The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

A user reports that AI coding agents act as a "thermonuclear ADHD amplifier," rapidly generating polished projects from vague ideas but leaving users unable to maintain the resulting code. The author argues the technology produces cheap rewards with minimal friction, making it a liability that requires curtailing use or developing discipline to manage.

The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription https://thoughts.hmmz.org/2026-05-31.html I didn't mean to build most of these things. Usually the Claude session started with something like " write a quick script for X", and one hour later the result is not aquick script for X, nor in the usual case is my problem solved, whatever the original itch happened to be.On that last point, this technology is horrificfor attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated "projects" they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted. This is a very real problem. I'm finding that coding agents can take me from a vague idea to a working solution, one with tests and documentation and that looks like a carefully considered project evolved over the course of many weeks... in less than an hour. Even if the code is rock solid, there's a limit to how many projects like that I can sensibly care for - and if they're instantly abandoned, what value was there from creating them in the first place? David doesn't think this is sustainable at all: I have no idea how to manage AI at present except by curtailing use, because a tool producing a cheap reward with minimal input and no friction can only be a liability, and achieving that realisation is probably the only real contribution of AI to date. I'm hopeful that the critical skill to develop here is discipline . That’s not great news for me: I’ve been trying to figure that one out for decades Interestingly, the Hacker News thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345896 has gathered a number of comments from people with ADHD who are finding agents help them achieve the focus they've been missing: Via Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345896 Tags: productivity https://simonwillison.net/tags/productivity , ai https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai , generative-ai https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai , llms https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms , coding-agents https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents , ai-misuse https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-misuse