I Am an AI Vampire
The AI vampire is Silicon Valley's name for the person who works through the night because the tools made them too productive to stop. I have been that person twice.
The first time was late November 2025, around the release of Opus 4.5. For a week or two it was cheap on GitHub Copilot, and it was the first model where I could actually feel the productivity. Everything before it needed dragging along. This one kept up. So I barely slept for two weeks. There was always one more snag to clear, and the model cleared them fast enough that stopping felt stupid.
The second time was around GPT 5.3 Codex on February 5. It lasted only a couple of days, but it pulled just as hard. It was the first genuinely "cheap" model that was actually good, and I fell straight back into it.
I had an epiphany around that time as well. AI did not make me work less. Without real discipline it actually made me work a lot more. It is the Parkinson's Law. The model makes each task cheaper, so you take on bigger ones. The hours you save get spent on harder problems you would never have touched before. You end up putting in more time with the help than you did without it.
I did not burn out. I like the work too much, which is usually the protection. Both of those stretches still wrecked me thought. And I have managed enough teams to know that no team survives at that pace. One motivated person can sprint for a week. A team that tries to live there breaks, because one person's thrill quietly becomes everyone else's expectation.
It is calmer now and, no, I did not find any tricks, I just got used to the models, like everyone else. The first sprint was so surprising that I wanted as much of it as I could get, and that hunger is what kept me at the desk. Now I know how they behave and how to get the leverage without paying for it in sleep.
What I do not know is whether everyone else has settled too, or whether most people are still mid-sprint with the fatigue building. Probably everyone will go through this at least and perhaps all of us are still in it without even realizing it.
The AI vampire is a real thing, and it is not sustainable. It just shows that the human brain is not designed to handle that level of productivity without a break. The tools are powerful, but we need to be mindful of how we use them. It's important to find a balance and not let the tools control our work habits. We need to set boundaries and take breaks to avoid burnout. The AI vampire may be tempting, but it's not worth sacrificing our health and well-being for the sake of productivity.