When the tool breaking is the only thing that makes you take a break

"Don't stop me now, I'm having such a good time, I'm having a ball"

11pm. Fourth worktree. Everything merging clean. Prompt, approve, ship, prompt, approve, ship. Freddie Mercury starts making sense. You're in the zone. You're a supersonic man. The PRs are green. You're floating around in ecstasy.

Then you realize — that song is about a guy who cannot stop. "Don't stop me, don't stop me, don't stop me." It's not a celebration. It's a confession. He's asking you not to interrupt because if he stops he'll have to feel something.

I barely write code anymore. The AI does 95% of it. I type a sentence, adjust a word, approve, ship. Next worktree. Merge. Next. And I'm more tired than when I did everything myself.

Make that make sense.

The dumbest contradiction

By every metric, my life got easier. The AI is genuinely good — I trust it, I built the systems around it, it ships real work. So why am I cooked by 3pm?

Because it's never one session. The AI is so fast that "done" and "what's next" are the same moment. No gap. No friction. You think "this will only take 5 minutes" — and that thought loops for 9 hours.

When I coded everything myself, debugging was secretly rest. Waiting for builds was meditation. The friction was load-bearing and I didn't know it.

Doomscrolling but productive

Each click is nothing. Each approval is nothing. You never hit the wall where your body says stop. AI-assisted shipping is the doomscrolling of engineering — except you actually ship stuff. Which makes it worse. Because at least with doomscrolling you feel guilty enough to stop.

Your GitHub graph is green. You're shipping. You haven't had an original thought in 3 days but hey — the PR got merged.

So what

Mrinank Sharma ran Anthropic's safeguards research. Last project was studying how AI makes us less human. Quit to write poetry. I'm not saying I get it. I'm saying after my 60th approve-merge-next loop, I don't not get it. (Weakkkkkkk)

We optimized away every reason to stop. Compile times, deploy queues, human bottlenecks — we called them inefficiencies. Turns out they were walls. And walls hold things up.

Credits just ran out. Going for a walk.

Best manager I ever had isn't a person. It's a rate limit.