PS. Here, "psychosis" and "depression" describe a cycle of obsessive AI use, not clinical diagnoses. If you think you have either one, see a mental health professional.
There is a specific comedown I keep recognising after a common kind of AI obsession.
For a few weeks, everything rises. Day over day, we are doing more. Week over week, we are moving faster. Every conversation opens three more doors. Ideas turn into tasks, tasks turn into prototypes, and prototypes turn into new projects before the old ones have had time to settle.
We cannot stop talking to the AI. It is the first tab we open and the last one we close. There is always one more prompt to send, one more branch to explore, one more thing that feels suddenly possible.
The fling
The beginning feels frictionless because so many old boundaries appear to have disappeared. Work that once took days takes hours. Questions that would have stalled a project get an immediate answer.
That speed is intoxicating. More importantly, it compounds. Excitement produces longer sessions. Longer sessions produce more visible output. More output produces more excitement. We begin to expect tomorrow to be faster than today because, for a while, it usually is.
The AI never looks tired. It never asks to stop. It does not bring yesterday's mental fatigue into today's conversation. We do, but that difference is easy to miss while the graph is still going up.
The acceleration
This stretch is the AI psychosis. Its momentum keeps validating itself.
Every response seems to prove that the project is working. Every new capability expands the scope. We stop measuring progress against the original goal and start measuring it against what else might now be possible.
The project grows faster than our ability to understand it. Threads multiply. Decisions remain half-made because another option appears before the previous one has been tested. We are producing at a pace that feels like clarity, even when much of what we produce is unfinished.
From inside the acceleration, slowing down feels irrational. Why would you stop when this is working so well?
The comedown
The shift is rarely dramatic. The AI does not suddenly become useless. We stop being able to follow the project at the speed at which we created it.
The easy work may already be done. Now the work is integration, judgement, maintenance and choosing what not to build. The AI can still respond in seconds, but progress no longer happens in seconds. A fast answer can create more work than it removes. A new feature can make the project harder to hold in our heads. Fixes begin to uncover decisions that speed allowed us to postpone.
The AI is still moving. We are the part that can no longer keep accelerating.
There is also the speed at which the work can spread. Writing code may be easier, but everything around the problem still moves at its own pace. Neither we nor the AI control governance, compliance, funding or the other forces around the work. They may not slow the code directly, but they limit how widely the solution spreads and how fast its profits grow.
Why I call it a depression
I call it a depression because the low is relative to the high that came before it. After weeks of feeling unusually capable and expansive, a return to ordinary attention, energy, boredom and doubt can feel like a collapse.
Often, nothing is broken. The tool still works, the project may still matter and the earlier pace may have been too intense to last.
Naming the pattern
I want a name for this cycle because an unnamed comedown can become a burden. We may mistake a slower phase for failure, abandon work that needs time to settle or chase another burst of novelty.
Naming it helps me see the comedown as a phase, not an identity. The high was not necessarily fake, the low is not permanent and a steadier rhythm can still follow.
A possible prevention
One possible prevention is to be more measured during the climb. While the work speeds up, we keep prompting even in our downtime. Going slower gives us time to decide whether the project needs to go higher.
That can mean spending more time thinking without the AI, learning the basics and testing our own understanding as the work grows. We can think longer about architecture and write evaluations before adding more features, so the foundation is strong before the fling takes the project past what we can follow.
A slower climb may extend the productive phase because understanding, rather than novelty alone, carries more of the momentum. It cannot remove the comedown, but it may delay it and leave us with a project we still feel able to steer.
When the comedown arrives, naming it gives us a choice. We can treat the feeling as proof that we should abandon the project, or recognise it as a phase and decide whether to continue. The control and expertise we build on the way up may make continuing the steadier choice.
What comes after the magic
The next phase is less cinematic. It begins when speed stops being the measure of progress and all the accumulated decisions become visible. Judgement, which briefly seemed optional, returns to the centre of the work.
The more productive relationship with AI may be a rhythm that survives contact with your real limits, rather than an endless high or the rejection that follows it.
The comedown is not necessarily where the work ends. It may be where the work stops feeling like magic and starts becoming yours again.