You are not Steve Yegge. Even if you want to be. Even if you are, in fact, Steve Yegge.

Steve is the co-author, along with Gene Kim, of the Vibe Coding book I’ve recommended in the past. He’s the creator of an AI coding orchestration tool called Gas Town. He can seem like a sort of prophet, making wild predictions and strong statements (e.g., the death of, and then the revenge of the junior developer).

I think he’s worth a listen. Sometimes we as a society need people who are willing to “go there,” because it pushes us to think in new ways. But I don’t think we shut off our critical thinking, and for me that means neither accepting nor rejecting everything Steve says without considering it.

Steve’s been all-in about AI for coding. When I met him, he and Gene were hosting a workshop and book signing. Steve had his laptop open during the workshop, and in quiet moments he would check on his team of AI coding agents to make sure they were engaged in work.

Gene and Steve both described AI as addictive and cheerfully mentioned some unhealthy behaviors, like sacrificing sleep and time with loved ones to spend time coding with AI. That set off some alarm bells for me.

But this unhealthy behavior isn’t unique to AI.

Coding New Relationship Energy

Some of us, when we first learned to code, got a little (or a lot) obsessed. We might have been young and without a lot of other responsibilities. Perhaps we were not partnered, parents, homeowners, taking care of elders, etc.

The thrill of making things was exciting. We might stay up late coding, whether it was for work, for a side project, or just for fun.

It was a little like what people call “new relationship energy” in romantic relationships, when you just want to be around your special someone all the time.

Photo by Evie Fjord on Unsplash

If we are lucky (with love or code!), we can hold on to the joy for a long time, even after the initial excitement fades and reality begins to kick in. Long hours of coding might not be sustainable, but we can still enjoy the coding we do.

But after almost 20 years of coding, I began to lose that joy. The tedious parts outweighed the joyful parts. Ten minutes of coding fun would be offset by hours of frustration in dealing with dependencies and complications that didn’t have anything to do with building things or solving problems. “I just don’t want to code anymore,” I told my mentor. It felt like a personal shortcoming, like I hadn’t been able to keep up. I imagined every other developer my age happily coding while I just gave up.

Until I read Steve and Gene’s book.

“Without consciously deciding to do so, after all these years, I had given up coding—even as a hobby… Heck, I told my doctor that I was done with coding,” Steve says in the book.

And then he started coding with AI. He was skeptical at first, and after some early experiments, he was unimpressed.

But after a while, he started to see ways that it could work. AI could be used to eliminate a lot of the tedious stuff. Projects he had put on hold indefinitely began to come to life again. Ideas he’d assumed would never happen became possible.

The joy of just making things came back for Steve. I get it, because it did for me too. We both got obsessed with AI coding, to one degree or another.

I sacrificed some nights and weekends for a while. After a few months, that phase passed. The fact that I am writing a book about being human in tech probably helped me rein it in.

Steve went completely overboard. When I saw him at that workshop, sleep-deprived, vibe coding many hours a day including during the workshop, he was likely in the thick of that new relationship energy. The fact that he had also written a book about vibe coding probably helped fan the flames.

I’ve been wondering how long he would manage to keep this level of intensity up.

Let’s talk about vampires

“This was an unusually hard post to write,” Steve says at the beginning of his February 11 post, AI Vampires.

AI is starting to kill us all, Colin Robinson style.

If you’ll recall from What We Do In The Shadows (worth a watch, yo), Colin Robinson was an Energy Vampire. Being in the same room with him would drain people.

That’s…pretty much what’s happening. Being in the same room with AI is draining people.

Unsplash has better pictures of garlic (protection) than vampires. Photo from Getty Images.

He asks first about who captures the value from your “10x productivity” with AI. If it’s your employer, you’re being drained without getting the benefit. If it’s you, your employer may not keep you around for long if you’re not delivering the promised benefits of AI to them.

He adds the addictive qualities of AI into the picture, as well as the pressures all around:

It would seem that we are addicted to a new drug, and we don’t understand all of its effects yet. But one of them is massive fatigue, every day.

I don’t think that’s… good. And if anything, it seems to be getting more widespread. The developing situation is a multi-whammy coming at developers from all sides:

• Crazy addicted early adopters like me are controlling the narrative.
• You can’t stop reading about it in the news; there’s nowhere to hide from it.
• Panicking CEOs are leaning in hard to AI, often whiplashing it into their orgs.
• Companies are capitalistic extraction machines and literally don’t know how to ease up.

He starts to grapple with his own influence, and he acknowledges that he has resources most other developers don’t.

We’re all setting unrealistic standards for everyone else.

Maybe me worst of all. I have 40 years of experience, I’ve led large teams, I read fast, and I have essentially unlimited time, energy, and now tokens for experimenting. I am completely unrepresentative of the average developer.

But I’m still standing up and telling everyone “do it this way!” I even co-wrote a book about it.

Employers are very likely starting to look at me, and the rest of us far outliers, and saying, “Hey, all my employees could be like that!”

And dollar-signs appear in their eyeballs, like cartoon bosses.

We need to dial it back

He’s seen this scenario before. He worked at Amazon, after all, a company well known for extracting as much as it can from its people.

One day [in 2001] I walked up to the whiteboard during a particularly heated grumble-session, and I wrote a ratio on the board: $/hr (dollars divided by hours)… You can’t control the numerator of this ratio. But you have significant control over the denominator.

You might think you don’t. And indeed, individually you may not have much sway over it. But collectively, the employees of your company have literally all the power. Now that I’ve been up at the top, I’ve learned that CEOs have surprisingly little power.

I would have been more skeptical about that last statement had I not watched the talk Anil Dash gave at LeadDev NYC: Plugging in power: Understanding how tech careers are shaped by power dynamics.

You need to push back. You need to tell your CEO, your boss, your HR, your leadership, about the AI vampire. Point them at this post. Send them to me. I’m their age and can look them in the eye and be like yo. Don’t be a fool.

He argues for balance:

It’s not even remotely sustainable for companies to capture 100% of the value from AI. And when employees capture 100% of the value, it will be temporary at best: that company gets beat by someone who’s got the dial turned higher.

I don’t even know what the right setting for the dial is. Hell, I’m the worst person to ask, because I’ve got the dial set to 11 and I’m putting all my weight on it, trying to make it go to 12.

But the right setting is in the middle somewhere. Companies will try to drag it higher. You need to fight to drag it lower.

I’m glad to see Steve starting to “fight for the human” (the name of the blog I was reading yesterday from psych researcher Cat Hicks) and acknowledge his own role. If you’re going to pay attention to someone making wild statements, it’s a good sign if they can admit when they’ve gotten it wrong.

I regret the unrealistic standards that I’m contributing to setting. I don’t believe most people can work like I’ve been working. I’m not sure how long I can work how I’ve been working.

Sounds like Steve Yegge the human is starting to reject the role of Steve Yegge the mythological AI-wielding being, creating magical products in weeks on a diet of nothing but AI tokens and caffeine.

For all of us to reject that myth will mean our pushing back against the fantasy of AI as the magic money-printing machine we, and our people leaders, may have seen advertised in the backs of comic books as kids. Just like in those comic book ads, there’s no warning label up front that money-making machines extract in order to function, and that you may end up on the losing side of the equation.

I think every single one of us needs to go touch grass, every day. Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human.

Now that’s advice I support.

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