AI Is Heroin

AI is heroin | pancake AI is heroin 11 Mar, 2026 At work, I have to use AI. Let's not argue that "have to" can be worked around, and that no one has gotten into problems for not using it. I generally do what I am told to, I am not the type to protest. A few days ago I have tried to pick up a personal project I started six months ago: its use-case came up again, with much more narrow scope, so it was actually achievable. And man, was it painful . Portion of it could be attributed to my nostalgic choice of using Sublime Text 4 instead of PyCharm. Without intellisense, I had to look up more of the Python's standard library than usual, and I have made a few syntactic mistakes I do not think I should have done. But what was even worse, it felt really exhausting. To write out every line by hand was like trying to walk in a viscous liquid that sticks to your legs. My brain hurt . It was not like sugar which you can fight by not buying those snacks when doing groceries. It felt like a literal withdrawl . I got nervous, my focus was gone, and so was clear thinking about what I was trying to achieve. I am aware this was not the only thing that was different. At work, I am contributing to major projects that have had most of their architectural and technical decisions made a decade ago. Greenfields done by myself for myself have them all unresolved, and it may contribute to that uneasy feeling. But the fact I craved AI , not a stable project I would be improving upon, points me at the direction I have described above. And I have got no idea what to do about it. My job is my dealer and until the whole system collapses, it will not stop inviting me to take more shots. #ai