This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...
This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...
Sounds like polyphasic sleeping might re-emerge as the lifestyle solution. Instead of waiting for agents to complete, you should sleep on the response so when you arise you have the optimized prompt ready to go and a reset on your energy to prevent the burnout.
Amusingly this is an almost-exact description of how I work on my current project, sharc. I'm porting Arc to Common Lisp, and implementing as many HN features as I can. I've been documenting as I go with handoffs: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... (Also thanks partly to dang, who is kind enough to find time to answer an email here and there about their current Arc stack.)
At one point I was working so hard that Claude actually suggested, all on its own, that I should get some sleep.
FWIW I've had the opposite experience. Whenever I work late the output is absolute garbage. If I work past midnight it takes me 3 hours to get done what would have taken me 30 mins in the morning, and with way less frustration and stress. Your inputs to the LLM are only as good as how fresh your mind is so I've made it a rule to not work past midnight (unless there's an emergency).
In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.
Feasibly you could do this work while asleep, the lifestyle of the future.
Then you're not challenging yourself with hard enough problems (those include the set of problems Claude cannot solve)
Most software doesn't really have "hard enough problems" unless you're working in deep tech. The majority of SWEs are probably working on some sort of SaaS which isn't super challenging for a model like Opus 4.7. Most of the problems I face are on the product side, which I do need to take time to think through, but it's not as challenging as debugging in the good old days.
How do you go from SaaS to “not super challenging”? The part of a SaaS product that I’m working on uses graph algorithms to work with what’s essentially an interactive form. There’s some mildly university-level computer science stuff and it’s mixed with enough domain expertise that Opus 4.7 is still unable to make even small changes without breaking everything or going against the architecture.
So far I’m not that impressed.
Are you guys hiring?