10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents

If you’ve ever used a 3D printer, you may recall the wondrous feeling when you first printed somthing you could have never sculpted or built yourself.Download a model file, load some plastic filament, push a button, and almost like magic, a three-dimensional object appears. But the result isn’t polished and ready for mass production, and creating a novel shape requires more skills then just pushing a button. Interestingly,today’s AI coding agents feel much the same way.

Since November, I have used Claude Code and Claude opus 4.5 through a personal Claude max account too extensively experiment with AI-assisted software progress (I have also used openai’s Codex in a similar way, though not as frequently). Fifty projects later, I’ll be frank: I have not had this much fun with a computer as I learned BASIC on my Apple II Plus when I was 9 years old. This opinion comes not as an endorsement but as personal experience: I voluntarily undertook this project, and I paid out of pocket for both OpenAI and Anthropic’s premium AI plans.

Throughout my life, I have dabbled in programming as a utilitarian coder, writing small tools or scripts when needed. In my web development career, I wrote some small tools from scratch, but I primarily modified other people’s code for my needs. Since 1990, I’ve programmed in BASIC, C, visual Basic, PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, Ruby, MUSHcode, and some others. I am not an expert in any of these languages—I learned just enough to get the job done. I have developed my own hobby games over the years using BASIC, Torque Game Engine, and Godot, so I have some idea of what makes a good architec