The AI Vampire

This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.

I first started noticing a concerning new phenomenon a month ago, just after the new year, where people were overworking due to AI.

This week I’m suddenly seeing a bunch of articles about it.

I’ve collected a number of data points, and I have a theory. My belief is that this all has a very simple explanation: AI is starting to kill us all, Colin Robinson style.

If you’ll recall from What We Do In The Shadows (worth a watch, yo), Colin Robinson was an Energy Vampire. Being in the same room with him would drain people.

That’s…pretty much what’s happening. Being in the same room with AI is draining people.

10x Productivity is Real

Let’s start with the root cause, which is that AI does actually make you more 10x productive, once you learn how.

I know some of you are holding on to old September/October-ish beliefs about this, from last time you tried it, and you respectfully disagree.

But if you haven’t used specifically Opus 4.5/4.6 with specifically Claude Code for at least an hour, then you’re in for a real shock. Because all your complaining about AI not being useful for real-world tasks is obsolete. AI coding hit an event horizon on November 24th, 2025. It’s the real deal. And unfortunately, all your other tools and models are pretty terrible in comparison.

But hey, don’t take it from me. Take it from… the Copilot people. According to The Verge and a bunch of other reputable news sources, Microsoft is openly encouraging their employees to use multiple tools, and as a result, Claude Code has rapidly become dominant across engineering at Microsoft. If you give your worker bees open season, they will quickly find the path of least resistance, and that path goes through Claude Code.

Let’s not quibble about the exact productivity boost from AI. The boost amount isn’t what this post is about. It just needs to be higher than about 2x for the vampire effect to kick in. We’ll use 10x because it’s a number people throw around. Let’s use it for the sake of argument.

With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.

For someone.

But who actually gets to keep that value?

Value Capture

Let’s pretend you’re the only person at your company using AI.

In Scenario A, you decide you’re going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison.

In that scenario, your employer captures 100% of the value from you adopting AI. You get nothing, or at any rate, it ain’t gonna be 9x your salary. And everyone hates you now.

And you’re exhausted. You’re tired, Boss. You got nothing for it.

Congrats, you were just drained by a company. I’ve been drained to the point of burnout several times in my career, even at Google once or twice. But now with AI, it’s oh, so much easier.

Now let’s look at Scenario B. You decide instead that you will only work for an hour a day, and aim to keep up with your peers using AI. On that heavily reduced workload, you manage to scrape by, and nobody notices.

In this scenario, you capture 100% of the value from your adopting AI.

In this scenario, your company goes out of business. I’m sorry, but your victory over The Man will be pyrrhic, because The Man is about to be kicked in The Balls, since with everyone slacking off, a competitor will take them out pretty fast.

But in Scenario A your company is honestly pretty precarious too, since you’re running all your employees on the ragged edge of burnout.

The answer to “who captures the value” must lie somewhere in the middle, or we’re all pretty screwed.

Inherent Acceleration

The world is accelerating, against its will. I can feel it; I grew up in the 1980s, when time really did move more slowly, in the sense that news and events were spaced way out, and society had time to reflect on them. Now it changes so fast we can’t even keep up, let alone reflect.

I’ve been watching the effect the AI Vampire is having on people around me and I’m growing concerned. We’re all excited, but it’s also… weird.

I already posted about the Nap Attacks, how I fall asleep suddenly at all hours of the day after long vibe-coding sessions, and how my colleagues at SageOx are seriously considering installing nap pods at the “office.” I’m still sleeping a crazy amount.

It would seem that we are addicted to a new drug, and we don’t understand all of its effects yet. But one of them is massive fatigue, every day.

I don’t think that’s… good. And if anything, it seems to be getting more widespread. The developing situation is a multi-whammy coming at developers from all sides:

• Crazy addicted early adopters like me are controlling the narrative.
• You can’t stop reading about it in the news; there’s nowhere to hide from it.
• Panicking CEOs are leaning in hard to AI, often whiplashing it into their orgs.
• Companies are capitalistic extraction machines and literally don’t know how to ease up.

So you’re damned if you do (you’ll be drained) and you’re damned if you don’t (you’ll be left behind.)

Before we get into how to fight back, I need to take some accountability myself.

Unrealistic Beauty Standards

Agentic software building is genuinely addictive. The better you get at it, the more you want to use it. It’s simultaneously satisfying, frustrating, and exhilarating. It doles out dopamine and adrenaline shots like they’re on a fire sale.

Many have likened it to a slot machine. You pull a lever with each prompt, and get random rewards and sometimes amazing “payouts.” No wonder it’s addictive.

People are discovering this fun and they’re shouting from the rooftops about the crazy stuff they built during a 40-hour nonstop sprint with Claude Code.

And that’s where the problem gets into full swing. Because other people are listening!

People like me, and folks on LinkedIn saying their whole company has 3+ Claude Pro/Max accounts for Gas Town, and Jeffrey Emanuel and his 22 accounts at $4400/month, not to mention all the other crazy early adopters–we’re all part of the problem.

We’re all setting unrealistic standards for everyone else.

Maybe me worst of all. I have 40 years of experience, I’ve led large teams, I read fast, and I have essentially unlimited time, energy, and now tokens for experimenting. I am completely unrepresentative of the average developer.

But I’m still standing up and telling everyone “do it this way!” I even co-wrote a book about it.

Employers are very likely starting to look at me, and the rest of us far outliers, and saying, “Hey, all my employees could be like that!”

And dollar-signs appear in their eyeballs, like cartoon bosses.

I know that look. There’s no reasoning with the dollar-eyeball stare.

I don’t think there’s a damn thing we can do to stop the train. But we can certainly control the culture, since the culture is us. I plan to practice what I preach, and dial my hours back. That’s going to mean saying No to a lot of people who want to chat with me (sorry!), and also dialing back some of my ambitions, even if it means losing some footraces. I don’t care. I will fight the vampire.

The next group that needs to arm up with garlic and wooden stakes is AI-native startups, where I’m concerned that the frenzy is getting out of hand.

Startups Are Poisoning The Well

Startups are an especially big contributor to the AI Vampire problem.

If you have joined an AI-native startup, the founders and investors are using the VC system to extract value from you, today, with the glimmer of hope for big returns for you all later.

Most of these ideas will fail.

I know this because they are literally telling me their plans like villains at the end of an old movie, since with Gas Town I have mastered the illusion of knowing what I’m doing. Truth is, nobody, least of all me, knows what they’re doing right now. But I look like I do, so everyone is coming to show me their almost uniformly terrible ideas.

Startup founders are out there draining people at a faster rate than at any time in history, in pursuit of instantly banal ideas like “oh hey, I bet nobody thought of making a sandbox system for agents.” Cue nine thousand sandbox startups, all of which will eventually be killed off by a single OSS winner wrapped by home-grown internal vibe-coded SaaS.

I could list out a bunch of others. It’s pretty bad. There’s a massive amount of talent being thrown at an incredible dearth of real ideas, basically the same six tired pitches. (“AI personas!” “Agent memory!” “Gas Town, but safe!” “Better RAG!”)

The overwhelming majority of these startups won’t sell a flea-bitten dollar of ARR. Even though enterprises aren’t too bright about SaaS, collectively (evidence: many are still on Copilot), they are quickly growing savvy enough to know that Build is the New Buy. Finance departments are about to make your head spin refusing to re-up SaaS contracts this year.

But the SaaS founders are throwing themselves and their entire companies into it like it’s a classic gold rush, where everyone’s going to get a stake if they just work to exhaustion. I don’t think it works that way this time, but that’s how they’re treating it. A footrace to stake claims in the AI space.

That’s a race that ends, in my opinion, with everyone collapsing in exhaustion without actually winning the race.

And while they run, they are setting the tone for the rest of us. I see these frenzied AI-native startups as an army of a million hopeful prolecats, each with an invisible vampiric imp perched on their shoulder, drinking, draining. And the bosses have them too.

Enterprises see the oncoming horde and think, oh jeez, we need to hustle. And they’re not exactly wrong. Which means this lovely dystopian picture is making its way slowly but surely into enterprise, at the big company where you work.

Executives everywhere are excited about AI. Many of them are addicted as well, vibe coding at home, somewhat dangerously. And they’re thinking, gosh, if I just had a few engineers who worked this hard all the time then I wouldn’t need a bunch of the others! This is really just a recruiting problem!

They’re reframing the problem in terms of finding people ripest for extraction.

The Anti-Amazon-Extraction Formula

Back when I was at Amazon in the shiny new US1 building in the International District in downtown Seattle, 2001–2003-ish, people began to tire of the ridiculous pace. The company was post-IPO; the market had been up and down, and the company was starting to mature. But everyone was still working like sled dogs.

Most of my colleagues who put up with that environment are billionaires now, so it’s easy to point back at that time and say, “Oh, it was worth it.”

But what if it hadn’t been a success? How many CEOs have bet everything, including their company’s wellbeing and mental health, on a big launch, only for it to go nowhere?

I’ve been there. Plenty of times I’ve allowed myself to be extracted from (drained) for the promise of some big potential future payout. One that often never came.

Companies are straight-up designed for extraction, and so you need to be the counter-force.

My friends who were grumbling back in 2001 needed some help with this, and I gave it to them. One day I walked up to the whiteboard during a particularly heated grumble-session, and I wrote a ratio on the board: $/hr (dollars divided by hours).

I said to everyone, Amazon pays you a flat salary, no bonuses, and you work a certain number of hours per week. From that, you can calculate that you make a certain number of dollars per hour.

I told the grumbler group, you can’t control the numerator of this ratio. But you have significant control over the denominator. I pointed at the /hr for dramatic effect.

They all looked at me, wide-eyed, never having EVER thought of it from this perspective before.

I don’t think they fully believed me, but at least I got them thinking about it.

As for my part, I went ahead and dialed that denominator down, and lived life a bit while I was at Amazon, because fuck extraction.

Funny thing, a couple of times over the next few months I’d be walking by some office full of people and they’d all be studying a formula on the board that said, in big letters: $/hr.

$/hr To The Rescue

That old formula is also my proposed solution for the AI Vampire, a quarter century later.

Someone else might control the numerator. But you control the denominator.

You might think you don’t. And indeed, individually you may not have much sway over it. But collectively, the employees of your company have literally all the power. Now that I’ve been up at the top, I’ve learned that CEOs have surprisingly little power.

You need to push back. You need to tell your CEO, your boss, your HR, your leadership, about the AI vampire. Point them at this post. Send them to me. I’m their age and can look them in the eye and be like yo. Don’t be a fool.

You need to educate them about sharing the AI value capture between the company and the employees, and how to strike a good balance of sustainability and competitiveness.

When I was visiting Combank in Sydney in December, in their historic train station tech campus, I was awestruck by how it seemed like the ideal balance of happiness and productivity. It was open-plan, high ceilings, fancy, natural light, fully green with plants everywhere, with a huge coffee and snack stand in the middle of all the offices. People were sprawled out through the building, working, meeting, socializing, walking around outside, eating, enjoying the sun. It was, like, Tuesday for them.

They found a great setting for the dial, at least for this time and place. I don’t know how it changes with AI. But I feel like their current setting is where we need to aim as the future changes us.

It’s not even remotely sustainable for companies to capture 100% of the value from AI. And when employees capture 100% of the value, it will be temporary at best: that company gets beat by someone who’s got the dial turned higher.

I don’t even know what the right setting for the dial is. Hell, I’m the worst person to ask, because I’ve got the dial set to 11 and I’m putting all my weight on it, trying to make it go to 12.

But the right setting is in the middle somewhere. Companies will try to drag it higher. You need to fight to drag it lower.

I would argue you need to consciously fight the AI Vampire even if you’re at a 30-person startup, where everyone agreed when they signed up that this was a sprint to try to get rich.

You need to fight it if you’re an investor. You will kill your Golden Geese.

You need to fight the AI vampire most of all if you’re a CEO or founder. People will be caught up in your enthusiasm. And they won’t understand why they’re being drained until they hit a wall and maybe can’t recover. Burnout’s a serious deal and can take someone down for a year or more. So take it seriously.

As company leadership, what, realistically, can you do? I mean, nap pods is an option, probably a good one if people come into the office. But what if people just didn’t have to work so many hours? That is by far the most concrete way to fight the vampire. Change your expectations about how many hours there are in a human workday.

I’ve argued that AI has turned us all into Jeff Bezos, by automating the easy work, and leaving us with all the difficult decisions, summaries, and problem-solving. I find that I am only really comfortable working at that pace for short bursts of a few hours once or occasionally twice a day, even with lots of practice.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, the new workday should be three to four hours. For everyone. It may involve 8 hours of hanging out with people. But not doing this crazy vampire thing the whole time. That will kill people.

As an individual developer, you need to fight the vampire yourself, when you’re all alone, with nobody pushing you but the AI itself. I think every single one of us needs to go touch grass, every day. Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human.

I regret the unrealistic standards that I’m contributing to setting. I don’t believe most people can work like I’ve been working. I’m not sure how long I can work how I’ve been working.

I’m convinced that 3 to 4 hours is going to be the sweet spot for the new workday. Give people unlimited tokens, but only let people stare at reports and make decisions for short stretches. Assume that exhaustion is the norm. Building things with AI takes a lot of human energy.

I’m going to continue to launch stuff, post blogs, all that. But be aware that I’m pushing back hard behind the scenes. I’m saying No to a bunch of people asking for meetings, and resisting the incessant demand for podcasts and appearances.

I’m making sure that if this all comes crashing down, I won’t have Regret Years to look back on. I’m even typing this post out at the mall, with Linh and Mozart, because when I close the computer, we’re going to go for a walk.

I’ll see you next time. I hope we’re both more refreshed.