Clear the session after 300k tokens and force your workflow to adapt to it. The rabbit holes come when you’re at context rot and blindly following Claude debugging some problem that you shouldn’t even be trying to solve.

Other than that, set an alarm when you want to stop working. When it rings, physically unplug your work laptop and move it somewhere out of sight.

Pure vibe-coding isn’t that satisfying (as you’ve discovered) the problem is you’re constantly reviewing its huge output, and it probably goes wild in directions making assumptions.

It’s much more fulfilling to give the LLM guardrails by engineering the solution.

This means coming up with the high level architecture, dependencies, breaking down the system into deliverable chunks, and implementing those chunks. The LLM can help in all those steps of the process. And it will be much easier to review and keep an understanding of the code.

I know this feeling. Before AI you had to evaluate an idea, plan its inplementation, judge if it is worth it or even doable. Now, you just prompt and see if you keep the output and think of the next thing to do. This can feel addictive. When i get lost in this i try to step away and think about what the bigger goal is and whether i am just distracting myself. I guess this helps me not get drained. But there is something which also helps tremendously: my coworkers do not work on the same things as i do. if they did, i would feel a big pressure to finish first. Are you competing with anyone?

Is this work related or addiction related? You are repeatedly pulling a slot machine in hopes for a jackpot of working usable code, something which does not come up just often enough to require another pull of the conversation turn.

Claude does not have a sense of time. What is stopping you from not talking to it until the next day?

Vibe coding is addictive for the same reasons slot machines are.

Sometimes the output is great, sometimes not, but it always feels like a change to the prompt will get you closer to the prize. Just like pulling the handle on a slot machine gets you one more chance at a jackpot.

Okay, I think the first problem is calling it an addiction because it is a similar feeling if you want to keep coding in machine code instead of moving higher in the hierarchy and start working with C++. It is an extremely handy tool to be able to produce some work, so you shouldn't take it off your belt. However, I will talk about Gemini addiction, where I can't even decide which color of shoes I should buy. I'm asking it to pick for me, which is terrible. So there is that.

I probably would try to delegate to Claude or any other agent quite long and hard task and then log off for the day living my offline life. Thus definitely remove my "guilt" for not being productive and let the useful work being produced. Not ideal,I know, but this is what I was doing lately

"this is a well-structured prompt. i'll pull up the relevant research and return with suggestions."