Ask HN: Are You Tired Too in This AI Era?

It's weird times.

I feel incredibly productive. I'm building in an afternoon what would've taken weeks. I spend all my time in either MR's reviewing code, or a terminal prompting.

I've moved from being a coder, to being a product-engineer-architect. I love coding -- LOVE it. But the role has morphed. And, I actually really like the new role. I love being product centric, and caring about architecture -- it suits me wel..

The code Claude produces is often clean, but terribly archictected. So I'm spending a lot of time reviewing in detail.

But the anxienty - OMG the anxiety.

I work on multple features (generally 4-5 work streams) concurrently, so am constantly context switching. I worry about how much time I'm spending on each task. Am I doing enough code review? Too much? Too little?

What about click-through testing? Our test coverage has never been higher - should I be able to just merge these features? Wasn't that always the promise of TDD - merging with confidence? But, it feels like a risk.

And, I'm moving really really fast - but I assume my competitors are too. So that drives me to move faster. Automate more. Use claude in more places. Which brings more anxiety - am I cutting too many corners? Is this all gonna crumble on me?

Also, is everything I'm working on going to become irrelevant? Will customers buy this product, or vibe code it? Do we even have a moat? Anxiety. More anxiety.

My investors are reading stuff constantly too. They're pinging me with market updates, em […]

Yes it's like I'm being chased by a ghost telling me I need to be more productive. And if I don't use my weekly limit to at least 90% I'm just wasting money and tokens. Should I just burn tokens endlessly? Is that a goal in itself? Where is the vision? Ami really building something worthwhile?

I am surprised of how many people here are claiming they review the results of multiple agents working on different prs at the same time constantly context switching between them.

I just focus on one, I use on purpose very short interactions because I want to check every single function directly and not a whole 300lines file or 2000lines pr just at the end. Probably I am going slower than most of you but I feel I retain the knowledge of my codebase almost as good as when I was the one writing the code directly, and my PRs get very few review comments

What get me tired the most is when people submit to me a pr to review and I see immediately they full vibe coded it and just delegate to me the actual hard work of correcting the nonsense written in it with a single prompt without interactions. The worst is when you ask someone why they implemented something that way and they answer with "well calude made it, I really didn't think about it, now that I read it it makes no sense indeed"

I am vey tired. I maintain Pinggy - my first bootstrapped startup and building Lumirank , my next one. But every day is a struggle of coping up with what is new and what 20 more competitors that corpped up yesterday are up to. Millions of lines of codes being written every day, I can not merge without knowing the overall architecture and flow. But I can't rest. Everyone is running.

Sometimes I feel please someone give me a job where I can work 12 hours a day - but the rest of the 12 hours I don't need to think about what will happen tomorrow.. It will still be less stressful.

I tell it I am a chimp with a 3 inch brain so complexity beyond chimp scale is forbidden unless requested. And to apply theory of bounded rationality during all chimp interactions. Takes care of me like a spl circus animal.

I ask it for a quick complexity thermometer reading when ever the rabbit hole is looking like it might explode.

Also walking away from it every few hours and doing random simple mindless stuff has helped. Like I will go inspect my fish and plants. Try to have a chat with the cat, get others around to do a little dance etc etc.

I have a priest in the family who has to deal with lot of heavy duty stuff/people's problems. They train them not to get totally sucked in and loose themselves. He calls it grounding. Just simple mundane things to focus shift out of anything heavy.

As agents become more capable, they can take on bigger work packages without being micromanaged. My conclusion from that is: I need to elevate myself up the hierarchy and work more like an engineering director than an engineer. For a few days, I contemplated how I want to work.

For me, the conclusion was: I want a spatial layout of work on a canvas per project and narrated demo videos, like in a feature launch review, where I as "engineering director" can decide to launch or give feedback for another iteration. Input mostly by voice. So it's a bit like sitting in a meeting room with engineers coming and going.

As software is so cheap to build nowadays, I think you just need to find out how you want to work and then build the harness for that style of work.

(If you want to try out my style, it's free and open-source. I'm sharing it because I'm excited about how much fun it is to use: https://github.com/sadilek/obeya)

Enforcing boundaries and saying no have gotten more important than ever, now that violation of either is automated at superhuman speeds.

FWIW, there might be a silver lining in this. A lot of dysfunction in the current state of tech can (IMO) be traced back to violation of boundaries.

This might lead to a cultural shift. Though, that might also just be wishful thinking on my part.

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> I would love to hear your tips, but still be relevant in this AI era, so my boss does not fire me.

If your boss fires you because you didn't multiply your performance by doing more work in the same time (without your compensation changing), that's not your fault but simply your employer trying to squeeze you harder and that not working out.

Always keep that in mind in these discussions.

Which isn't to say that you should not improve efficiency and all, but it needs to be organic. If something inorganic is asked, then the (moral) failure is on the asker and not the askee.