I Can't Stop Running Claude Code Sessions

I've tried to get Claude running on my phone during my son's soccer practice. Swimming lessons too. When I take him to the park, I kick off background agents before we leave the house because God forbid my $200/month Max subscription has idle cycles while I'm pushing a kid on a swing.

I've been using Claude Code every day for over six months. I write about Claude Code every week. I'm not new to this.

I just can't stop doing it.

Here's my activity from the last ten weeks, tracked by an open-source tool called AgentsView:

2,835 sessions in ten weeks (there is no data before that).

One session. You're focused. The output is good. You ship something real.

Then you realize you can run two in parallel. One writes the feature, the other writes the tests. Why wouldn't you?

Then three. Then five. You discover background agents - kick off work before bed, wake up to finished PRs. You start thinking about your agents the way a factory manager thinks about machines on a floor. Utilization rate. Idle time. Wasted capacity.

I started making sure I always had something queued. Session finishes, start another one. Not because I had a plan for what it should build. Because the session was available and leaving it empty felt like waste.

I’ve taught over a hundred engineers in various Claude Code workshops.

One student built a Telegram bot so he could talk to Claude from his phone. Another set up a queuing system so tasks line up and fire automatically. One even had Claude call him when it needed input. Engineers building personal notification infrastructure so they're never more than a buzz away from their agents.

On Reddit, the r/ClaudeCode community coined a term for it: Claudesomnia. The post explains: "We all lack sleep because 1 hour lost not Clauding is equivalent to an 8 hour day of normal human developer's work."

A 20-year engineering lead wrote: "The rush of creating and shipping software has always been there a bit. But now with Claude Code, that feeling has gone up 10x. It is like going from weed to crack."

One dad described cat-napping 15 minutes at a time until 5 AM, babysitting his agents, then cramming one hour of sleep before taking his kids to school.

Another developer's heart rate kept spiking into the 80s while running five or six terminals — so he built a smartwatch app to buzz him when it happened. His fix for the problem was more engineering.

On Hacker News, someone posted "Addicted to Claude Code — Help." Simon Willison replied: "I know dozens of people who are in a similar state right now."

At SXSW, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said on stage: "I sleep four hours a night right now. I have cyber psychosis, but I think a third of the CEOs I know have it as well."

Steve Yegge called it "The AI Vampire". "I find myself napping during the day. And I'm talking to friends at startups, and they're finding themselves napping during the day. We're starting to get tired and cranky."

60-min video lesson + CLAUDE.md starter kit. Yours when you subscribe.

Every post I've linked describes the behavior as a personal failing. My discipline, my sleep hygiene, my inability to log off.

But look at the incentives.

In March 2026, Anthropic launched a "Spring Break" promotion: 2x usage during off-peak hours. Off-peak means nights and weekends in the US.

The Reddit reaction was immediate: "Lol, I'll sleep from 8am till 2pm for the next 2 weeks then." Power users started restructuring their workflows to run heavy agent sessions after midnight.

Same playbook utility companies use with off-peak electricity rates. Except the resource being consumed isn't kilowatts. It's your attention at 2 AM.

The weekly usage limits created a scarcity loop. People ration their Claude usage across the week, planning which days to go heavy and which to coast. One user wrote: "I knew it was over when I began organizing my day in 5-hour time blocks."

The community calls this speedrunning. Building faster, sleeping less, shipping more.

A recovered addict on r/ClaudeAI, 14 years sober, saw it for what it is: "Whether it's painkillers or Claude Code... what starts out as fun turns into something we wind up resenting. We chase the thing we hate, which pulls us further away from the people and things we love."

Nobody building these tools has an incentive to slow you down. Your late night is their growth metric.

I know. I can hear it. "This is a you problem, not a tool problem. Just close the laptop."

People said the same thing about social media in 2012. Just put the phone down. Just don't scroll. They didn't understand that the feed was designed to make putting it down feel like a loss.

I'm not saying Anthropic is doing this deliberately. But the pricing, the weekly limits, the off-peak bonuses, the background agents that run while you sleep. Add it up and you get a product that rewards compulsive use and punishes moderation. You don't need intent for that to be a problem.

P.S I write about Claude Code internals every week. Last week I wrote about how Claude Code is a while loop with 23 tools. Subscribe to get the next one!

My sleep first. I use an Eight Sleep and I've always been consistent. In bed by 10, asleep by 10:30, up at 6. Then I started missing my sleep window. One night, two nights, then a whole stretch.

Green bars are nights I hit my sleep window. Gray bars are nights I didn't.

I wasn't staying up because the agents needed me. Background agents don't need babysitting. I stayed up because I wanted to see the output. One more prompt. One more check. Let me just see if this one lands.

Then the terminals. I looked at my screen one morning and had no idea what half my sessions were doing. I'd kicked off agents the night before and forgotten about them. Most of the output was useless. I'd asked for things I didn't actually need.

Boiling the ocean because the marginal cost of one more session felt like zero.

It wasn't zero.

Five sessions running in parallel and I couldn't hold the state of any of them in my head. Review quality in the gutter. Merge conflicts multiplying. Half the code I generated, I never even read.

I wasn't coding. I was running a factory.

There's a movement right now to turn this behavior into a philosophy. StrongDM's AI team published a manifesto: "Code must not be written by humans. Code must not be reviewed by humans." Ralph loops, self-driving codebases, autonomous agent pipelines that open PRs while you sleep. Some teams spend $1,000 per engineer per day on tokens.

The pitch: your agents should never be idle.

I know what factory-mode code looks like. I generated it.

Files that exist because an agent had capacity, not because anyone needed them. Tests that pass but test nothing meaningful. Features nobody asked for, built because the session was available and why not.

The code works. You just can't explain why half of it is there.

The divide forming in AI coding isn't addicted vs. disciplined. It's factory mode vs. craft mode. Factory mode fills every idle cycle. Craft mode starts with a clear goal, runs one session, and reads every line of what comes back.

I went the other direction. One session now. Sometimes two.

Harder than it sounds when you have a Max subscription and you know you could be running five agents right now. Steve Yegge thinks you might only get three productive hours out of someone vibe coding at max speed. He's right.

The codebases that matter in two years won't be the ones with the most commits. They'll be the ones where someone knew why every file exists.

I still take my laptop to the gym sometimes. The heatmap is still green. Just a little less green than it used to be.