The developers who get the most out of AI are also the ones who sleep the least: it’s called "AI psychosis"

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and who coined the term vibe codinghas been in what he describes as a state of “AI psychosis” since December. He works 16 hours a day directing swarms of code agents. And he admits that he feels “extremely nervous” when he has left tokens without consuming at the end of the month. This has been admitted in an interview with Sarah Guo.

It is not an isolated case but rather the pattern that is beginning to repeat itself among the developers who get the most out of this type of agents.

Why is it important. The dominant narrative about AI has been that of unlimited productivity and the famous “10x“What is beginning to be documented is its dark side: the most intensive users are also those who show the most worrying signs of behavioral deterioration. And they are not anecdotal profiles. Garry Tan, CEO of an entire Y Combinator, has called his own experience “cyber psychosis“. A CTO picked up by Axios says he needs prescription medication to sleep.

If the most productive tools in history generate the same patterns in their most intensive users as games of chance, the debate about the impact of AI at work enters another dimension.

Between the lines. Karpathy’s nervousness at the tokens Being left unused is the behavioral signature of someone who has internalized scarcity as a threat, exactly the same mechanism that keeps a gambler hooked on a slot machine.

Developer Armin Ronacher talked about this in January: “Many of us fell into code addiction with agents. We barely slept, we built incredible things.”

The context. Agents like Claude Code either Codex from OpenAI do not work like a chatbot that is asked a question. They operate autonomously for hours, writing, testing, and deploying code while the developer monitors, fixes, and re-delegates.

The promise is enormous and so is the cognitive cost: the human brain is not designed to supervise processes that advance at machine speed during 16-hour days.

Yes, but. Programmers have always had a reputation for working in marathons of concentration. Sleepless nights before a launch are part of industry folklore.

What distinguishes this phenomenon is its compulsive nature and its continuity: it is not the specific pressure of a deadlinebut an activation that does not turn off when the job ends, because with an agent that can keep running, the job never completely ends.

In Xataka |I have lived the “miracle” of vibe coding: this is how I programmed an Android TV app without having any idea about programming

Featured image | Anthropic

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The news

The developers who get the most out of AI are also the ones who sleep the least: it’s called “AI psychosis”

was originally published in

Xataka

by
Javier Lacort

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