I gotta cop to something – the loneliness of working all day with AI. And lack of satisfying conclusions.

I’m not speaking for you – only for me. But maybe you’ve felt this…unease as well?

This feeling has crept up on me, the more hours a day (work, home) I spend typing alongside Claude. I’m working with 7-10 asynchronously concurrent sessions in both employed and free time. And it’s hitting me more and more at the sputtering end of each day:

1. I’m never “completed” – as soon as I feel like I’m getting to address the first two/three (five) problems I’ve fired at the session/PLAN.md/backlog, not only does Claude stare blankly back at me, goading me with “was that it?”, but I find I’m reaching for additional ways to improve, elevate, evolve the problem space.

2. Because each session is rarely “done”, and that TMUX tab is just staring back at me the next time I sit down, when I sit down again it’s to an increasing sense of anxiety that I’m not sure I remember where I left off – like, even though I can (and increasingly do) ask for “what were we working on again?” and (after a few minutes) get back a relevant answer, it’s still feeling like I’m SO not in command of the situation. Claude’ll ask me “let me know if this proposal seems good, and I’ll get going”, I’m lying to it (and to myself) that they’re probably right, I should go along rather than embarrass myself by asking for reminder/clarification AGAIN. No matter how well I name and rename the tab, or have built hooks and session reminders to capture things, there are some tabs – like that text message you’ve left too long – that haunt me and intimidate me from coming back to them.

3. I’m a product manager by trade – used to prioritizing, setting & cutting scope, adjusting to surprises – but this solitary (pair programming, but only as a distant laissez-faire nudger) work seems like an endless spectrum of shades of not-quite-doneness. Working with zero feedback (but for a needs-to-please stochastic automaton) is a kind of purgatory for me.

I have no pithy advice to give (myself). I’m merely bleeding off anxieties into the void. And hoping someone hears, nods, gives me the sense I’m not alone in this, and can offer a step they took from this same place to somewhere less fraught.