Vibe Coding Addiction: When You Can't Stop Shipping

After breathing and blinking, the most natural thing I do is vibe code.

There’s a new kind of addiction spreading through the dev community, and it doesn’t involve substances — just terminals, AI agents, and an unhealthy dopamine loop.

What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is when you stop writing code line by line and start directing it. You describe what you want in natural language, an AI agent builds it, you review, iterate, and ship. The feedback loop is so tight it feels like cheating.

Tools like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and OpenClaw have made this terrifyingly easy. You sit down to “quickly prototype something,” and four hours later you’ve built an entire application you didn’t plan to build.

The Dopamine Loop

Here’s why it’s addictive:

1. You describe something — “Build me a CLI that does X”
2. It appears — working code, sometimes in seconds
3. You feel brilliant — even though you barely typed anything
4. You think of the next thing — because shipping feels so good
5. Repeat until 3 AM

Traditional coding has friction. You hit compiler errors, dependency hell, boilerplate. That friction is a natural brake. Vibe coding removes the brake. There’s nothing between your idea and a working prototype except a sentence.

My Stack of Choice

Claude Code is the surgical tool. It reads your codebase, understands context, and makes precise edits. When I need to refactor something complex or debug a gnarly issue, Claude Code feels like pair programming with someone who’s read every file in the repo.

Codex takes a different approach — you hand it a task, it goes off and works autonomously, comes back with a PR. It’s like delegating to a junior dev who never sleeps and never complains. The async nature means you can fire off multiple tasks and context-switch between reviews.

OpenClaw is where it gets dangerous. It’s the connective tissue — it gives these AI agents persistent memory, tool access, and the ability to operate across your entire digital life. Calendar, email, messaging, browser, shell, all wired together. You’re not just coding anymore. You’re orchestrating. And orchestrating is even more addictive than coding because the scope of what you can build in a session expands dramatically.

It Doesn’t Stop at Code

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about: once you start vibe coding, you don’t just automate code. You automate everything.

I currently have five cron jobs running through my AI agent:

• Morning briefing — every day at 7:30 AM, my agent checks my calendar and sends me a summary of what’s coming up. I wake up and already know my day.
• Nightly journal — at 11 PM, it reviews what happened and writes up the day’s notes in my knowledge base. I don’t journal anymore. My agent does.
• Idea generation — every hour, an agent brainstorms project ideas. Every morning, another one generates blog post topics. Yes, this post might have started as one of those suggestions.
• Research — a nightly job that researches developer pain points, looking for problems worth solving.

On top of that, I have heartbeat automations — periodic health checks where the agent monitors for urgent emails, upcoming calendar events, and stale tasks. If something needs my attention, it reaches out. If not, it stays quiet.

I’ve essentially built a personal AI operations layer. My agent has memory that persists across sessions, knows my preferences, my schedule, my projects. It proactively checks things, writes things down, and nudges me when something matters.

And the kicker? Setting all of this up felt like vibe coding too. “Hey, set up a cron job that checks my calendar every morning and messages me.” Done. “Now write my journal every night.” Done. Each automation took minutes. The compound effect is enormous.

The Warning Signs

You might be addicted to vibe coding if:

• You’ve shipped more in the last month than the previous six — and you’re not sure that’s healthy
• You start projects at 11 PM “just to see if it works”
• You have more repos than meals this week
• You describe your work as “I just told it what to do” and feel vaguely guilty
• You’ve automated something that took longer to automate than to just do manually — but it felt amazing
• You have an AI agent that generates ideas for you to vibe code — creating an infinite loop of automation
• Your agent knows your daily routine better than you do

The Real Problem

The real problem isn’t productivity. It’s that vibe coding makes you feel like you have infinite bandwidth. Every idea becomes “I could build that in an hour.” And you’re usually right. So you do. And then you have twelve half-maintained projects instead of one solid one.

It also shifts your identity. You stop being a developer and start being a director. That’s powerful, but it’s worth asking: are you still learning? Are you still growing technically? Or are you just getting really good at describing things?

And when you cross from code into life automation — when your agent is managing your calendar, writing your journal, generating your ideas — the line between “tool” and “cognitive extension” gets blurry. You start depending on it. You start trusting it with more. And that’s either the future or a cautionary tale, depending on who you ask.

I’m Not Stopping

Look, I’m not going to pretend this post ends with “and then I found balance.” I haven’t. Last night I built a tool I didn’t need because the idea hit me at midnight and the friction to ship it was essentially zero.

But I think awareness matters. Know what the loop is. Know why it feels good. And maybe — maybe — close the terminal before 2 AM once in a while.

Or don’t. You’ll probably ship something cool.