Coding Disengagement Syndrome

Claude finishes the task, I read the diff, looks good, merge. But why do I feel kind of robbed?

Bad code doesn’t bother me much, at least slop gives me something to fix. It’s the good code that’s the problem.

You know when three nested ifs turn into one line and you feel like a genius for five minutes? That’s why I like coding. Now Claude gets there first and my contribution is “LGTM” in a PR (reviewed by Claude too btw).

It’s like paying someone to do your crossword.

I’m calling it Coding Disengagement Syndrome.

The dumb part is nobody made me do this. I’m literally building my own toolbox for AI agents so I can automate even more of my work, and I’m having fun building it, obviously.

It happens slowly. First it’s the boring stuff, then bigger tasks, then the stuff I actually wanted to do. Next thing I know my day is writing briefs, reviewing diffs and explaining what I meant.

Well, congrats, I’ve promoted myself to manager of a team of clankers.

No idea how to solve it yet. Best I’ve got is trying the interesting problems myself first: get stuck, come up with something, /grill-me, try again, then let the agent tell me what I missed. It’s slower and probably worse on every metric.

But it’s my evening. I’m not trying to finish, I’m trying to enjoy it.