The Death of Deep Work
Coding agents increased my output while turning work into a state of constant availability.
One of the things I lament about the rise of coding agents is that it feels like we’re witnessing the death of deep work. I miss the old days when I would sit down and plan an eight-hour session on just building the feature. The work was deeply intellectually stimulating. And by “the old days,” I mean about a year ago.
So much of modern coding is dispatching agents, running several in parallel, and responding when they come back. You spend less time in your editor, using your Vim keybindings and working through the little details yourself. In some ways, it’s great. You’re freed up to think about the bigger decisions. But when you’re paying for a subscription, you feel like you should be making the most of it. The agents can work as long as you keep giving them something to do. Your job becomes keeping the uptime.
I’m constantly checking notifications, reading what an agent has done, and responding so it can keep going. My brain feels like it’s turning to mush. I came here to write code, and somehow I’m on call like an investment banker. I’m at lunch with friends, a notification comes in, and I feel the urge to check it.
You’re arranging your sleep around when you can prompt again. Being available for the next conversational turn starts to organize the rest of your life. You even hear stories about people turning to polyphasic sleep to make the most of their Claude Code usage limits, like that Hacker News post from about a year ago about a developer taking two- or three-hour naps between sessions. The URL was literally “no-sleep-till-agi.”
And after all those hours of reading and responding, it’s not always clear that I’m doing the right thing. Sometimes I look back and think I could have done it better if I’d just sat down and edited the thing myself.
It also feels like coding has become less of an intellectual activity. Yes, I still read a lot. I read arguably even more than I did before. And I’m definitely still steering and putting my taste into the work. But it feels different. The amount of code I produce has gone up, and I am further away from the original work that I loved.