I think Social Media Addiction is a big thing, and I’m noticing more that AI and Generative AI are facing the same problems.
Besides Vibe Coding getting addictive to people, it’s also bad that generative AI floods social media with Fake News and AI Slop.
How other call it
Steve Yegge calls it’s the “Vampiric Effect”, as you won’t go to sleep and try to instruct your agents all night long.
DHH said tough, there’s no limited sales going on, AI will be around in a year, or two still. So, there is no rush to stay up all night. Even more so, it’s the worst version of AI today.
Don’t trade your sleep and health for a shallow productivity, as I like to call it.
# Shallow Work
We need to be careful not to treat it like Shallow Work, Vibe Coding, the 10th app, we do not need. It’s fun, but if we should actually do our work, it’s not productive - quite the opposite.
Cal Newport talks about it in his book Deep Work long before chatbots, but compares deep work with Pseudo Work. Pseudo work, or Shallow Work, is how he calls it when you are constantly sending and receiving E-Mail messages like a human network router, instead of doing the work.
In note-taking, someone called it meta-work. Instead of writing and taking notes, we optimize the system.
That’s why Use less AI is better, at least for now (2026-03-10) as we figure things out.
There are relations to addiction, like casinos.
It has a similar feel to Social Media Addiction, though here we are building something. I’d say it’s closer to Productivity addiction, that people make their system so fancy, me included, and spend day and night optimizing it instead of using it (me not!).
# Slot Machines vs Vibe Coding
Vibe Coding can be very similar to slot machines in Las Vegas. Obviously, you get something for it, and there’s real value—but the feeling of wanting to stay up and not go to sleep is definitely not to be underestimated when building your 10th app or feature that you didn’t really need.
Great read Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding and how it’s related to Dark Flow.
A great talk with Tristan Harris about this topic at the Diary of a CEO: AI Expert: Here Is What The World Looks Like In 2 Years..
Google Deck on Digital Wellbeing on “A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention” by Tristan Harris. How to minimize and be mindful about notifications on the Gmail app when he was there:
Digital distraction, and also with Vibe Coding, proved to be very true, and I noticed it, too.
I wrote more about it in Finding Flow: Escaping Digital Distractions Through Deep Work and Slow Living and Finding Flow.
# Further Reads
Origin: Will AI replace Humans
References: Learning with AI