Fear of Missing Code | Hacker News Reader

Fear of Missing Code

9 pointslukol9 comments

Talking to developer (and increasingly non-developer) friends of mine, the following pattern has emerged:

Many of them are caught in a "just one more feature" loop that keeps them awake late at night, destroys their sleep cycles and has them wondering every waking hour if they spend their Claude Code Max subscription as effectively as possible. You could actually be building a feature while you're grabbing dinner or hitting the gym, so why don't you?

Combined with the fact that the current state of AI assisted coding is still far from perfect, this leads to exhaustion. Letting your agent do its thing fully unsupervised only works in few scenarios and reviewing (or at least: QA-ing) the countless things that were built while you were spending time with your friends / family / pets is mentally taxing.

How are you handling this?

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Our economy is no longer one that produces things to be consumed, but rather one that increases consumption. This is what that looks like.

Maybe I'm missing the point here - but how is this connected?

producing more code than we can keep up with, lending more houses than banks can keep up with, producing more degrees than available jobs, publishing more papers than are reviewed, etc...

I usually try to minimize the risk as much as possible, and let it run, without being supervised. And always, always validate the result the next day. As we can't trust fellow developers, and we need code review sessions, QA sessions, automation testing session, same is here as well. Don't fully trust the AI. Nothing is perfect

We had the ability to write code while eating dinner before. Now it just takes less effort. Thinking for a good prompt is easier than thinking for a good nested loop. And the whole vibe, and enthusiasm are bigger, pushing people to try something new.

I deal with it by not worrying about it.

When I feel like doing it (for my own projects), I do, if not, I don't.

I spent almost all of 2025 without touching any of my personal projects, although I've started working on them again this year.

While I'm on the clock at work, I do, when I'm not on the clock, I don't.

Same as before A.I.

I don't sleep that well but that's because of other reasons (I often fall asleep on the couch with the lights on, like a dummy, and then wake up several hours later and go to bed properly).

The anxiety doesn't come from "missing out on code", it comes from the dread of waking up to a mountain of generated code that you now have to untangle and verify. Treating the AI strictly as a tool that gets turned off when I step away from the keyboard is the only way I've kept my sanity.

Today Claude Code built several features and fixed a laundry list of bugs while I was at the movie theatre. When I came home I did about 15 minutes of reviewing its work and doing manual testing, found some issues, made a list and fired it off to Claude again before going to bed.

I’m not mentally taxed at all, in fact I’m excited to be building something 24/7 without sitting at my keyboard night and day typing out code and ruining my physical health.

When I reflect on the old days of coding (pre 2024) I have a hard time thinking about how many days of my life I spent manually coding away at the keyboard - it makes me queasy and uncomfortable realizing the amount of time I lost.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to go to the gym and have Claude bang out several more features while I’m exercising - and I’m stoked to review the results and keep the ball rolling.

A bunch of different things. Spend time with friends and family. Exercise. Be in nature. Sauna. Stop using tech a couple hours before bed. Read physical book in bed before sleeping

wow

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