TL;DR: How can I break my workaholic Claude Code addiction?Hello HN users, I really appreciate you reading this. I can&#x27;t think of a better audience for this question. If this issue has affected you in any way, I would be really thankful to you if you could leave a comment on this post.MY GOAL:
to be able to consistently do an acceptable day&#x27;s work as a professional software engineer, keeping a reasonably good understanding of the parts of the code that I changed that day, ending the day roughly on time, feeling like I did enough, feeling like I can forget about work until the next workday.MY PROBLEM:
I find that as the workday goes on and time runs out, my style of programming gets further from LLM-assisted coding (me designing and writing code, talking to Claude Code only when I get stuck) and closer to pure vibe-coding (where I don&#x27;t even review the code it writes until a big chunk has built up at which point I&#x27;m likely to abandon it, unless it&#x27;s really useful in which case I&#x27;ll painstakingly review it and try to understand it and usually have to make a lot of changes to get it how I want it - sometimes I&#x27;ll still have to abandon it if it&#x27;s too confusing or large). This leads to me spending hours and hours on vibe-coding sessions on workday evenings, after the workday is over. In the pre-Claude-Code era, working that late (with no external pressure) was much rarer for me. This leaves me feeling drained, frustrated, and with less time to look after myself and live my life.My work-life balance before was actually pretty good, so the shift in the last year or so has alarmed me.I think the fundamental problem is that vibe coding doesn&#x27;t feel as &quot;hard&quot; as work, so I can just keep doing, but essentially I&#x27;m just sitting at the computer working and not participating in my personal life long after the workday is officially over. Another factor is that I have too much autonomy at the moment and work remotely, which was OK before but now the communication between myself and colleagues has been really redirected into communication with Claude Code.I&#x27;ve tried the following with a bit of success but they&#x27;re hard to stick to and all have their own pros and cons:
- Abstain from using Claude Code at all
- Always typing out the edits it suggests myself instead of letting it make them (or even copy-and-pasting) - an old trick I learned from Dr Frank King. This means I keep the effort of doing a certain kind of character-by-character code review (maybe not &quot;understanding&quot; it fully but still getting closer than if I just squint at it and approve&#x2F;deny, or worse, go into &quot;accept edits&quot; or &quot;auto&quot; mode). And I feel more comfortable with the code later. But I just stop doing this at the end of the day when I&#x27;m trying to squeeze in &quot;one more bit&quot; of functionality
- Only using claude in &quot;low&quot; effort mode, manual mode - reviewing (and quarreling with...) every little diff - kind of works but feels draining in its own way
- Setting a hard deadline to end the workday, regardless of how much Claude Code I&#x27;m using.
- Reminding myself that my job isn&#x27;t to complete the whole project as fast as possible - it&#x27;s to do as much as I can (comfortably) in a workday
- Telling Claude to tell me to stop after the workday is over (it forgets this in long sessions though)
- Splitting my work into smaller chunks so that I have to interrupt it to make PRs and wait for feedback, or discuss design with colleagues etcI guess my internal emotional state, my workplace, and the stories I tell myself about my productivity, my goals, and the use of LLM tools, are all responsible for this behaviour - among other things. So counselling and general advice about workaholism &#x2F; remote working &#x2F; WFH would probably help - that&#x27;s welcome too if you have any thoughts.Many thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing from you.

Ask HN: How to break Claude Code addiction?

It seems like the PayPal app now refuses to run on GrapheneOS. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s only because I have enabled the PayPal card for contacless NFC payments, but when opening the app it crashes with the following exception: com.paypal.oslo.app.rasp.RootDetectionSecurityException: Security policy violation: s=root

Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS

I have emails from 1997-98 onwards all in one massive inbox, currently on gmail with emclient on Mac as the mail client (there have been probably a dozen services starting from self-hosted in the beginning). I would like to archive the historic mails for the first 25 years, but in a way that&#x27;s actually searchable and usable in the future (and potentially importable to a new mail client&#x2F;service) and not in any particular mailbox format that may go obsolete. There is no good reason to hoard them, other than &quot;I feel like doing so&quot;. What are the best options, and tools?

Ask HN: Best way to archive 25 years of emails

Why not just publish your API docs and let the client&#x27;s bot chain together what calls need to be made.You could even repurpose the MCP so you only ever produce the API documentation as EVERY response. No LLM necessary.

Ask HN: Why do we need MCP?

I want to buy a printer.I have a theory that all printers are made by predatory companies that want to sell you planned obsolescence devices with cryptographically motivated expensive cartridges.Am I not fully correct? Is there a good option outside of this realm? Should I buy an old used laser printer?

Ask HN: What's a Good Physical Printer?

Brex&#x27;s CEO said this and I understand where he comes from, but is there a place for end to end workflows in LLM based applications? At the end of the day I agree that cutting edge software should be fully usable by agents, but I can&#x27;t decide if every product should be an agent. I personally hate the UX of most agentic applications. I have this fantasy of future products where I can simply enter input X and get output Y without having to give feedback on every little thing. Of course when you&#x27;re designing something it needs to be a process, but what if I can tell my phone to &quot;buy dinner&quot; and it just does it without bothering me at every step? What if it was just good enough? I think a conversable agent is necessary as long as the application is unsure of the accuracy of the output, but I wonder if the UX of LLM applications could be more like a rich person fixing their car, like here is my situation, just do what you need to do and don&#x27;t bother me.

Is "An agent with tools" the only valid LLM application?

I built an AI desktop client specifically designed for non-programmers, which has the capabilities of Codex&#x2F;Claude Desktop, but it is localized, protects all your privacy, and supports any model call.Would you like to try using it? 
Any questions, feel free to ask me!

Ask HN: What BOYK AI client are you using?

I&#x27;m administering a small number of Linux servers that run an ssh server exposed to the Internet. I usually connect using a cryptographic key, but I still allow password authentication in case of trouble (perhaps I&#x27;m being overly cautious). I&#x27;ve been using fail2ban with good results, but I&#x27;m annoyed at having to install a Python interpreter on every server.Is there an alternative to fail2ban that is just a single binary? It doesn&#x27;t need to have all of the features of fail2ban, blocking dictionary attacks against ssh is all I need.

Ask HN: Alternatives to Fail2ban?

Where can I sign up to move away from HF?

Ask HN: Hugging Face is out. Who is hosting open models?

Today, you can create any utility or service you would like, and securely access them with gold standard privacy.Why is this not way more widespread?

Ask HN: Why are onionv3 services not more popular?

I see companies having codebase in Tauri going back to electron - is this a common thing?

Ask HN: Any true alternatives to electron JavaScript?

I have a lot of personal blogs and articles from people who are in different fields, including game dev. What I don&#x27;t have is articles or stories from people that talk about the independant publishing process of a video game, especially on different platforms and stores.

Ask HN: Any blogs/personal notes from game devs who self-published a game?

Almost every codebase is calling a REST, gRPC, or a GraphQL API or using SDKs from an external or event internal provider. It gets harder to keep track of everything when the codebase matures and increases in size and from my experience sometimes  it gets hard to respond to changes in time or even become aware that a dependency is deprecated and their API has changed completely. 
Do developers need better tools that to improve dependency and integration management?

Ask HN: Is observability over the dependencies in codebases still a problem?

Nowadays, almost everyone codes with AI, right? I am a freelancer, and the entire market is now setting deadlines based on AI-assisted coding speeds. If you don&#x27;t use AI, you simply cannot meet the deadlines. Because of this, I completely transitioned to AI-driven coding at the beginning of this year (starting around GPT-5.3).It&#x27;s not that AI coding isn&#x27;t fun. It is. But in the beginning, there were still many things AI couldn&#x27;t do well. The community focus was on &quot;Harness Engineering,&quot; attaching MCPs, or deep Prompt Engineering. I actually built and used quite a few custom AI tools during that phase.In the past, you had to provide not just your intent and direction, but also detailed, step-by-step instructions to reach that goal. Lately, though, even if you skip the detailed instructions, both Claude and GPT-5.6 handle it perfectly. You don&#x27;t even have to agonize over which model to use. &quot;Graph engineering&quot; is currently trending, but it seems the models have already learned those patterns natively—if you establish a high-level plan with them, they automatically embed the execution policies into it. Whenever I try to learn and apply a new AI engineering technique, the next model update already does it out of the box, making the effort feel pointless.The real problem is that AI is now too good. It applies ADT patterns, immutability, Option&#x2F;Maybe, Result patterns, functional programming patterns, monadic chaining, and architectural structures like MVC, MVVM, MVI, and Hexagonal architectures far better than I can. It&#x27;s heavily demotivating.All those years I spent memorizing GoF patterns, slowly applying them to my work, and tweaking them into my own style—it all feels meaningless now.Honestly, the vast majority of freelance work revolves around simple CRUD apps. Sure, there is domain knowledge to memorize, but when it comes to structuring CRUD, using functional techniques for error and value handling, or writing boundary tests, AI is just far more meticulous and capable than I am.It even feels like AI is better at domain modeling. I try to hypnotize myself into believing I&#x27;m still necessary, but realistically, I don&#x27;t work in Big Tech. I&#x27;m a programmer who mostly assembles business logic on top of existing frameworks, and the truth is, AI does my job better. And faster. I don&#x27;t think I can deny it anymore.Top-tier developers might still outperform AI, but for the vast majority of us, including myself, that is no longer the reality. To write the kind of code AI generates, I used to have to keep documentation open on a second monitor, think deeply, and constantly Google better approaches. AI just generates it instantly, making my past efforts feel obsolete.When AI writes better code than I do, how am I supposed to maintain my motivation and identity? I would especially love to hear from other freelance developers. With market deadlines getting tighter and tighter because of AI, how are you handling this transition?Again, it&#x27;s not that AI &quot;vibe coding&quot; isn&#x27;t fun. It is. But entirely separate from that, the stark realization that I am losing my competitive edge is making me increasingly depressed.

Ask HN: AI writes better code than me. How to keep my identity?

There was another one of these a couple of months ago and it did not get any traction. Lets hope this one does better. I myself am at $0&#x2F;mo from my side projects and am really hoping side projects still have a future.So, those of you making $500&#x2F;month or more on side projects in 2026, what are you doing these days?https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39110194 (2024)https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34482433 (2023)https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29995152 (2022)https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29667095 (2021)https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24947167 (2020)

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2026 – Show and tell

Ask HN: Why still no unified standard file to describe all skills/mcps for repo?

Amazon now hides nearly all product reviews . Filtering and ordering are disabled . Only the top 5-10 are shown . To opt out, a 5 day email request is requiredHere is an example of the UI for members of the experimenthttps:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;stillmisanthro1&#x2F;status&#x2F;2092441592242028986

Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

Still working on &quot;transitioning&quot; from the early version of SWE with AI, where you have just a single session open like a chat, to the system I hear more and more people use, many sessions&#x2F;windows while orchestrating several agents to multitask.Curious to hear how people manage this and what their routine is &#x2F; how they manage the issues that sometimes come up while trying this

Ask HN: How do you use multiple sessions for software engineering?

I want to hear some advices to not waste time on smth. You can advise everything what you want or you can share any experiences or stories.

Ask HN: If I am 16 what should I learn? Which books should read?

Just got an email saying this:&gt; On October 7, 2026, edit predictions will no longer be included with Zed’s free Personal plan. They will remain available on the Pro, Student, and Business plans.&gt; Edit predictions require ongoing inference infrastructure, so we’re moving them to plans that support those costs.&gt; You’re receiving this email because you’ve recently used edit predictions on the Personal plan. If you want to continue using predictions after October 7, you can:&gt; Upgrade to Pro&gt; Self-host Zeta 2.1 (see our docs)&gt; Use one of the third-party providers we support&gt; Otherwise, no action is required.&gt; — The Zed team

Zed: Edit predictions are leaving the free Personal plan on October 7

Looking for options that might work for a low power touchscreen for a calendar project.