A leading programmer warns that artificial intelligence has a “vampire effect” that needs limits

A veteran Silicon Valley software engineer says programmers need to learn “how to say no, and very quickly,” or risk being “crushed” by artificial intelligence (AI) tools, Business Insider reports.

Steve Yegge, who entered high school at age 11 and graduated at 14, began his career as a programmer in 1992 and then worked with Jeff Bezos at Amazon in the early years of the company. Later, he was, for 12 years, a senior programmer at Google. But his new experience with AI-assisted programming leads him to say that AI tools are built in a way that can lead to deep burnout.

“There's a vampiric effect of AI where you get excited, you work extremely hard, and you end up capturing a huge amount of value,” Yegge recently told The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter and podcast.

Yegge said companies also need to understand that while AI can make engineers more productive than ever, pushing things to the limit will only lead to workforce burnout.

“I really think that founders, company leaders, and engineering leaders at all levels, all the way up to line managers, need to be aware of this and realize that you might only get three productive hours from a person doing 'vibe coding' at full speed. So you let them work three hours a day? The answer is yes, or your company will collapse,” he said. “So you let them work three hours a day? The answer is yes, or your company will go under.”

“Vibe coding” is the term that has become popular recently to refer to computer-aided programming, where a good part of the source code or other tasks are completed by AI tools.

More and more programmers are reporting AI-assisted work fatigue

But Business Insider notes that software engineers are increasingly voicing concerns about “AI fatigue.” Research engineer Siddhant Khare, who develops AI tools, recently published an essay about how artificial intelligence accelerated the pace of his work to a point where it had exhausted him.

Yegge points out that engineers need to set boundaries when doing “vibe coding.”

“People have to learn the art of opposition, of saying no,” he said in the interview for “The Pragmatic Engineer.”

Until then, Yegge says, he and his fellow engineers are sleeping during the day and growing increasingly tired.

“I get to sleep during the day and talk to friends from startups, and they get to sleep during the day,” he said. “We're getting tired and cranky,” the veteran programmer added.

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