The Omnipotence Syndrome
When $200/month buys you everything, and you can't handle it
Hey,
It’s February now. We’re one month into a year that already feels different.
And I have a prediction that might sound crazy:
The reliance on Claude Code and other coding agents will take down many people.
Not physically. Mentally.
Let me explain why, and why this isn’t actually new. Humanity has been here before. Many times.
The Ancient Warning
Three thousand years ago, the Greeks told a story about a king named Midas.
You know the surface version. He wished for the golden touch. Everything he touched turned to gold. The end.
But that’s not the story.
The real story is what happened next.
Midas touched a twig. Gold. He touched a stone. Gold. He touched a rose. Gold. He was ecstatic. This was everything he’d ever wanted.
Then he sat down to eat.
The bread turned to gold in his hands. The wine turned to gold as it touched his lips. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t drink. And when his daughter ran to embrace him, she became a golden statue.
The gift became a curse the moment it became unlimited.
According to Aristotle, Midas eventually died of starvation. His prayers fell on deaf ears. The very power that seemed desirable brought only misery and profound regret.
Why am I starting with a 3,000-year-old myth?
Because we’re living in it.
The Original Truth
When I got into IT years ago, and for many years after, there was this one truth that seemed unshakable.
“Alone, we’re limited. Together, we build great things.”
And it was absolutely true.
Talented colleagues in different seats across the product pushed you to do more. To care about quality. To feel pride in what you shipped. Sometimes, together, you made something impossible.
But all of that was built on a fragile system.
Human relationships. Egos. Miscommunication. Politics. Burnout. Salaries. Vacation days. Someone’s kid getting sick. Someone quitting for a competitor. Someone not pulling their weight. Someone burning out.
The “team” was powerful, but maintaining that power required constant, exhausting effort.
It was a complex system of relationships between people who each had their own ambitions, fears, and bad days.
And now?
The Era of Coding Agents
Welcome to February 2026.
The era of coding agents is here. Not “coming soon.” Not “in beta.” Here.
Today, any person with ideas can replace most of their colleagues with digital equivalents.
Let me be specific about what’s available right now:
Codex 5.2 xhigh for heavy lifting and complex implementations
Opus 4.5 for surgical, precise work that requires taste
GPT 5.2 Pro for writing PRDs, strategy, and asking hard questions
Every complex skill has a skill file. Every API integration has an MCP server. Every hard question has an answer that rivals what many experts in their fields can offer.
The “universal team” is available 24/7.
It doesn’t get sick. It doesn’t have bad days. It doesn’t ask for equity. It doesn’t threaten to quit. It doesn’t send passive-aggressive Slack messages. It doesn’t need one-on-ones. It doesn’t have opinions about the company culture.
And it costs $200 a month.
The dream of every “idea person” is suddenly real.
And most idea people are absolutely not ready for it.
King Midas got his golden touch. We got ours.
The Pattern We Keep Repeating
Here’s what most people miss: this isn’t the first time humans have faced the psychological crisis of suddenly getting everything they wanted.
We have data on this. A lot of it.
Exhibit A: The Lottery Winners
In the 1990s, psychologist Stephen Goldbart noticed something strange. His clients who had received sudden windfalls, lottery winners, IPO millionaires, unexpected inheritances, were showing symptoms that looked like PTSD.
He called it Sudden Wealth Syndrome.
The symptoms: shock, guilt, isolation, uncertainty, paranoia, identity crisis.
The numbers are brutal:
Out of 35,000 lottery winners who received between $50,000 and $150,000, 1,900 filed for bankruptcy within five years
78% of former NFL players go bankrupt or face severe financial stress within two years of retirement
60% of former NBA players are in dire financial straits within five years
70% of wealth transfers fail by the third generation
This isn’t about money management. This is about psychology.
When you suddenly have everything you ever wanted, something breaks. Your identity was built around wanting. Around striving. Around constraints. Remove the constraints, and you don’t know who you are anymore.
“While others may view sudden wealth as a boon, adaptation to a new situation is often not easy. It can be another life stress. Lack of purpose and depression can result.”
Sound familiar?
Exhibit B: The Child Stars
There’s another group that gets too much, too fast: child actors.
Former child stars are one of the most at-risk groups for developing mental health issues. Researchers have documented what they call Child Star Syndrome, often misdiagnosed as “poor decision-making” when it’s actually a form of PTSD.
The pattern is eerily consistent:
Macaulay Culkin became one of the most famous children in the world after Home Alone. What followed: financial exploitation, legal battles, estrangement from parents, years retreating from the spotlight.
Drew Barrymore was in a psychiatric ward at 13. Lindsay Lohan. Amanda Bynes. The list goes on.
Why does this happen?
Because youthful fame requires adult-level performance while the prefrontal cortex, responsible for emotional regulation and impulse control, is still developing. This creates a perfect storm for emotional dysregulation, fractured identity, and deep attachment wounds.
The essential elements of healthy development, play, connection with peers, freedom to explore, are replaced by applause, bright lights, and a constant state of being on display.
They get unlimited capability before they develop the internal structures to handle it.
This is exactly what’s happening to builders right now.
Exhibit C: The Hedonic Treadmill
There’s a reason lottery winners often return to their old lives, and it’s not always because they lost the money.
Behavioral economists call it hedonic adaptation. No matter how dramatic the change in circumstances, humans quickly return to their baseline level of happiness.
Once the excitement fades, they begin to miss the familiarity of their previous life. The structure. The constraints. The sense of purpose that came from working toward something.
“Sustainable happiness comes not from money itself, but from using it wisely. Eventually, many lottery winners voluntarily return to their old routines, and not always because of financial loss.”
The constraint was the meaning.
Without it, you’re just floating.
What Happens Next
Here’s the pattern I’m seeing with coding agents. In myself. In friends. In the broader community.
The person with ideas starts doing what they always wanted to do.
Phase 1: They build the thing they’ve been thinking about for years. The one they could never get off the ground because they didn’t have the team, the budget, or the time.
Phase 2: They resurrect abandoned projects. Remember that side project from 2019? Let’s bring it back.
Phase 3: They buy their 7th domain “just in case.” Because what if this other idea is actually better?
Phase 4: They start breaking personal records for projects that will be abandoned in the future.
But today? Today feels productive.
Today they feel IT-omnipotent.
And something strange happens in this process.
The Great Inversion
For the first time in IT history, ideas are no longer more abundant than resources.
Read that again.
We’re used to having more ideas than we can execute. That was the constraint. The bottleneck. The thing that kept us sane.
“I have so many ideas, but I can’t build them all.”
This sentence has been the organizing principle of every builder’s life.
Not anymore.
The terminal becomes the new source of endorphins. Not reels. Not TikTok. Not even games. The blinking cursor waiting for your next command.
The childhood dream of all-powerful terminal magic now costs less than a nice dinner for two.
I’ve written before about how the idea people are having their day in the sun. Sam Altman said it. I felt it in my bones.
But here’s what I didn’t fully anticipate:
What happens when the sun is too bright?
King Midas found out. Lottery winners find out. Child stars find out.
Now it’s our turn.
The Dopamine Terminal
Let’s talk about what’s actually happening in the brain.
When you prompt an agent and it returns working code, something fires. Dopamine. Satisfaction. Progress.
But here’s the thing: unlike finishing a real feature with a real team, this dopamine hit comes fast. Too fast.
Studies from late 2025 showed something fascinating:
Developers expected AI to make them 24% faster. The actual measured result? Tasks took 19% longer. But here’s the kicker: developers still felt 20% faster.
The perception of speed doesn’t match the reality.
This is the dopamine talking. The terminal rewards you. Every time. Even when the reward isn’t real.
This is why lottery winners blow through their fortunes. This is why child stars flame out. This is why Midas kept touching things even as his world turned to cold metal.
The reward system hijacks judgment.
Research published just this week showed that experienced developers actually saw a 19% drop in their original code productivity after heavy AI adoption, while spending 6.5% more time reviewing code from less experienced contributors using AI.
The productivity gains are going to junior developers.
The maintenance burden is falling on seniors.
“The system spins faster but travels no further.”
The Skill We Never Needed
In this new world, I think the most valuable skill is one that never existed before.
It wasn’t needed.
Learning to tell yourself: “I’m not doing this. It’s not necessary.”
This is the skill that separates lottery winners who thrive from those who flame out. It’s what separates child stars like Jodie Foster and Natalie Portman, who went to college and stepped back, from those who spiraled.
Because resources are now sufficient for almost anything. And because of that, a new addiction is forming.
The addiction to create.
Not create well. Not create meaningfully.
Just... create.
The Paradox of Choice, Amplified
Barry Schwartz wrote about the paradox of choice decades ago. More options should mean more freedom. Instead, they lead to paralysis and regret.
Now multiply that by a thousand.
When you could theoretically build anything, the question “what should I build?” becomes heavier than ever.
The blank terminal is the new blank page. But worse. Because unlike a blank page, the terminal promises it will actually make whatever you type.
Your working memory can handle about seven items. The blank terminal presents infinite possibilities. This is beyond what our cognitive architecture can process.
Constraints created creativity.
Unlimited power creates chaos.
Midas learned this when his roses turned to cold metal. No fragrance. No life. Just gold.
The New Psychosis
I think many people won’t learn to say no to themselves.
The cocktail of FOMO and the desire to make something, mixed with unlimited capability, will produce a new kind of breakdown.
A purely IT psychosis.
Where AI slop isn’t expressed in code quality.
It’s expressed in product meaning.
In the sheer volume of information that one person can now pump into the internet.
Scientists are already naming it. A paper published in early 2025 called it “Generative AI Addiction Syndrome” or GAID. It’s being compared to gaming addiction, but with one key difference: instead of consuming content, you’re compulsively co-creating it.
The brain struggles to distinguish between productive use and compulsive engagement.
Here’s what the researchers found:
“This syndrome emerges from an excessive reliance on AI as a creative extension of the self. Users engage with generative AI not only for utility but also for intellectual stimulation, self-expression, and even companionship. This blurs the boundary between productive use and compulsive engagement.”
This is Sudden Wealth Syndrome for capability instead of money.
The terminal rewards you. Every time.
Even when the reward is a product nobody needs. A feature nobody asked for. A project that will be abandoned next week.
The 82% Problem
Data from this month shows that 82% of organizations plan to integrate AI agents in 2026.
A massive chunk of those projects are going to get scrapped.
Not because the technology doesn’t work.
Because people can’t handle it.
They’ll build too much. Ship too fast. Create too many things that don’t connect to each other. Flood their own systems with AI-generated code that requires more maintenance than it’s worth.
The IEEE Spectrum piece that dropped this week nailed it:
“2025 was a lot of ‘let’s play with it, let’s prototype it.’ 2026 will be the year we put it into production, and find out what will be the difficulties we have to deal with when we scale it.”
The difficulty isn’t scaling the technology.
The difficulty is scaling the humans.
The Industrialization of Code
There’s a phrase I keep coming back to from the research:
“The Industrialization of Code.”
The historical scarcity of syntax generation has been replaced by a new scarcity: verification, architectural coherence, and human judgment.
Think about what this means.
Writing code used to be the hard part. Now it’s the easy part.
The hard part is:
Knowing what to build
Knowing what not to build
Reviewing what the agents produce
Maintaining architectural coherence across a sprawling codebase
Making judgment calls that require context, the agent doesn’t have
The role of the developer is shifting from “Code Writer” to “Technical Product Owner.”
The ability to write clear, unambiguous specifications becomes the primary skill set.
But here’s the problem: most people don’t want to be product owners. They want to be builders. They want the dopamine hit of making something.
And the agents give them that hit. Over and over. Without requiring them to think about whether the thing should exist at all.
Midas didn’t want to think about whether each object should be gold. He just wanted to touch things.
The Paradox Nobody Warned You About
I wrote about it back in July.
The idea of specialized AI personas working together. An architect for system design. A debugger for fixing errors. A business strategist for planning.
What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was the psychological weight of having that team available 24/7.
When you have a human team, there are natural constraints:
They go home at night. They push back on bad ideas. They have their own priorities that compete with yours. They get tired and need breaks. They quit if you overwork them.
The agent team has none of these constraints.
Which means you become the constraint.
And if you don’t have strong internal constraints, if you don’t have the discipline to say “no” to yourself, you will run yourself into the ground.
Not because the technology failed.
Because you succeeded at doing too much.
This is exactly what happens to lottery winners without financial advisors. To child stars without protective parents. To anyone who gets unlimited power without the internal structures to wield it.
What’s Actually Overlooked
Here’s what most people miss about this moment:
The problem isn’t capability. We have more capability than we’ve ever had.
The problem is wisdom.
Knowing when to use the capability. Knowing when to hold back. Knowing that just because you can build something doesn’t mean you should.
This is a skill that previous generations of builders developed naturally, because constraints forced them to prioritize.
We don’t have those constraints anymore.
So we have to build them ourselves.
And most people won’t. Because building internal constraints is hard, and building products is now easy.
The path of least resistance leads to endless building.
Research on lottery winners shows that those who thrive after a windfall share common traits: they hire advisors, they set boundaries, they maintain their previous routines and relationships, they find purpose beyond the money.
The same principles apply to unlimited capability:
Get external perspectives (agents can’t tell you if your idea is stupid)
Set artificial constraints (I don’t touch Claude Code after 8pm)
Maintain routines that existed before the power
Find purpose beyond the building
Or Maybe This Is It
Or maybe these are just early signals of the technological singularity.
A world where everyone can do everything in IT.
I don’t understand that world yet.
I’m not ready for it either.
I’m also learning to tell myself no. To not build every idea that pops into my head.
It’s harder than you think.
When you’ve spent your whole career wishing you had more resources, more help, more capability, suddenly having all of it is disorienting.
The constraint was the structure.
Without it, you’re just floating.
Or drowning.
Depends on the day.
What I’m Learning
A few things that are helping me navigate this:
The 24-hour rule. When I have an idea, I write it down and wait 24 hours. If I still care about it after a day, maybe it’s worth building. Most ideas don’t survive the night.
The “who cares?” test. Before starting anything, I ask: “Who specifically will use this, and why will they care?” If I can’t name a real person with a real problem, I don’t start.
Finishing over starting. I’m trying to finish more things than I start. This is harder than it sounds when starting is so easy.
Scheduled constraint. I don’t touch Claude Code after 8pm. The agents are available 24/7, but I’m not.
Talking to humans. The irony of building with AI is that human feedback becomes more valuable, not less. The agent can’t tell you if your idea is stupid. A friend can.
These aren’t perfect solutions. They’re survival tactics for a world that’s changing faster than our psychology can adapt.
Dionysus told Midas to wash in the river Pactolus to lift the curse. There’s no river for us. We have to build our own rituals of restraint.
The Bottom Line
February 2026.
We have more power than any individual builder has ever had in the history of technology.
And that power is going to break some of us.
Not because we’re weak. Because we’re human. Because our brains evolved for scarcity, not abundance. Because saying “yes” to opportunity is in our DNA, and saying “no” is a skill we never had to develop.
The dependency on coding agents will take down a lot of people this year.
Not physically.
Psychologically.
The ones who survive won’t be the ones who build the most.
They’ll be the ones who learn to build the right things.
And to leave everything else in the terminal, where it belongs.
King Midas learned, eventually. Through starvation. Through losing his daughter. Through watching everything he loved turn cold.
We don’t have to learn the hard way.
But we probably will. 🏥
Post-Credit Scene
🎧 No Priors: Jensen Huang on Reasoning Models, Robotics, and the “AI Bubble” (January 15, 2026) Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Nvidia’s CEO for a wide-ranging discussion on 2026. Jensen’s take on why AI increases productivity without necessarily taking jobs, and which sectors are due for their “ChatGPT moment.”
🎙️ Latent Space: Artificial Analysis (January 2026) Swyx’s first episode of 2026 with the Artificial Analysis team on the state of LLM evals and benchmarks. They cover the “smiling curve of AI costs” and why GPT-4-level intelligence is now 100-1000x cheaper than at launch.
📄 AI-Assisted Programming Decreases Productivity of Experienced Developers (arXiv, January 28, 2026) The paper that backs up what I’m feeling. Shows that while productivity increases overall, experienced developers see a 19% drop in original code productivity while reviewing 6.5% more code.
📰 IEEE Spectrum: “Was 2025 Really the Year of AI Agents?” (January 29, 2026) A balanced look at where agents actually landed versus where we thought they would. Key quote: “2025 was a lot of ‘let’s play with it, let’s prototype it.’ 2026 will be the year we put it into production.”
📚 The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz Not new, but more relevant now than ever. The original thesis on why more options make us miserable. Replace “consumer choices” with “AI capabilities” and you’ll see our future.
Thanks for reading.
Vlad