help! my husband is addicted to Claude Code.

the first, and possibly last, writerbuilder advice column

I have always secretly wanted to be an advice columnist, so I’m going to give that a whirl today with a question I hear bubbling up among women who love men who love technology.

(If you would like to encourage this clearly self-destructive impulse, send me your questions! Reply to this message, or leave them in the comments if you are brave.)

Hi Writerbuilder, I think my husband might be addicted to Claude Code. He keeps panicking about his “agents" being “underutilized” while he is sleeping, and he’s purchasing Mac Minis to support some kind of lobster companion. How can I stop this? Also, how much money is he spending? — Pac Heights Princess

Dear Pac Heights Princess,

Before you do anything, I would encourage you to take stock of your current situation. Your vibe-coding husband is distracted. His eye is not on the ball. Now would be a great time to refurnish your entire house, fill your cabinets with impractical vintage glassware, and finally buy an Airwrap.

Once you have taken care of that, it’s time to get to work.

I use Claude Code every day—in fact, I would say at this point I am “running my life out of Claude Code”—and even I look out at the tweets of breathless enthusiasm and think: what, exactly, are you guys all doing? It’s giving, “I asked you to fix the garbage disposal and instead you made an app where Mario has to fix a garbage disposal to save the princess.” It’s giving, “I have turned my life into Sim City.” As part of my ongoing mission to avoid undermining myself with my own skepticism, I did the thing everyone cites as an impressive first use case, which is telling Claude Code to organize your downloads folder. I cannot emphasize this enough: My life is no better for it. (It also named one of the folders “Stuff,” which to me is not an impressive feat of taxonomy.)

So why is the brouhaha so aggressively male? Surely there are plenty of women using Claude Code, including women who talk on the internet. Like, uh, me! I can’t help but think about the psychoanalyst Karen Horney, who dared to ask:

“Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?”

I think there’s something to this. And tbh it feels like not a coincidence that the “vibe coding” school of creation is, if not defined by, at least extremely associated with instant gratification. You tell it your vision, and bang! You immediately feel the satisfaction of having made something. It’s creation that fits a very male-coded fantasy: a single decisive and pleasurable act rather than nine months of getting kicked in the ribs from the inside followed by life- and body-altering labor. And then, of course, there’s the urge to move on to the next project rather than doing the tedious work of raising the thing you made.

There’s also this:

Vibe coding extremely scratches the male itch to monitor the situation. You stand there with your arms crossed, watching your little agents work, feeling like Jeff Bezos in a headset overseeing a rocket launch. Very powerful. Very in control. The situation is being monitored.

And there’s something to the mechanics of the addiction itself:

Anyone who has attempted to gamify some experience knows that if you want to keep people hooked, make them feel like they’re always almost at the next level. Vibe coding does this naturally. The agent builds you something amazing in five minutes, then the 10% that’s wrong takes longer to fix than the 90% that was right took to build. But it never feels that way. It always feels like you’re right on the precipice of completion.

Anyway, none of this actually answers your question of what to do about your husband’s addiction. Unfortunately, I’m of the school of thought that you cannot convince another person to stop doing a thing they want to do. Maybe I should have said that before dragging you through this snakepit of gender essentialism.

(Also, I will not tell you how much he is spending, because the money one spends on AI tools is between them and their God. At least that is what I tell my husband about my AI tools.)

But…!!! I do have some tricks up my sleeve.

First, you could try beating him at his own game. Use the word “agents” a lot. Brag about how your agents have had zero percent downtime in the past three weeks. Ask him, casually, what his agent downtime is. You could also try making up terms to see if he’ll pretend to know what they are. Ask him what to do when your GitHub gets coagulatized. Wonder aloud if you should be worried about repo desaturation. Mention that you’ve been thinking about switching to a hot-forking workflow. If he admits he doesn’t know what any of that means, you’ve won. If he pretends he does, you’ve also won.

But my real advice is: Lean in. Help him brainstorm tasks that allow him to get actually useful things done via vibe coding. Let him discover meal planning from first principles. Make the Tetris of your family calendar into literal Tetris. Once Claude Code gets its claws in you, there is no escape. The future comes for us all. You might as well have nice furniture when it arrives.

xoxo,

hils

P.S should I buy an Airwrap??

P.P.S. if this made you think “wow, I want to learn more from Hilary about using AI to be a better manager,” first of all, interesting takeaway from this piece, but also: the deadline to enroll in Supermanagers is in a week. I do actually reveal how I run my life with Claude Code in the course. Get 20% off here (and please reach out if cost is an issue!).

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