Hi, My Name Is Stefan and I'm Addicted to AI

Hi, my name is Stefan and I’m an addict.

You know that kind of introduction from Alcoholics Anonymous, and I know it’s a heavy comparison. Alcohol and drugs kill people and I don’t want to make fun of that. My addiction cost me money and energy, and people got less of my time.

I still think the word fits quite well. The one thing that made me take a break was the usage limit of my AI coding tools, and I paid $200 a month for a second plan to get around it. If it went this far with me, I think it can go a lot further for people who get addicted easily, and that is why I’m writing this down.

It started with Claude Code

I was building the Rawkode Academy studio with Claude Code and it felt awesome. After a few months of coding like this the fatigue hit as well, because my brain wasn’t ready for the mental load. Siddhant Khare wrote a whole post about that kind of exhaustion, “AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it”. I kept going anyway.

When the limit hits

I used Claude Code on a monthly plan, and a plan like that has usage limits, so after a certain amount of work you have to wait. Back then there was one limit that reset every five hours and one that reset every week, and sometimes there was just an outage.

Without AI the work felt boring. I thought, okay, I could continue manually, but then I just waited.

Three subscriptions and almost a fourth

And then I fell back on buying another plan. I had the 20x plan for Claude for $200 a month, and I added the 20x plan for Codex, the coding agent from OpenAI, for another $200. OpenCode Go, a cheaper third subscription, came on top of that.

Codex gives you limit resets that you can save and use when you want, and I used them to get going again early. OpenAI also keeps resetting the Codex limits on its own, and for someone like me that doesn’t really help, because for a short time it feels unlimited.

It went so far that I had three subscriptions at the same time and was about to get a second Codex account.

What stopped me from buying that second account was the money. After a while I noticed that the Codex plan alone was another $200 a month just to not have to wait, and that I was paying more than $400 a month in total.

I didn’t need all of that to be productive. It was more an addiction type of thing, I was token-maxxing, burning tokens for the sake of it, and didn’t want to stop. I’m not the only one, Alexey Pelykh wrote in April that he had four of the Claude plans and couldn’t stop.

A blessing and a curse

AI is a blessing and a curse at the same time, and I don’t want to only complain here, because AI is awesome. I would not want to give up having ideas and then a way to try them out. For me that is mostly building games that just run in the browser.

That is also what made it so hard to stop, because there was always one more idea I could build right now. Peter Steinberger describes the same thing in “Just One More Prompt”, the write-up of a talk at a meetup called Claude Code Anonymous. He opened it with “Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a Claudoholic”, so I’m not the first one with this kind of introduction.

There are also people who are super annoyed by AI, for example because it doesn’t solve anything in their field. For them it is just noise, and I get that. Maybe they even see it more clearly than I do.

Who should be careful

I once talked to someone who used AI so heavily that they were thinking about quitting smoking, just to have more money for tokens. They actually meant it, and I was a bit shocked. Quitting smoking is a good thing of course, and cigarettes are a lot worse than tokens, but to me it sounded like exchanging one addiction for another. And then I thought, hey, I would have done the same, which is pure addict behaviour on my part.

Some people get addicted more easily than others. If you know that about yourself, please be careful with AI, and if the limit is the only thing that makes you stop, don’t pay to get around it like I did.

The bad thing is that it doesn’t look like a problem. If you sit in front of your AI agents all day, it just looks like hard work and you might even get praised for it. I got so hooked on the whole AI topic that I spent more time with the computer than with people.

I’m not a doctor and none of this is a diagnosis. Kayla Crane is a couples therapist who writes that she sees this in her sessions, and she describes the warning signs better than I can. She also says that most people don’t have to quit AI completely, they have to be able to stop. For a while only the limit did that for me.

I have cut back and I’m down to one subscription, the Claude one, and that was hard. Not using AI at all is not really an option in my job.

So, my name is Stefan and I’m an addict.