The Most Productive Looking Procrastination I've Ever Done

Last month I built a soccer manager CLI game, on a Sunday afternoon, while there were things to do around the house. Things I'd been putting off for weeks. I'll never use it after playing for a few days, but still I built it. I mean, why not? The effort is so low nowadays.

That's the thing about building with AI agents. It is so easy that it's becoming my procrastination of choice. Before AI agents, my escape was video games for years, then YouTube and Instagram took over, each one lower effort than the last.

Now it's AI agents. I open a terminal, describe something that sounds useful, and within an hour I have a working prototype.

A quick Expo mobile app, a new scraping job, an automation I really didn't need, a game.

The mechanism feels similar to doomscrolling, just disguised as productivity.

With AI building, the reward is watching something materialize in real time. Will the agent nail it? Will it actually run? The dopamine hits before you've shipped anything real.

And unlike doomscrolling, you can convince yourself you're being productive. Research has found that developers using AI tools felt faster even when they were objectively slower. The sensation of velocity is the reward, not the output. I've experienced this.

The tools aren't the problem. I use them for real work and they're genuinely good. But outside of work, low friction becomes an escape. Any time something at home feels heavy or boring, there's a terminal and an idea waiting.

Before I spin up an agent now, I force myself to ask: Am I avoiding something? Or, what's the actual impact of the thing I want to build?

Usually the answer tells me everything. The soccer manager game is still on my laptop, and the thing I was avoiding is probably still on my list.