People who have adopted agentic AI tools like Claude Code or Cowork run a real risk of becoming addicted to their detriment. I know, because I feel that same emotional tug of AI when I use it. But I think I’ve also figured out how to use AI without losing control.

At this point, most people are familiar with the obvious dangers of AI addiction. We’ve read the stories about people who chat endlessly and stop interacting with real humans or become convinced by sycophantic AI that they’ve discovered the secrets of the universe. I’m talking about a much subtler danger–becoming addicted to the feeling of power and productivity that using AI brings.

This was already an issue with simple chatbots. Prompts produced seemingly magical results. But agentic AI magnifies the problem. Now, a prompt can save you hours of work.

Earlier today, I hopped on a Zoom call with a friend who is one of the world’s leading experts in his field, and we recorded a 45 minute conversation that we hope will lay the foundation for a book about the impact AI will have in his industry.

Before AI, I would have paid a service to transcribe the text, and then painstakingly took my own notes on how to turn the conversation into an essay. The process would have taken at least a day of clock time, and 3-5 hours of my time (and I work 2-3 times faster than most people on such tasks).

Tonight, I fired up Claude CoWork, and within 30 minutes, I had produced both a blog post and a detailed book outline based on the transcript that Zoom’s AI had automatically produced for me. Magical, right?

But I also realized some worrisome things.

First, the process of using Claude for this work was so swift and painless that I found myself reluctant to take the next logical step, and review the output. I skimmed it quickly, then realized that it would take a lot more work to manually edit and improve the blog post and book outline. It was far easier to just share them with my collaborator, and then knock off for the night, satisfied with a job well done.

Let that sink in: I felt so productive about using AI to accomplish a task that I found it harder to commit myself to doing the time-consuming manual work to complete my project. Instead, I punted that hard work to another day. But that work isn’t done, only deferred.

Second, the instant I finished punting the work, my first thought was, “What else can I use Claude to do?” I am a big advocate of using AI to be more productive, but this instinct seems like putting the cart before the horse. Rather than deciding on a goal, and then using AI as a tool, I was now trying to find a goal that would allow me to use more AI.

There’s an old saying, that when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

That amazing feeling of productivity that AI gives you creates an incentive to focus on goals that lend themselves to AI magic. But you shouldn’t select your goals simply based on what tools you can use–that’s like searching for lost car keys near a streetlight because that’s where the light is.

But I didn’t heed my own warning. Since I still had some time before I needed to go to bed, I asked Claude to rewrite its initial draft of the blog post (which read a bit to “AI-y” to me) in the style of the author Chris Yeh. This led to two interesting things.

First, Claude decided that the best way to figure out my voice was to re-analyze my half of the 45-minute transcript. Second, halfway through this token-intensive task, it informed me that I had hit my token limit, and asked me to either wait, purchase more tokens, or upgrade my plan.

I would love to operate a product that could A) decide on its own to consume more resources and B) when resources ran low BECAUSE OF MY PRODUCT’S ACTIONS, ask my customers to give me more money.

If I were truly addicted to Claude productivity, I probably would have paid. But fortunately, I had an alternative–I could take my Claude Cowork experience, and turn it into this blog post the old fashioned way, using human compute.

That’s the key lesson to take away. AI can be an amazing tool to increase your productivity. But AI’s incentives are to increase your *feeling* of productivity so that you use it more and more. It’s a magic wand that wants you to use it (and then charges you more).

Keep the focus on your AI-boosted productivity, not the intoxicating feelings it produces. And it wouldn’t hurt to do things the old way now and then, to maintain your ability to concentrate and do the hard work to is sometimes needed.