Coding Addiction: How Programming Affects Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

Coding Addiction: How Programming Affects Your Brain

medium.com

41 pointssafaa199342 comments

I suspect it is less about solving puzzles, and rather more about an act of creation that is almost perfectly abstract - with none of the pesky real life issues around physically building something, getting permissions, budgets, collaborating with workers, waiting for paint to dry etc.

For those who get off on creating things, coding is the perfect hit.

I have always thought of it like Virtual Lego, and would definitely consider it a creative outlet!

Indeed, and I did a lot of Lego when young.

Apparently a distinction has been found between first starting building with Lego, and first starting with Meccano - Mecaano is rather more dependent by the physical properties of the components, whereas Lego is just plugging stuff together almost without constraint, so much more abstract.

> with none of the pesky real life issues around physically building something, getting permissions, budgets, collaborating with workers, waiting for paint to dry etc.

Huh. It used to be fun for those reasons. I've gotten so burned out on coding in recent years because once the cloud became part of the stack, so did bureaucracy-- permissions, budgets, collaboration, dictation of style, opaque errors, legal review, bespoke CI/CD configurations, security-related constraints, etc.

Coding just doesn't feel empowering anymore. It's like making a sandwich and having to go petition Congress before you're allowed to eat it.

We had an incident at work that required multiple people working on a tedious task overnight; it was refreshing to just hammer out a sloppy script, write some tests, sneakernet it and see the prospect of a long night reduced to minutes.

Technically the fine muscle movement triggers dopamine in your brain. Regardless of the serotonin associated with solving tasks.

We have really over-indexed on this dopamine thing as a culture, I think. The important piece is the feeling of internal reward, not any specific chemical. The role of dopamine is so, so much more complex than "make brain happy." I don't think the dopamine response of the physical act of typing is terribly relevant here, for example.

I think there's an extra layer for the heavy addicts.

One is straight up ego, it's not just about creating, it's about telling yourself you're the next Knuth and Wirth all in one, you'll be the one to revolutionize how we do things, it will go down in history.

But it seems they don't like corporate megaprojects, they're not creating features and functionality as much as they are invention new abstractions.

And of course the ultimate addict project is a new programming language.

Some seem to be deeply disturbed by things not being open source and as simple as possible.

If there's a simpler way, even if the CPU savings aren't relevant and it takes far more effort, they want to explore it.

Sometimes it seems like they don't actually like tech at all, they like ideas. They want computers to be bicycles for the mind more than abstraction layers to outsource parts of life so we don't have to learn how tax papers work.

But they seem upset like they feel some responsibility to get the rest of us to use simpler tech and protect our privacy and add more logic and elegance to our software.

I think there's definitely multiple types of addicts with different motives.

One thing is for sure, I'm not addicted to coding at the office.

Not to talk on how it affects thinking, but it most certainly affects dreaming.

I have what I refer to as "recursion dreams", which are never ending code within code within code within code dreams, incredibly disorienting, dizzying, leaves me with a massive headache and migraine in the morning* - but often comes after long stretches of code reading/writing, and sometimes will lead to solving a particular problem I am working on. But, usually, it just means I'm stressed.

I've heard of code dreams, but does anyone else have recursion dreams? I'm going on nearly twenty years of them with them getting more and more complex.

Yup I've had recursive dreams. You're likely internalizing something you're grokking

You just forgot to specify the end condition for the recursion, that's all. It's a common mistake, and one you should fix before going to bed. Otherwise you'll blow out the stack, which is what leads to migraines.

I've had something similar basically like Inception where I'm in one dream, I realise it's a dream and wake up but I actually wake up within yet another dream. This can continue for a few iterations.

Yup. Unsolvable code dreams. More like nightmares. Just keep looping through on something. I noticed they come on if I’m experiencing acid reflux while sleeping, or am under a lot of stress in life. Glad to know I’m not alone.

For me it's about that dopamine hit whenever I finish a feature. When I'm finally testing a new feature or functionality I've been working on I get an immense dopamine rush, likewise if a feature is taking me too long to finish it's much the opposite feeling. I don't really get this working on work projects because there's inevitably rules I have to follow. On my side project though it's something about having access to the entire plane (frontend, backend, DB, etc) that gets me excited, because I know there is no blocker that I have to rely on others to solve.

There's something something intoxicating about working on a large side project knowing that you're in absolute control, if I see a bug, any bug, I have the power there and then to fix it, no asking permission or working with other teams.

Then there's also the financial motive, I get the chances are minuscule but there's something so incredibly intoxicating and sexy about knowing that there is a non-zero chance that the project I'm working on may one day make me a multi-millionaire or a billionaire. It's a bit like walking into a casino and knowing that any slot you pull the lever on may spit out a jackpot. The rational part of my brain knows to keep my expectations in check, but I do let the "lizard" part of my brain out once in a while to daydream about what yacht or jet I'm getting once my side project IPO's

My dopamine hit comes from people using my stuff.

When I fix a bug, add a feature, or write some docs, I experience the resolution of anxiety. I'm just so worried my stuff isn't good enough, will confuse users, and so forth.

It feels very similar to my compulsion to pick up litter. While hiking, walking the dog, etc. I. Just. Can't. Stand. Seeing. Trash. Every. Where. It really takes me out of my happy place. I'm just so much more relaxed, resolved when litter (or bugs) are gone.

Yes, I've been working chilling out.

> It feels very similar to my compulsion to pick up litter. While hiking, walking the dog, etc. I. Just. Can't. Stand. Seeing. Trash. Every. Where. It really takes me out of my happy place. I'm just so much more relaxed, resolved when litter (or bugs) are gone.

Be glad you don't have compulsive hoarding tendencies.

When I spend too much time playing Pokemon, Red Dead Redemption or Metal Gear V, I find myself planning to capture every animal, pick every flower and steal every shipping container I come across.

For me, a lot of the motive of larger personal projects came from a delusion they'd one day become big public things run by a foundation with a board of directors and a DevOps guy and code reviews.

Once the delusion faded and I realized that was Probably Not Happening, the number of projects that held my attention went down about 75%

If I don't solve some problems in a day, my brain creates problems for me to solve.

I'm sure the only form of "coding addiction" is optimizing toy programs as hobby or for competing in some sort of public leaderboard. Normal casual coding, and writing down/debugging code is unappealing drudgery that feeling like testing patience. I don't like the coding process itself, just the results: elegant, fast code.

It can also be trying to add random useless toy programs to a work project.

And if course, nothing stops one from deluding themselves into think their toy project is going to change the world and be the thing that replaces Windows.

I am so happy that this is being discussed. Programming addiction is a scary. It takes over people's lives, and sometimes it gets so bad they produce close to nothing of any value to anyone else, while feeling like they are a top asset to the tech industry.

Can't wait to see warning labels on programming books in the future :D

The C Programming Language (second edition). Warning this book can cause addiction.

I wonder if GCC and CLANG will end up in court like big tobacco :D

I like seeing things happen as a result of my coding. Seeing a website update after I run my code for example - it feels like magic.

Can’t read it all due to full screen modal. What the fuck is wrong with Medium?

Just put your blog on a GitHub Pages website if you don’t want to pay for hosting.

...and get paid for posting.

Knowledge should be free.

There is zero knowledge in this article.

I've said before and I'll say it again. The best and fastest code is the code you don't write.

Coding or nothing. Since nothing trivially can't exist, it'd better be coding.

It's a real thing.

It doesn't cause I only pretend I know how to code and just ask gpt4 to do everything for me

I think having access to Copilot and GPT-4 has actually increased my addiction, because I feel so much more productive, and I can outsource so many mundane tasks.

I think honestly I've been building things almost non-stop, besides work as well.

In addition because of those new tools, I feel wrong and anxious when I'm not coding, because it's as if I'm not taking advantage during this quickly changing period of time with those tools becoming more powerful and powerful, I feel like I have to be completely involved in all of this in order to not miss out on this hyperfast development.

I'm kinda the opposite - I can't stand using GPT as it sucks the life out of coding for me

Yeah, I've decided not to use it. I only program for pleasure now and I can't see it doing anything to improve that.

Why so?

Not op but as i have experience in software i can see the high frequency of errors it generates and it’s actually a hindrance. I can tell why inexperienced users find gpts useful as it sounds convincing but overall not that useful.

Which version do you use?

People often say things like your comment and 99.9% of the time, it’s poor prompting or a lower GPT version.

GPT-4 is remarkably helpful for many coding tasks. If you can’t find use for it, that likely is more of a user problem than the tool.

Blaming users? An interesting strategy. Nonetheless I use gpt4. It’s rather useless.

I agree with you here. For boilerplate stuff I can never remember it's fine.

With more advanced use cases I find the LLMs better at exploring a problem space and possible solutions rather than providing a solution full stop. Being able to refine a problem down into a digestible chunk the AI can take a bite of does require human level understanding that's hard to get if you haven't 'done the work' to have good fundamentals.

> With more advanced use cases I find the LLMs better at exploring a problem space and possible solutions

The number of times it misled me makes me reluctant to rely on it again. I was wasting time chasing non existent paths.

I think the marketing around chatgpt is more powerful than the tool. It looks impressive to junior devs or people without expertise in a domain, but that’s about it. What bothers me is the amount of spam around this tool - they need to work on improving it and then restart promoting as thus far it’s just annoying noise.

There is intuition you can develop to understand when it might be not good at solving the problem and when it will be. I have 10+ yrs coding experience, tons of side projects besides work and I find it amazing.

I actually think maybe it is even better with more experience as it allows you to understand what it excels at and be critical of its output to recognize when it might be wrong.

I would usually be able to do whatever it does, it would just take more energy and time, but I am able to almost immediately recognize when it is wrong.

> as it allows you to understand what it excels at and be critical of its output to recognize when it might be wrong.

Issue is that my time is more valuable than to be spent improving someone’s product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com