Over the past few months, I've been trying to find answer to questions like, what is the point?
Deep, I know. But if you really ask yourself, when strolling through socials on your phone and you find you've lost 30mins of your day and gained nothing from it, do you ask yourself, what is the point?
I hardly ever open up Mastodon / Bluesky these days, my feeds are dead or not grabbing my attention from those people I used to follow on Twitter, they have either left socials or aren't posting as much now. I used to post daily to Instagram but now it's once a week if you're lucky, I do open the app daily but then I just doom scroll. I open up LinkedIn and then close it again because it's just full of AI slop, have you seen how many AI generated images that place has these days?!
But, I can't help myself from opening the apps, scrolling endlessly just in case I miss something.
It's not what I thought the internet would be like when I was growing up. I know, I'm old. I miss the user groups, the IRC chats, the websites recommended to me by a friend that they discovered by accident. The news that was true, not AI generated. The fun videos that were people actually doing the thing, rather than now needing to guess whether it's real or not.
I'm also missing the thrill of coding. It's now a case of prompting Claude, getting it to building something for me, in a fraction of the time it would have taken me. But, where is the joy in that? AI is killing the joy of learning, but, it's also allowing us to deliver projects faster so it wont be going anywhere any time soon.
So what is the point?
If I uninstalled all the social apps from my phone, I would gain at least an hour of my day back, but, I also enjoy seeing what others are doing e.g. I follow my local gym and they share interesting stuff. I follow some bouldering friends and I get to see how their climbing has gone. But then the algorithm kicks in and I have dogs doing funny things, I have people showing off their amazing holidays or "perfect lives", which then suck you in. I miss the days of old Instagram, old socials, where you only saw the stuff you actually wanted to see without 101 adverts or spam.
If I have an itch, from a coding perspective, I now fire up Claude, see if it understands what I want to do and then I implement it. It could be done in about an hour of prompting and the project is finished. Then maybe I'll read the code, see what has been done, but I've literally done zero coding to get the end result. Am I still a software developer?
Even with this blog post, I'm throwing down some thoughts straight out of my head on to the keyboard and I have no real point, I'm not sure what I am trying to say but the next paragraph is what I asked Claude to summaries for me :
Somewhere along the way, the internet and my job both got really good at giving me the end result while taking away the bit I actually enjoyed. Social media still shows me my friends' climbing and the gym reels, but it's buried under stuff I never asked for. Claude still gets my projects finished, but I don't get the buzz of figuring it out myself. I'm not anti tech. I just want to feel like I'm choosing how I use it again.
The dopamine bit
There's something else I think is going on here, and it's a bit more personal.
I don't have an official ADHD diagnosis, but I've long suspected I'm somewhere on that spectrum. I'm always flitting between projects and interests. New idea, all in, shiny, then on to the next one.
And when you think about it, scrolling is basically built for a brain like that. Swipe, quick hit. Swipe, another one. Instant feedback, zero effort, and there's always something new just below the one you're looking at.
The annoying part is that AI coding scratches exactly the same itch. An idea pops into my head, an hour of prompting later it's done. Quick win. Then the next idea, and the next. It feels productive, but it's the same loop as the feed, just with a GitHub repo at the end of it.
The old way of coding was slower. You got stuck, you pushed through, and when it finally worked the payoff was huge because you'd earned it. I think that's the thrill I've been missing. It wasn't the finished project, it was the struggle to get there.
So, time to reset.
Ways to reset
Delete the apps, keep the accounts. The problem isn't the platforms, it's having them one tap away. If I want to see what the gym or my bouldering friends are up to, I can open a browser. The extra friction is the point, however, the issue with this is if I do want to post anything on to my accounts, it's a real hassle.
Give scrolling a job. Before I open an app, ask myself what I'm there for. Checking on a mate's send? Great. Nothing in particular? Close it.
Keep one project just for me. Work can have the AI speed. Pick a side project that I code by hand, badly and slowly, purely because I want to. No prompting allowed. I've a few already in the pipeline but it's oh so tempted to jump to Claude and get it done faster!
Park the shiny ideas. When a new idea hits, write it down instead of instantly firing up Claude to build it. If it still seems like a good idea in a week, great. Most of the time the urge to start is the dopamine talking, not the idea. How many of us have partly started projects in Github that have never seen the light of day? Yip, me too!
Choose the slow reward. Pick things where the payoff takes a while, like finishing a project I started or working a bouldering problem over a few sessions. The longer it takes, the better it feels when it lands.
Use Claude as a pair, not a replacement. When I do use it, ask it to explain, review or nudge me in the right direction rather than just write the whole thing. Then actually read the code it gives me. If I understand it, great, if not, then ask questions, learn.
Takeaways
The first thing I've realised is that losing 30 minutes to a feed isn't really a willpower problem. Those apps are built to do exactly that, and they're very good at it. So rather than just trying harder, I need to change the setup. If I want to access the app, I need to make an effort, so to start with, I've removed the apps from my home screen and removed the push notifications. Now I need to go looking for the app if I want to use it. A conscious decision.
I've also noticed that scrolling and AI coding give me the same quick hit. Whether or not there's a label for it, knowing that makes it a lot easier to catch myself when I'm chasing the buzz rather than doing something I genuinely care about.
AI isn't going anywhere, and pretending it will isn't helpful. The real question is where I let it in and where I keep it out. Which leads nicely on to the thing that's been bugging me most. Am I still a developer? I think the answer is yes, because being a developer was never just about typing code. It's about understanding the problem and caring how it gets solved. I can keep hold of that, but only if I stay in the loop.
And finally, the joy is usually in the doing, not the done. If something gets me to the end result but skips the bit I love, it's not actually saving me anything.
Is it time for you to reset?