Working with AI is addictive.

Dopamine, backlog, and a reward cycle that won't stop.

There's something that isn't discussed enough about working with artificial intelligence, and it's that it's genuinely addictive. Not as a metaphor, not as Twitter hyperbole. It hooks you because it activates exactly the same circuit that slot machines do: variable reinforcement, short cycles, unpredictable but frequent reward. The difference is that here the reward is real. It's not an illusion of progress, it's progress. A problem unblocked, a draft that moves forward, an idea that suddenly has shape. Your brain doesn't distinguish between "I hit the jackpot" and "I just solved this in twenty seconds when it would've taken me two hours before." The mechanism is the same.

And that changes something fundamental about how working feels. Traditional work has friction everywhere, and that friction, though frustrating, serves a function we don't value until it disappears: it gives you excuses to stop. Waiting for it to compile. Waiting for review. Waiting for someone to get back to you. Those dead times are uncomfortable but they're also the moments where the brain rests without you realizing it, where you integrate what you've done, where the next thing surfaces. AI eliminates them. Every idea can be tested immediately. Every question has an answer in seconds. And then your brain, which was used to finding natural stopping points, suddenly can't find any, because the next step is always one prompt away.

That's why there are people working fourteen hours straight and describing it as "fun." It's not classic workaholism, it's something subtler: when the reward frequency is high enough, the subjective experience of effort almost vanishes. You don't get tired because you notice you're tired — you get tired because at some point your body pulls the plug and there's no going back. Sleep is overrated. Opus 4.5 spikes dopamine harder than finding a massive iron deposit right when you're setting up the factory in Factorio. Those who've felt it know exactly what I'm talking about. But when your bottleneck stops being execution and becomes imagination, the dynamic flips completely. Before, the chokepoint was doing: writing, coding, searching, building. Now the chokepoint is thinking what to ask for. And thinking has no visible friction, no progress bar, no external signal that you've been at it too long. So the loop accelerates inward. More ideas, more iterations, more drafts moving forward, more feeling like you're on a streak. And then you realize — or you don't realize, which is the more common outcome — that you've been hours producing things that don't land anywhere. A lot of symbolic creation. Very little materialization. The feeling of progress has replaced progress, and it's such a clean substitution that it's nearly impossible to detect from the inside.

What I find most interesting about all of this is that it doesn't happen the same way for everyone, and I think that difference is going to matter more than it seems right now. There are people who thrive in that environment: novelty stimulates them, they handle rapid context-switching well, they maintain mental structure even when the environment is chaotic. For them AI is a clean amplifier, no noticeable side effects. But that's not the majority. For the rest, the same tools that feel stimulating to some turn out overwhelming, and the problem is that the initial enthusiasm masks it so well that when burnout shows up it seems to come out of nowhere.

The only thing that actually works for me, and I say this without pretending it's a solution, is going to the gym. Not because it's a wellness practice or because I read somewhere that exercise improves focus — but because it's the only moment in the day where the context changes so radically that the loop breaks on its own. You step outside, and that alone is something. The commute on public transit becomes almost a ritual: headphones, Obsidian open, notes that had been left half-finished. It's not productivity, it's more like letting ideas settle without forcing them. And when you get to the gym and you're lifting weight, there's no prompt to fire off and no next step a click away. Nothing feels as good. The fact that this is now the sharpest contrast I have with working with AI says a lot about what AI does to the natural rhythm of a day.

I'm not going to give five tips for managing it better because I don't have them and I distrust anyone who does. What I do believe is that there's a question worth asking yourself honestly: is the fast-reward loop serving you, or is it using you? The tools aren't calibrated for your well-being. They're calibrated for your productivity. Those are different things, and in day-to-day life it's easy to confuse them because for a while, sometimes a long while, they look pretty similar.