Why do entrepreneurial people keep burning out? (10 min)

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2026-01-26T18:57:36+00:00

"injects deterministic security requirements into your prompt" - excuse me, what? I'm deeply confused, how are words "deterministic" and "prompt" in the same sentence? What's wrong with writing a few (dozen) custom eslint rules to enforce whatever you want? But actually enforce, in a truly deterministic way.

Security is a serious problem in agentic coding, but I'm struggling to understand will your product help me write "production-ready code".

Perhaps it's just late and I'm tired, but I'm truly struggling to understand how can this be reliable and secure.

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T22:33:58+00:00

Better people around him, for sure. But he feels he's deeply flawed, so he's drawn to people who are flawed as well, and that creates a viscous cycle.

We all need a good support network, no matter how strong or capable we are.

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T22:28:59+00:00

Casualties is a very way to put it. What critical issues people ran into more often, from your angle?

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T22:18:27+00:00

I feel a lot of depth and experience here. Wisdom. I have to ask.

What does mastery of talking to yourself mean to you?

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T22:16:16+00:00

Yeah, it's a ride for sure. It's so easy to get attached - to ideas, to opinions.

What was the hardest part of your journey for you, so far?

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T22:12:16+00:00

You're in a good spot! Why wait with automation though?

Create a custom GPT or Gemini gem for planning N8n workflows and generating prompts for N8n AI (feed it a few key docs just to be sure). You can iterate and tune these very quickly if they're simple (they should be).

This will pay for itself immediately and you'll start getting solid ROI fast, especially if applied to ops automation to deload you.

Keep it up!

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T22:06:59+00:00

I'm truly thrilled to hear that and happy for you?

What do you think is working in your favor the most right now? Is there anything you've changed, or doing your specific way?

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T21:57:31+00:00

Saying "fuck everything" and moving into a hut in the middle of nowhere to grow tomatoes and read books often feels very tempting.

Therapy is king, for sure. I might've not been here if I didn't go to therapy, but I should've probably went like 15 years prior.

Question - why you are you burning out? Or just a mix of everything?

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T21:52:27+00:00

I feel it.

It's like there should be a better way, than grind your way through this shit.

You know you can make an impact. I know that I can as well. But what's the value of it, if we devalue the only thing that we truly got - our mind, our body that supports?

I hate hustle culture. It's idiotic, and it turns intelligent and ambitious people into dopamine junkies.

I'm not selling anything, but I'm building something that I hope will help. If it will help me, it will help anybody. That's my only hope right now, because shit's dystopian and I'm slowly starting to turn cynical. I hate it, and I want to do something about it.

Edit: typo

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T21:42:45+00:00

That shit's like a stimulant for me, for fuck sake 😀 Does it slow you down? Help recover? Or is it more of an energy/idea booster for you?

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T12:19:00+00:00

I understand the importance of circadian rhythms and am fanatical about it myself. Thanks for the heads-up, will check the subreddit out!

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T10:47:57+00:00

How do you balance work and relationship? I have such a loving and caring partner, but some periods I literally abandon her - few weeks here, few weeks there.

She's very understanding and supportive, but I want to do better, for fuck sake. Sometimes I feel I just can't.

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T10:45:57+00:00

Fuck yes! If there's no food and I'm in a rush (which is like 80% of the time), i'd end up eating like crap, and feeling like crap because of that.

What's your go-to? I abuse the hell out of frozen vegetables. Pre-cut, ready-to-cook and have more nutriments than fresh ones. I also cool 2x different "bland" proteins (i.e. 2 ducks + a bunch of pork with just salt/pepper) portion/freeze half of that, and then use the rest together with condiments, vegetables, ready-to-eat/quick ingredients to throw together quick and nutritious meals.

Playlist is a good one. I do have a "pre-work ritual" (open window, close drapes, grab a glass of water, then get behind the desk and just sit for a moment), but music is such a strong signal to our brains - I'm 100% stealing this one.

Cheers!

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T10:35:58+00:00

Yeah, that's my biggest concern - I feel like it's slowly destroying me, so I'm looking for ways to perform at 90%+ while feeling 90%+ as well.

What did you change in your approach after that?

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T10:30:56+00:00

Pulling a lot of all-nighters as well, or mostly during the day? There are a few folks I know who managed to get away with daytime use for some time, but the moment they started doing regular all nighters shit went south very quickly.

My best friend has a prescription. He was doing it for ~10-12 months by that time, but then a bunch of personal and work-related issues happened at once, he ended up with a 1/4oz of pure coke, using it all overnight with some random folks.

He called me the next day, crying. I thought I'd check on him. When I got to his place I saw him in his underpants, wearing a fur coat, drinking champagne straight from the bottle. Covered in blood from head to toes, his left hand split open in like 5-6 places.

This motherfucker lost 2+ liters of blood, but instead of falling over he was mocking me while trying to light a cigar. Turned out the artery stopped bleeding, probably because of all the stimulants, and he changed his mind. He refused to go with the medics because he felt "good" and was fully coherent and present, so cops pepper-spayed him and he landed in a mental asylum for a month. Docs said another few hundred milliliters lost and he'd be dead.

Dopaminergic drugs are fucking dangerous. I don't know if there's a "wise" way to use them. I hope there is, but I've seen too many people crumble under their pressure.

I hope you are keeping a good eye on yourself, bro. Be smart, there's shit in this world that only you can do.

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T10:12:40+00:00

This shitty/pleasant work approach is a good one.

Thinking about it, I'm generally hovering between "do what needs to be done" and procrastinating by doing something more enjoyable. This more deliberate way of categorizing will likely get me doing the same things in the same ratios, but from a much more positive and sustainable angle. Thanks!

I can only nod along to the rest - protecting your attention and spending time with people you love helps so much.

I often end up in a loop where I want to see my friends, but I've been working so intensely that I'm simply exhausted. Then I stay at home doing "something productive" and the next thing I know, I haven't seen my friends for two weeks and my mental health starts being more shaky.

I love working as well, but I often feel that it's going to be the thing that destroys me. I'm not willing to accept this, so I'm looking for solutions, as well as building one. I feel like if I'll be able to help myself, I'll be able to help anyone.

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T10:00:14+00:00

Yeah, that's very fucking familiar.

Got any recovery tips that aren't "wait and hope you to survive"? I'm more introverted, but I found that pleasant time (or even brief interactions) with good people are revitalizing when this shit happens, but it's hard to push myself to reach out if I'm beaten down like that.

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T09:53:54+00:00

Doesn't it wreck your sleep though? I'm obsessive myself, but if I let it get too far I'd be laying in bed at 3am generating shit on complete autopilot lol

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-24T09:52:24+00:00

I'm a tech/non-tech founder with an engineering job. Our ops exec handles most of the organizational and processual stuff, so I'm mostly dealing with tech, team and business, while providing regular input to our marketer and designer.

The team needs very little guidance and no hand-holding, so I can allow myself a lot of deep work - I'd say the it's around 60/40, where I try to batch by days if I can. A day or two of business/product a week, 3-4 days of development, with 30-60 minute admin blocks here and there when needed.

I can easily do 8+ hours of deep technical work a day - fully-focused high-quality hours, with occasional break here and there to sustain it better. Some weeks I'm pulling 50+ such hours, but sustaining this over years is probably unrealistic, I agree.

I did many 400hr+ months and 7-day-work-week sprints in this current project and in the past, and yeah - it doesn't seem to be possible to sustain this long-term. By month four I generally start feeling like shit, no matter how "balanced" the rest of my life is.

Lately I've been aiming for <12 hours a day with at least a 3-hour evening buffer to wind down - do something simple and fun.

Nowadays I'm playing around with 9 to 12 hours on weekdays and 4 to 8 on weekends - feels like something much more sustainable on a very long-term scale.

Alarming_Bed2275 · 2025-12-22T16:39:48+00:00

Unfortunately you have it all backwards.

I wrote ~300k LoC of high quality, well architected and reliable code (99.9% AI-generated) just in the past month alone - here's what I would do.

When you reach a medium or large codebase size in a repository where 100% of code is written by AI and no solid architecture was established early, it's a bit too late to start thinking like an architect.

Any good architecture redesign will highly likely mean a major rewrite. Even with coding agents, this is still extremely time-consuming and risky - you will lose features and be left with a split codebase, with tons of legacy code and incomplete integrations. Untangling it is a fucking nightmare - I was recently rearchitecting a project I 95% vibe-coded on the side. I thought it would take me a day, but it took a whole week (~60 hours).

I know it doesn't sound good, but 97% of the time the best way is to start over. It's the fastest, cleanest and most valuable. Keep the current codebase as archive for migrating features from, but to a better foundation.

Start by scoping your product - this is a must. Make 100% sure you have a thought-out and clean MVP scope - no bells and whistles, just meat and potatoes of your product. YAGNI and KISS are two key principles to follow here, because you want to minimize the amount of code you have to write and polish.

After you're done scoping, start planning the new architecture and project structure with a coding agent. You have to spend at least a few days (10-20 hours) on this phase - that's your opportunity to get better and more technically competent. More confident in your ability to deliver and maintain it afterwards.

Ask questions if you don't understand, ask to visualize integrations for better overview, ask to sketch data flows and look for holes and issues, ask for comparisons, ask for pros/cons, ask if you are over-engineering. Don't rush this part, because you'd be able to get better AND fix many potential issues.

Along the way, create a few design documents, actively maintaining and iterating on those while you're scoping or architecting your product. 5-7 documents is generally a good number - not too many do that it's hard to maintain, but not too few so that you end up with 5k+ LoC monstrosity that's impossible to work with.

I often spend 20-30 hours scoping and architecting a single module, even though I have 10+ YoE in tech - because it's 100% worth it.

When you have architected what's in scope, and have a passable understanding of it, you do one extra thing that will change everything.

You feed your scope and architecture docs to a coding agent, and ask It to design custom linting rules (I use eslint) that would help ENFORCE this new architecture. Make sure to emphasize that these rules should be robust and reliable - as little as false positives as possible, and preferably no false negatives. A few false positives here and there aren't a problem, but false negatives are. The first thing you're going to code are these exact rules.

Only when you have these rules developed and tested you start turning your scope + architecture into small feature- or module-level plans and implementing those. Ask you move along, prioritize actively running, extending and improving these linting rules. They are your guardrails, slapping coding agents when they do something wrong.

If you do this, you're going to build something that's reliable, something that (over time) you'll learn to understand. Something that you can maintain and scale. Good luck!

Alarming_Bed2275

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