[[Steve Yegge]]'s [[Posting|post]][^1] regarding the concept of `AI vampire` and how to deal with it. > Congrats, you were just drained by a company. I’ve been drained to the point of [[Burnout|burnout]] several times in my career, even at Google once or twice. **But now with [[AI]], it’s oh, so much easier**. ## Problems Inherent Acceleration: > I’ve been watching the effect the AI Vampire is having on people around me and I’m growing concerned. We’re all excited, but it’s also… weird. > > [...] how I fall asleep suddenly at all hours of the day after long [[Vibe coding]] sessions, and how my colleagues at SageOx are seriously considering installing nap pods at the “office.” I’m still sleeping a crazy amount. Drug: > It would seem that we are addicted to a new drug, and we don’t understand all of its effects yet. But one of them is massive **fatigue**, every day. > > I don’t think that’s… good. Addiction: > Agentic software building is genuinely **addictive**. The better you get at it, the more you want to use it. It’s simultaneously satisfying, frustrating, and exhilarating. It doles out [[Dopamine|dopamine]] and [[Adrenaline|adrenaline]] shots like they’re on a fire sale. Startups Are Poisoning The Well: > Most of these ideas will fail. > > I know this because they are literally telling me their plans like villains at the end of an old movie, since with [[Gas Town]] **I have mastered the illusion of knowing what I’m doing**. Truth is, nobody, least of all me, knows what they’re doing right now. But I _look_ like I do, so everyone is coming to show me their almost uniformly terrible ideas. Founders: > Startup founders are out there draining people at a faster rate than at any time in history, in pursuit of instantly banal ideas like “oh hey, I bet nobody thought of making a sandbox system for agents.” Cue nine thousand sandbox startups, all of which will eventually be killed off by a single OSS winner wrapped by home-grown internal vibe-coded SaaS > > [...] But the SaaS founders are throwing themselves and their entire companies into it like it’s a classic [[Gold rush]], where everyone’s going to get a stake if they just work to exhaustion. I don’t think it works that way this time, but that’s how they’re treating it. A footrace to stake claims in the AI space. > > That’s a race that ends, in my opinion, with everyone collapsing in exhaustion without actually winning the race. Executives: > **Executives** everywhere are excited about AI. Many of them are **addicted as well**, vibe coding at home, somewhat dangerously. And they’re thinking, gosh, if I just had a _few_ engineers who worked this hard _all the time_ then I wouldn’t need a bunch of the others! This is really just a recruiting problem! Companies: > Companies are straight-up designed for extraction, and so **you need to be the counter-force**. ## Solution $/hr To The Rescue: > Someone else might control the numerator. But you control the denominator. Fight: > But the right setting is in the middle somewhere. Companies will try to drag it higher. You need to **fight** to drag it lower. Leadership: > As company leadership, what, realistically, can you do? I mean, nap pods is an option, probably a good one if people come into the office. But what if people just didn’t have to work so many hours? That is by far the most concrete way to fight the vampire. Change your expectations about how many hours there are in a human workday. Individuals: > As an individual developer, you need to fight the vampire yourself, when you’re all alone, with nobody pushing you but the AI itself. I think every single one of us needs to go touch grass, every day. Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human. Hours: > I’m convinced that 3 to 4 hours is going to be the sweet spot for the new workday. Give people unlimited tokens, but only let people stare at reports and make decisions for short stretches. Assume that exhaustion is the norm. **Building things with AI takes a lot of human energy**. [^1]: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163