Confession
I'm a technical coach who teaches teams to slow down, write tests first, and understand the code they're writing. But I haven't written code myself in over 6 months. I prompt agents all day and fill the wait time with Slack and backlog grooming. I can't even write this article on my own...and that's part of the issue.
What my days actually look like
Usually the user story starts out as a vague ask from a product manager or sales person. I talk it out with my pair and start prompting a coding agent to plan the approach. I read the plan, go back and forth correcting it. While I wait for the code to be produced, I'm catching up on Slack conversations, looking ahead at other work to be done in the backlog, or prompting another agent. Nowadays staying busy has become important to me for some reason. I never used to be like this.
How I got here
In July 2025, I started with a new client building AI workflows for them. Later in December I became the team captain and had more responsibilities to take on. Our output was high for a month or 2 to meet deadlines for a conference, so naturally expectations got higher.
I used to meditate for years. My last class I took was a 3 day silence retreat before my son was born. He's now 20 months-old. I've always been a single tasked person. That's why I gravitated towards test lists and TDD so much. I also used to be very intentional about taking breaks. When we remove ourselves from the problem, our brain continues to chew on the problem and we can come back to the work knowing exactly what to do next. I've lost these habits and developed other ones instead. Now I prompt and manage AI coding agents. If it can't figure out the issue, I detail the issue in a markdown file, bead, or task and find another model or session that can crack the solution. This is my life now. I've learned to accept it. Most days it's fun, but the burnout signs are different. When my days are over, my head is pounding from all the cognitive load I've been juggling throughout the day.
The moment that cracked it
In our agentic codebase, we have a vibe-coded evaluation framework that I don't fully understand. It has python scripts to run experiment datasets locally and push the results out to Datadog. This week while improving the visualizations and results one feature got lost while adding the others. I've tried 10+ times to prompt my way past it. But I can't get any agent to figure it out. And I can't figure it out myself, because I don't fully understand the code. The irony is a TDD coach refusing to sit down and read the code because it feels too slow now. Who have I become?
Today my body stopped me
This morning, my body refused to go back to that issue. I took the day off sick. I think my body got sick so I didn't have to face this for another 6+ hours. Two days ago we talked about Steve Yegge's AI Vampire article at work and it made me take stock about my relationship with LLMs. During the meeting, people were running multiple agents in the background. I had prompted an agent just before the meeting had started. I felt this pull to check on the LLM's response, but I didn't. I admitted that I have an addiction to AI. The power it gives software developers is incredible and it can be dangerous to our mental health as well. The options we have at our fingertips is amazing. But at what cost?
What I'm going to do about it
I want to take more breaks. I want to start exercising again and going outside. I want to work on less AI-coded side projects. I want more silence, less devices, and to get a stable reading habit back.
I feel a lot of pressure to stay informed about AI news. I coach teams on AI agents so I feel like I need to understand the landscape. But I need to be okay to take a break from the AI news and just relax and be. I used to be able to mindfully breathe and focus on one thing. I want that back.