The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

He built a mountain of AI side quests — now commenters say the real bug is his attention span

TLDR: A developer says AI tools lured him into making dozens of flashy but mostly pointless side projects, and now he thinks the smartest move is to quit paying for them. Commenters split between “this is just fun, stop guilt-tripping yourself” and “no, this stuff is absolutely wrecking people’s focus.”

One fed-up developer went online to confess that his paid artificial intelligence helper didn’t just speed up work — it turned into a chaos machine. What started as “write a quick script” kept exploding into half-finished apps, clones, tools, games, and even a news site he says he never meant to run. His big conclusion? The answer may be brutally simple: cancel the subscription before the subscription turns your brain into a 24/7 project factory.

And the comments? Oh, they were very ready. One camp basically said, “Hold on — why are we acting like every hobby needs to become a business?” That crowd thought the author was being way too harsh on himself, arguing he built a pile of weird, fun stuff and then judged it for not making money. Another group said the deeper problem is painfully real: these tools make easy tasks even easier, while somehow making it harder to focus on anything difficult. In other words, huge bursts of output, suspiciously little progress.

Then came the spiciest philosophical swing: one commenter warned that this tech doesn’t merely help human thinking like a calculator or spellcheck tool — it replaces it. Others got more personal, joking grimly that AI is perfect for people with restless brains because it fills every spare second with “ultra processed weirdness.” The vibe across the thread was part support group, part intervention, part meme: is AI making people more productive, or just more distractible at industrial scale?

Key Points

  • The author lists numerous AI-assisted software projects built across tools and languages, including one sizeable SaaS and many smaller utilities, clones, and prototypes.
  • The article says most of these projects were not useful enough to maintain and often expanded far beyond the author's original request for a quick script.
  • The author argues that current AI coding tools promote distraction and fragmented attention rather than focused application.
  • The author describes reducing a Claude subscription to Pro, then switching to Codex after Claude service issues, but says usage rose again.
  • The article states that while AI can generate impressive technical output quickly, vendors and tools are structured to increase interaction, token consumption, and code volume.

Hottest takes

"overindexing on useful and underindexing on wonderful" — elliotbnvl
"AI make easy work even easier... it shortens the attention span" — xendo
"ultra processed weirdness" — hyperhello
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