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ZDNET's key takeaways
Programmers find AI tools addictive, but exhausting.
Coding speed can be lost due to delays in fixing AI-written code.
AI programming tools can lead to programmer workaholism and burnout.
Yes, yes, we get it. Thanks to GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, whatever the hot new AI tool is for developers, you can get more work done than ever before as a programmer. But even as developers use them ever more to generate boilerplate, explain unfamiliar code, draft tests, refactor modules, and troubleshoot errors, many are also finding that the same tools can be pains in the rump.
AI-induced workaholism
That's because, as Quentin Rousseau, CTO and co-founder of the AI-powered incident report company Rootly, described in a LinkedIn post, "It's 2:47 a.m... I'm not debugging an outage. There's no deadline. I'm just watching Claude Code refactor a module… and I can't stop." Why? Because, he continued, "Agentic coding is addictive. When the agent gets things right, you get a dopamine hit. When it fails, you get an adrenaline rush." Rousseau confessed that he couldn't sleep and had to seek medical help.
This isn't too surprising. Programmers have long been prone to workaholism. However, AI has brought a new pace to the work where, as Rousseau put it, "Watching an agent's work is passive enough to feel like rest, active enough to keep you hooked." The result is a new kind of burnout.
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