The AI Vampire This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on. I first started noticing a concerning new phenomenon a month ago, just after the new …

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Steve Yegge argues that AI coding tools like Claude Code are creating an 'energy vampire' effect — dramatically boosting developer productivity while simultaneously causing widespread burnout. The core tension is value capture: companies extract 100% of AI productivity gains while developers bear the exhaustion. Using a $/hr framework he developed at Amazon, Yegge advocates for workers to control the denominator (hours worked) rather than accepting unlimited extraction. He proposes a 3–4 hour focused workday as the sustainable sweet spot for AI-augmented work, acknowledges his own role in setting unrealistic productivity standards, and calls on CEOs, founders, and individual developers to consciously resist the pressure to work at unsustainable AI-fueled intensity.

The AI Vampire

<p>I never felt like AI is addictive, quite contrary. It produced for me trash so terrible I was always discussed by it.</p>
<p>Ok, maybe React was acceptable but in 2025 react was trash compared to everything else so the bar wasn’t very high</p>
