Show HN: Methadone – Sieze the means of production from our agentic overlords

A developer released Methadone, an open-source tool that wraps agentic AI coding assistants such as Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI with a start-up timeout that grows based on how often and how long the user has run them. Distributed as a Nix function for NixOS and Home-manager configurations and requiring Babashka on the $PATH, Methadone weights each session by age using exponential decay rather than a fixed window, and its optional methadone.stats command reports on the shared usage log instead of wrapping a binary. The developer framed the project around Marx's Theory of Alienation and Naur's "Programming as Theory Building," arguing agentic AI tools can be useful but should not become a crux.

It occurred to me that agentic AI tools can exacerbate the feeling of estrangement from ones own work, per Marx's Theory of Alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s theory of alienation , and are in direct contradiction to Naur's treatise of Programming as Theory Building https://pablo.rauzy.name/dev/naur1985programming.pdf . See my original post https://hachyderm.io/@xophmeister/116857208020117822 on this, on Mastodon. Agentic AI tools can be useful, but they shouldn't become a crux. So I wrote this little tool to seize the means of production Rather than disabling these tools altogether, this script wraps them with a start-up timeout that grows with how much you've leant on them lately -- both how often you've reached for them and how long you've kept them running -- along with a "helpful" message to remind you that you should be in control of your own work. This is distributed as a Nix https://nixos.org function, that can be used in your NixOS configuration, for example, like so: js { pkgs, ... }: let methadone = pkgs.callPackage ./path/to/methadone.nix { }; in { environment.systemPackages = methadone.wrap { package = pkgs.claude-code; binary = "claude"; } Wrap as many as you like; they share one log methadone.wrap { package = pkgs.github-copilot-cli; binary = "copilot"; } Methadone under its own name, which reports rather than wrapping methadone.stats ; } or, with Home-manager https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager : home-manager.users.YOU.home.packages = methadone.wrap { package = pkgs.github-copilot-cli; binary = "copilot"; } ; methadone.stats is optional and installs a methadone command that reports on what the log holds rather than standing in front of anything. I gotchu, bro. All you need is Babashka https://babashka.org on your $PATH , plus a directory that takes precedence over the binary you want to wrap: 1. Build the single-file script. The sources are a handful of namespaces, but what gets installed is one file, concatenated in dependency order: bb build 2. Put it somewhere permanent: install -Dm755 methadone ~/.local/share/methadone/methadone 3. Symlink it into a directory that comes earlier in your $PATH than the real binary, with that binary's name: ln -s ~/.local/share/methadone/methadone ~/.local/bin/claude 4. Rinse and repeat for anything else you want to wrap: one symlink each, all pointing at the same script. 5. Optionally, symlink it under its own name as well. Invoked as methadone , with no agent standing behind it, it reports on the log rather than wrapping anything: ln -s ~/.local/share/methadone/methadone ~/.local/bin/methadone Methadone works out what to run from the name it was invoked as. It looks along $PATH for the next binary of that name which isn't itself, so the symlink shadows the real claude and Methadone finds it immediately behind. There's nothing to configure per binary. If that's not what you want -- the real binary isn't on $PATH , or you want to wrap it under a different name -- set METHADONE BINARY to its full path and Methadone will use that instead. That's how the Nix route works: the wrapper sets it for you. The wait is a function of two things: how often you've launched the tool and how long you've kept it running. Recent use counts for more than old and the whole thing is bounded, so that Methadone never becomes so obstructive that deleting it is the rational move. Methadone doesn't count usage inside a fixed window. Every session is weighted by its age instead, with an exponential decay in which :window : A hard window is a cliff. Under a rolling week, last Monday's marathon stops counting this Monday and your friction drops for no reason you earned; a free pass on a schedule you could learn and time your work around. Decaying the weight removes the cliff: old sessions never stop counting, they just matter less. :window is therefore a mean lifetime rather than a cut-off. The half-life follows from it, That gives two decayed totals: a count of launches integrated across the session. Writing Integrating, rather than weighting the whole span at its start, discounts the older part of a long session against its newer and it has a pleasant consequence. A session you never close has The two measurements are traded against each other at a fixed rate and added together into a single score: :session-equivalent . That rate and at its default of 30 minutes reads as a question in English: How long may a session run before it counts as another launch? Both terms are needed, because the friction is a start-up cost and nothing else. Once the nag is paid, keeping a session open is free, so counting launches alone makes the cheapest strategy a single session opened when you wake up and abandoned when you go to bed. That is more use of the tool for less friction, which is precisely backwards. The exchange rate decides which habit comes off worst: set it too generously and someone churning through short sessions is punished harder than someone who never closes one at all. Because the cost of leaving a session open is only charged the next time you start one, Methadone says what it is weighing as it makes you wait: Back for a top-up already, are we? Lately: 6 launches, 9h 11m running, for a score of 25. The scolding escalates with the score as well. A ladder of messages, ordered from mild concern to open denunciation, is spread evenly across the span of the score that the curve actually varies over, which is twice its midpoint; past the top of that span there is nothing harsher left to say, so the sternest of them stands. The words therefore keep pace with the wait rather than repeating one rebuke at every level and a week bad enough to be worth remarking on is remarked upon differently from a quiet one. Consider the following three habits to make that concrete; each a week's worth, at the point where the decay has settled: | | | Score | |---|---|---| | A light week | 5 sessions of 20 minutes | 8 | | A heavy week | 40 short sessions | 47 | | One long session a day | 7 sessions of 8 hours | 119 | The last is what the duration term exists to catch. Under the original https://github.com/Xophmeister/methadone/releases/tag/v0.1.0 formula, which counted launches over a calendar day, it cost exactly the same as the lightest. The score is fed through a logistic, of ceiling Gentle while usage is ordinary, steep once it isn't, then levelling off rather than climbing forever. That bound is deliberate. The obvious alternative -- keep doubling, as the original did -- reaches hours within a fortnight and a wait long enough to be worth circumventing buys no deterrence at all: the bypass is a single rm . A Methadone that's been deleted measures nothing. A hard cap has the opposite defect. Past the cap, more usage is free: you've paid the toll, so you may as well carry on. A logistic approaches its ceiling without ever quite reaching it, so there is always a little more to pay. Two constants shape the curve and they do almost independent jobs. :anchors is a pair of score, seconds opinions: what a light week and a heavy one ought to cost. The steepness and midpoint are solved for from them rather than written down, because 0.0645 and 84.04 are numbers nobody can sanity-check, whereas "ten seconds after a light week" is a judgement you can actually hold. :max-friction is the ceiling, Inverting the logistic gives Those logarithms are where the configuration guard comes from, too: their argument is positive and finite only for If you get it wrong if-you-get-it-wrong . Moving the ceiling barely disturbs the anchored region: | :max-friction | Light week | Heavy week | One long session a day | |---|---|---|---| | 10 minutes | 9 s | 2 min | 10 min | | 20 minutes | 9 s | 2 min | 18 min | | 30 minutes | 9 s | 2 min | 26 min | ...and moving the anchors barely disturbs the ceiling's: | :anchors | Light week | Heavy week | One long session a day | |---|---|---|---| | 10 5 50 60 | 4 s | 49 s | 16 min | | 10 10 50 120 | 9 s | 2 min | 18 min | | 10 20 50 240 | 18 s | 3 min | 19 min | So the anchors set how the everyday feels and the ceiling sets what the worst case costs; you can tune either without upsetting the other. All four are settings, described under Configuration configuration . Methadone runs on its defaults with no configuration at all. To change them, drop a methadone.edn in $XDG CONFIG HOME usually ~/.config/methadone.edn : {:window 14 :days :anchors 10 30 50 300 :log "/home/you/.local/state/methadone/log.edn"} Anything you leave out keeps its default, so a file need only name what you want to differ. | Setting | Default | What it is | |---|---|---| | :window | 7 :days | The decay's mean lifetime | | :retention | 30 :days | How long a session is kept in full before it is reduced to a daily tally | | :heartbeat | 60 :seconds | How often a running session marks itself alive | | :session-equivalent | 30 :minutes | Runtime worth as much as one launch | | :max-friction | 1200 | The longest possible wait, in seconds | | :anchors | 10 10 50 120 | Two score seconds opinions pinning the curve | | :log | XDG state path | Where the log lives, if not where it usually would | Spans of history are given as n unit , where the unit is one of :ms , :seconds , :minutes , :hours or :days ; or as a bare number of milliseconds, if you prefer. Waits, being what you actually sit through, are always plain seconds. :retention must be at least :window and Methadone refuses to start if it isn't: sessions the friction still counts would otherwise be reduced before it could count them and the wait would quietly fall for reasons you hadn't asked for. There is no need to set it generously beyond that, though: What is kept past it is the daily tally, which is kept for good regardless, so a longer retention buys detail nobody reads at the cost of a file rewritten on every heartbeat. Methadone also reads a methadone.edn from each directory in $XDG CONFIG DIRS , after your own. Yours wins, so a NixOS module can install a policy at /etc/xdg/methadone.edn that you remain free to overrule. Methadone refuses to start and says everything that is wrong in one go rather than one fault at a time: Methadone cannot use its configuration: :windwo is not a setting Methadone has :retention must be a positive span: milliseconds, or n unit with unit one of days, hours, minutes, ms, seconds :anchors must rise, cost more than nothing and stay under :max-friction 1200 s Refusing outright is deliberate. The alternative -- shrugging and falling back to the defaults -- means a typo can quietly turn Methadone into something that isn't watching you at all, which is exactly the failure you would never notice. The anchor rule earns its keep here in particular: an anchor at or beyond :max-friction has no finite logarithm and the wait that falls out of the arithmetic is zero . Methadone keeps a log at $XDG STATE HOME/methadone/log.edn ; usually ~/.local/state/methadone/log.edn . Set :log if you would rather it lived elsewhere. It holds two things. Sessions are recorded in full, one entry per launch per wrapped binary, with the moment it began and the moment it ended; these are what the friction is worked out from and they are kept for :retention . Once a session is older than that it isn't discarded but reduced: the detail goes and a tally of the day it began on -- how many launches, how long altogether -- is added to a history that is kept indefinitely. The second half costs a few dozen bytes a day and reaches back as far as you have been running Methadone, which is what the report below is drawn from. Invoked under its own name, with no agent in front of it, Methadone reports rather than wraps: bash $ methadone The last 7 days and what it costs you now: binary launches running score wait claude 9 11h 50m 21 20s copilot 2 45m 2 6s Scored by week: earlier 59 46 35 36 now The two halves of that table are counted differently, deliberately. Launches and running time are a plain tally over seven whole days, which you can check against your own memory of the week. The score and the wait are decayed by age and are what you would pay for reaching for the tool right now; i.e., the very figures that produced your last nag. The trend is scored by week rather than decayed, so that its numbers can be compared with one another and with the rows above them. It draws on the history as well as on the sessions still held in full, so it reaches back further than :retention does. Under Nix, methadone.stats installs it. Otherwise it is the symlink in step 5 above. Yep. However, it's probably easier to just run it than trying to circumvent it. The idea is to provide enough friction to make you think twice before reaching for agentic AI tools and, hopefully, building a habit of re-engaging with your own work. Deleting the log is the obvious way round, but the reporting means deleting isn't free: The history goes with it and the history is the half that accrues rather than the half that charges you. A fortnight in, that's no loss at all. A year in and it's a year of knowing what you actually did. Ctrl+C is not one of the ways round it, but nor is it meant to be a trap. During the countdown it abandons the launch outright: Methadone commends you, exits, the agent never starts and nothing is written to the log, so thinking better of it costs nothing and is not held against you next time. What it cannot do is hurry the wait along, there being no agent on the far side of it to hurry towards. Once the agent is running, Methadone ignores Ctrl+C and leaves the agent to answer it, as it is much better placed to know what interrupting it should mean. To try to further the point, I've included an example agent instruction set to reinforce the idea that you should be in control of your own work. Copy this https://github.com/Xophmeister/methadone/blob/main/AGENTS.md.eg wherever your agent of choice looks for instructions. I sure did...but maybe not in the way you are thinking. Almost all the application code is hand-written, under Claude's tutelage; part of Methadone's remit, despite my better judgement, is as a small project for me to learn Clojure. The only big chunks of code that are generated are the tests -- I hate writing tests -- and the SVG plotter for this README . The friction model was brainstormed between me and the AI and some of the prose here and in comments/docstrings have been expounded at my request.