Being High on AI

Some time ago, an older friend of mine told me: “Tim, many years ago I used cocaine, once”. “How was it?” I asked. “It was that good that I will never do it again!”.

He was aware of his own weaknesses. He knew that things that feel as good as cocaine are highly addictive and dangerous for him. He knew that he potencially won’t be able to stop it once he is in the spiral. And so he commited to do it never again.

Drugs don’t just just make a human being feel great, but detach their perception from the actual reality, beyond the rush. Drug users can feel awesome, powerful, elevated, while freezing in a winters night under a stone-cold bridge.

Lately the cocaine-story of my friend led me to a consequential insight. Isn’t working with AI very similar to using cocaine?

In my own work, I have always been trying to build systems in a way that they are fully comprehensible for me, so I can repair and extend them if necessary. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher called this already in the 1970s “Technology at a Human Scale”. My visual language, the architecture of the things I build, my style as a designer – all these are emerging directly from that mindset of frugality.

Working this way means thinking critically about every element, striving for systemic simplicity through pushing back the unnecessary. This dialectic process is cognitively very exhausting sometimes. It needs training. But it leads to great results.

In my own experiments with coding with AI, I observed, that I tend to lose the connection with my attitude. Once, I’ve vibe-coded a few features for my website, I’ve realized how I felt great while bloating the codebase, by implementing features that I would never build without an Coding agent. I felt efficient, productive.

I was high on AI.

Is coding and designing with AI potencially as harmful for the quality of our work as cocaine? It gives us a great feeling of power, but this feeling leads us to terrible decisions, feature bloat, decoration and overwhelming complexity.

And it makes us want more!