Your programmer friend is excited… and tired.

Midjourney founder David Holz summed up the feeling among many programmers in an X post. His friends “are all feeling extremely productive and also extremely burned out on the latest coding models,” Holz wrote.

“This makes me feel like something is wrong and also that there could be a great opportunity,” he wrote.

Holz concluded the post by asking, “Does anyone have any strategies they use to feel better on a day-to-day basis?”

Commenters responded with their own solutions and more detailed diagnoses of the problem. Former Meta engineer Shuming Hu wrote that “vibration coding does not get you into a flow state.”

Catherine Wu, Anthropic product manager for Claude Code, responded that she liked “work focused on a difficult task with a single agent.”

“I usually manage dozens of agents, but it’s good to get into the zone and the weeds of a task to do it well,” Wu wrote.

Former X and Cash App designer Brandon Kainoa Jacoby said the problem “will probably get worse before it gets better.”

He recommended moving away from AI a bit: “I’ve noticed that doing some kind of deep cognitive task, completely removed from any model, helps a little.”

Others suggested similar analog solutions for drainage, such as looking at a tree or playing with their children.

As AI coding tools transform their daily workflows, engineers are sounding the alarm about AI fatigue. In February, programmer Siddhant Khare argued that fatigue was real and “nobody talks about it” in a viral essay.

Other programmers told Business Insider that they were struggling to keep up with rapid advances in technology, leading to a feeling of paralysis in the workplace.

There’s a frenzy in the age of AI, one that’s keeping programmers up late and working longer. Ben South, serial founder and former VP of Postmates, shared his drive in Holz’s comments.

“Even an hour of rest seems like a ton of lost productivity,” South wrote.