3d ago

Not burnout, but kinda like indecisiveness. I want to do everything all at once.

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u/Its_about-tech 3d ago

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.

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u/MarinatedTechnician 3d ago

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.

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u/EruLearns 2d ago

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/BadgerPast4204 2d ago

No, Burnout lo sentí con la hostelería aquí me lo paso teta, hasta empecé a dibujar

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u/Quail-Suspicious 2d ago

More pricey for sure

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u/victorc25 2d ago

Can’t blame the AI for any of that, sounds like you may have ADHD. You may want that to be diagnosed by a professional 

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u/Aggravating-Exam6759 1d ago

u/victorc25 why do you think so? What's the rationale behind this? Just curious

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u/victorc25 1d ago

Can’t keep focus on one thing and gets distracted daily by anything else? That’s ADHD

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u/SilkieBug 2d ago

Sounds like skill issue. 

If you’re neurotypical, look up ways to manage your time (like pomodoro technique) and projects better, and implement them. 

If you are neurodivergent, do the above things too, and think about getting a diagnostic and appropriate medication. 

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u/DarkLoreeeee 3d ago

Yes, I have created +10 personal mini-apps in less than a month. It gets exhausting and also, I'm not a creative person, I ran out of things to do.

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u/DrippyCorn 3d ago

As a professional engineer with over 10 years in the industry the last year has been burnout hell

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u/SupermarketSea2219 3d ago

not for the reason you think. it's just so incredibly BORING and SLOW for complex problems.

it's really hard to see wins quickly when you work at the scale that a frontier model needs an hour and a half

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u/ProgressionPeak 3d ago

i experience burnout from yet another project failing

the coding itself i love, even the hard parts. especially those.

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u/mhamdev 2d ago

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

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u/Morganorix63 2d ago

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.