AI ERA2026

The AI Vampire

Steve Yegge · Feb 11, 2026 · Medium

TL;DR — AI really does make you ~10x faster — and that's the problem. The gains don't flow to you; your employer captures nearly all of them while you absorb the intensity. Agentic coding is addictive and it strips out the easy, restful work, leaving only the hard decisions. The "vampire" is that dynamic: it drains you dry, Colin Robinson style, and you're damned either way — drained if you keep up, left behind if you don't. Yegge's escape hatch is a 25-year-old ratio: you may not control the numerator (your pay), but you control the denominator (your hours).

This isn't a doom essay about AI taking your job. It's about AI keeping your job — and quietly bleeding you white while you keep it. Yegge's claim is that the productivity miracle is real, and that's exactly why it's dangerous.

What the vampire actually is

The title isn't a metaphor for AI itself. Yegge borrows Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows — the energy vampire who drains the life out of people just by being in the room. The vampire here is the extraction dynamic that AI supercharges: the work culture that quietly siphons off your surplus energy and hands you nothing back but fatigue.

"AI is starting to kill us all, Colin Robinson style."— The AI Vampire

The 10x that isn't yours

Yegge fully grants the productivity boost — this is not a skeptic's take. The trap is who captures the value. A 10x engineer produces roughly nine extra engineers' worth of output, but that surplus is claimed almost entirely by the company. You supplied the leverage; you keep the exhaustion.

"your employer captures 100% of the value from you adopting AI. You get nothing."— The AI Vampire

And because everyone else is doing it too, opting out isn't safety — it's falling behind. That's the pincer at the heart of the essay.

"You're damned if you do (you'll be drained) and you're damned if you don't (you'll be left behind.)"— The AI Vampire

Why it actually drains you

The exhaustion isn't just longer hours. AI removes the easy parts of the job — the boilerplate, the busywork, the natural rest between hard problems — and leaves you with a solid day of nothing but high-stakes judgment. Add the slot-machine pull of agentic coding, and you get a workday running at an intensity no human sustains for eight hours straight.

"AI has turned us all into Jeff Bezos, by automating the easy work, and leaving us with all the difficult decisions, summaries, and problem-solving."— The AI Vampire

The result is a specific, recognizable emptiness — a lot of output, and nothing left in the tank.

"You're exhausted. You're tired, Boss. You got nothing for it."— The AI Vampire

Control the denominator

Yegge's fix is a ratio he wrote on an Amazon whiteboard in 2001: $/hr. You rarely control the numerator — companies set your pay, and they're built for extraction. But the denominator, the hours and effort you pour in, is yours to set. The move isn't to work harder or quit in protest; it's to deliberately dial the denominator down — short focused bursts, boundaries, rest, and a refusal to let the vampire feed on the promise of some future payout that structurally never arrives.

"Someone else might control the numerator. But you control the denominator."— The AI Vampire

Context: the numerator/denominator line isn't new advice — Yegge traces it to a 2001 Amazon meeting where he argued you can't control what they pay you, but you can control how many hours you hand over. The AI Vampire is that old lesson with sharper teeth: the boost makes the extraction faster, so the boundary has to be firmer.