Task Paralysis and AI

Ozzie-D

This resonates. The "idea to result" loop getting shorter with AI is genuinely addictive, I've noticed it in my own workflow too. But theres a flip side nobody talks about: once you get used to that speed, going back to manual implementation feels 10x worse than it did before. The paralysis dosn't go away, it just gets masked. The real question is whether AI is solving the problem or just compressing the dopamine cycle around it.

Weryj

I could have written this article myself. The addiction part, the ADHD part and the pending test part. The fear of becoming addicted to AI is real and I don't think I'll be capable to stop it, considering we're asking people who struggle with avoiding quick dopamine to use it professionally in their daily work life. My Pro went to Max(5) to Max(20) pretty quickly and I was burning through that weekly limit still, without large agentic workflows that burn tokens. Just me and 4-5 terminals. Sometimes I was happy to hit the limit because I was forced back to normal life. I've gone back to Pro to stop what was happening. Now I'm self-aware enough to notice the trend and put up safe guards, but that's because I've always had to adapt my environment to control my behaviour because I know direct behaviour control is abnormally challenging. I fear for those who won't see it coming, until they're in deep.

sourcecodeplz

It is really weird reading things but I guess normal? It seems many feel this, including me. AI just compounds this behavior even more! Darn.

pllbnk

So the end game for the current generation of AI companies won't be productivity improvements but gambling, just like everything else nowadays. That's why they want to get us all into these massive casinos they call data centers and don't want us to own the slot machines. So what that you have ideas - other people have them too. It's not ideas that build businesses but knowing right people or ability to sell products.

p0w3n3d

> What is it good for? > For me, personally? It helps me overcome my task paralysis. As mentioned earlier: I have a plan. A strategy. An idea. I just need someone (or something), who has fun in churning through the implementation. I have the ideas. But boy is coding exhausting. I find the same. AI helps me overcome any paralysis. I just think "hey it's cheap to write the prompt" and go on.

cl0ckt0wer

AI has replaced video games for me. And there are plenty of cheaper models that "do it" for me, I don't have to spend $$$$ just for entertainment. I will step up to the frontier for serious work. But if I'm just playing, I'm going for the free stuff on openrouter. Also, ai art is fine. It looks better than me using paint. That said, there are plenty of foss art pieces and public domain that you can leverage if all you really need is placeholders, and that is much cheaper.

thrance

Don't know about ADHD and whatnot, but I do feel this "task paralysis" pretty often. One thing that I found works really well for me is to work on multiple projects at once. Go one to two weeks on one, then switch to another. I'm not lacking motivation anymore and it feels great.

dgellow

I do have an actual diagnostic and I had the same experience over the past year with early coding harness at the beginning of the year, then Claude code since its release date. But after 1+year going that direction I really don’t want to continue. The novelty is gone, dealing with AI now feels frustrating and boring, I miss engaging deeply with the actual lower level technical challenges. I do not want to manage fleets of agents. I do not want to rediscover for the hundredth time that in fact all this time an agent took shortcuts for acceptance tests I rely upon and didn’t catch. Or once again get the agent to understand why and what I want it to do after its context got bloated and it start to drift completely. While I got artifacts I can use (libraries, tools, docs), including some things that I’m pretty confident are SoA I do not feel satisfied anymore knowing that I used a model to generate them, even if I was the one designing every part of it. I do feel that I’m lying anytime I come to a colleague to share a new cool tool I have made. And I do not feel that relying on AI actually helped me improve with dealing with my executive function issues. YMMV but I’m personally feeling burnt out with AI coding agents and ready to go back to the old ways for my next personal project

adamtaylor_13

Nitpick: Stop the throat clearing and get to the point. The final paragraph is the whole point of the article. It's a real turnoff when I have to scroll past a moral lecture on artistry and piracy when I just want to hear your thoughts on task paralysis. --- To the author's point though, AI is incredible at building some initial momentum on a task. The initialization energy is basically zero.

andai

Re: Claude usage limits There was a comment the other day that explained how to use the new DeepSeek V4 with Claude Code. I mention because it's roughly fifty times cheaper than Claude, and the quality gap is closing. Which is the difference between "I don't use it for anything serious because I constantly run into limits" and "I can actually use the thing..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002640 It seems "Sonnet-ish" in quality so far, but I haven't tested it much yet.

albert_e

Resonates with me. In a paradoxical way, the amount of stuff you can get done in an hour now is like a firehose -- which we rarely experienced in our earlier life -- which can be overwhelming to my brain. So I subconsciously resist starting a session because I never feel fully rested, calm, and focussed to take all that and process it well. There are also 10x more "active" projects now -- and prioritization and choosing between them at every moment is still a struggle. The tempation to do the fun and novel thing and avoid important but familar boring chores pops up every step of the way and can derail you for days. I am still trying to create a system that works -- now using the very tools. Long journey ahead. EDIT: My experience -- I was paying for both Claude Code as well as ChatGPT Pro ...but was heavily almost exlucively using CC for coding work because it was so good. After CC started hammering the session and weekly quotas lately -- I tentatively srated using Codex and find that it seems equally good and almost indistnguishable for my work, and ocassionally shines by one-shotting some tasks. This helped me stay afloat with just 2x$20 spend per month without feeling held-up for ransom. Also never hit codex limits till now. Leaving a 5 hour session quota unused towards the end, or worse not even starting a 5 hour session clock, was a source of constant anxiety -- that I am wasting precious quota getting nothing done. I think I am getting over that now.

keiferski

Another way to put this is that focus is ultimately what matters, when it comes to actually getting stuff done. Choosing what not to do is often more important than what you actually do. Since AI tools make it extremely easy to get started, it's really easy to begin half a dozen different projects, feel like you're being productive, but actually accomplish nothing. This accurately described how I used to utilize AI – and my ChatGPT history is filled with all sorts of grandiose project plans. But lately I've been more and more narrow with what I actually prompt. This leads me to think that a chatbox is not the best UI for using AI, as it's too open-ended and too prone to give you long, broad answers, rather than hyper-specific ones.

rufasterisco

Some traits I recognized in many excellent coders i worked with, their drive to optimization, intellectual thirst, critical and creative thinking are attributes i consistently correlated with them being in some sort of neurodivergence spectrum. Being able to remove the "first step" block is great, but what worries me is that this is coupled with LLMs sycophantic behaviours. My gut feeling is that coupling the feeling of unblocking ones capabilities with dopamine hits with the constant praising over someone abilities is an intro to psychosis and paranoia for them.

sajithdilshan

I can relate to this. Last October, I had a real epiphany using Claude Code at work. Suddenly, that initial inertia of starting something whether it’s drafting a JIRA ticket, structuring a PR, or just brainstorming completely vanished. I started using Claude exclusively in plan mode, and within minutes, I’d have full clarity on exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. With the release of the Opus model, I felt 100% more productive because I stopped spending time on menial tasks like manual coding or documentation. Instead, I shifted my focus to architecting, problem solving, and reviewing code to make it perfect. I even wrote two PyCharm plugins to unify my workflow (one to manage Claude Code sessions as a first class citizen and another to render Markdown in a less eye straining way) so I don't have to leave the IDE. However, the novelty is starting to wear off. Six months ago, I would have truly admired how efficient and productive the current version of myself has become, but now I just take it for granted. It has become the new normal, and I’m finding myself bored and stuck in a vicious cycle of constantly needing to reach the next level.

_ink_

For me it's different. I am not diagnosed, but I think my executive function doesn't work right. It's really hard for me to start a new task, but when it is interesting enough I can hyper focus until it's done. In the past that often happened when I needed to implement something not too trivial. But now that AI does the implementation in minutes I need to switch tasks constantly and it is honestly super exhausting for me.

hyperific

Addressing the end of the article, I think that we are all very much still learning how to use AI responsibly. It's like we just discovered alcohol and we're going on a rager every night because we don't know any better yet. It's too easy to buy €100 of Claude tokens and burn through them to make those dream projects appear as if by magic. There's a middle ground where, for example, instead of building a whole project it could produce a project template and provide guidance as you build. That should take the edge off the task paralysis and hopefully disrupt the addiction loop.

ravila4

As someone with ADHD, it’s a lot more nuanced than that. Coding agents can remove task paralysis, but they also introduce many other distractions. Being one prompt away from zero to one is a double edged sword, because it means any random thought, idea and side project is also a prompt away.

ncr100

I've a thought that AI could drive humanity to appreciate humans, as a side effect of its rise. Nowadays we're bumping up against alternative nonhuman intelligences, nowadays as we go about our lives. New neighbors, kind of. And AI has its idea of 'living' in this world .. as a servant to us mainly. So human life is changing: we now have the opportunity to relate to life (existential) while we're being influenced by the valuable accompaniment of these new docile servants. We're able to "see our plantation and peacocks" if you will. We experience our life-challenges differently ... now being alive to see our daily labors accomplished by others, and we're able to reap the benefits: more dopamine, resources, whatever. Our role is changing somewhat, being 'wealthy' or 'elevated'. I think this poses new questions implicitly, like: Q: Do we like our new wealthy-in-productive-results selves? Is this a life worth living?

dakiol

I've come to the conclusion that using AI is: - good for me in the short term (e.g., I can fulfill what my company asks from me) - good for the company in the short term (see above) - bad for me in the long-term. E.g, I'm starting to become more and more replaceable at my job; I don't have the same depth of understanding of the systems we're building as I used to; my peers and I collaborate way less now (instead of talking to each other, we just ask claude directly); and there's not much to be proud of in my day-to-day work (we're not building CRUDs, but we're not building netflix either, it's something in between). The compounding effect worries me too: every shortcut I take today is a piece of context I'm not internalizing, a debugging instinct I'm not sharpening, a tradeoff I;m not learning to weigh. The skills that used to differentiate me are slowly atrophying. We're all individually more "productive" on paper, but collectively i think we're gonna end up with a codebase nobody fully understands and a team that barely knows each other - good for the company in the long-term: they can fire me easily, they don't need 80% of us anymore. They can just pay anthropic for the agents instead. They don't need people to maintain or read the codebase either: agents do that now. And executives never really cared about us in the first place, so that part hasn't changed I guess. The math is simple from their side: headcount is the biggest line item, and agents don't ask for raises, don't burn out, don't go on leave, and dont push back when leadership makes a dumb call. We're the worst part of the business on a spreadsheet, and the tools to replace us are finally cheap enough that someone is gonna pull the trigger I'm not a superstar engineer. I know that. I'm probably in the 80% bag of engineers out there. Some of you may be in the top 20%, and you probably gonna keep your job somehow (or not, who knows). But for the rest of us, I think we simply cannot compete anymore. I regret every single time I've used AI so far. Nothing good has come from it for me; the feeling is so different from any other technology I've used in the past (frameworks, languages, libraries, whatever): it used to be fun, it improved my career prospects, it expanded my knowledge. AI/LLMs are precisely the opposite: it's not fun, it's making my career worse, and it's not expanding my knowledge. I CANNOT UNDERSTAND HOW MOST OF US, ENGINEERS, ARE OUT HERE VOUCHING FOR AI. WE ARE LITERALLY CHEERING ON THE THING THAT IS COMING FOR OUR JOBS, AND WE'RE DOING IT FOR FREE, POSTING BENCHMARKS AND EVANGELIZING IT TO OUR MANAGERS LIKE WE'RE GETTING A COMMISSION. WE ARE NOT. THE LABS AND THE EXECS GET PAID. WE're HANDING THEM THE ROPE

rglover

Best way I've found around this: I design and code the UI for a given feature by hand and then let AI do the more tedious backend work (HITL/human-in-the-loop) I don't wish to do by hand. It's wonderful if you do the things you enjoy by hand and delegate the "buhhh" stuff to AI. This approach also circumvents the need to review massive PRs (you're only ever concerned with the individual feature, not the whole farm).