Ask HN: Procrastination with AI?
A Hacker News user asks software engineers how AI coding tools (like Codex, Cursor, Claude Code) have affected their procrastination habits—whether they procrastinate less, more, or differently compared to before these tools disrupted traditional workflows.
Background
- The post is on Hacker News (HN), a tech-community discussion board run by Y Combinator. "Ask HN" is a convention where users pose open questions to the community.<br>- The context is the rapid adoption of AI coding assistants: OpenAI's Codex (the model behind early GitHub Copilot), Cursor (an AI-first code editor), and Claude Code (Anthropic's terminal-based coding agent). These tools autocomplete and generate code, reducing grunt work but also changing how developers engage with problems.<br>- The poster is asking whether these tools worsen, improve, or simply shift procrastination patterns — a classic concern in software engineering where endless tweaking and context-switching are common.<br>- The underlying anxiety: if AI removes the friction of starting to code, do developers instead procrastinate on *what* to build, or on reviewing AI-generated code? Or do they ship faster but feel less ownership?