My Week of AI Vibe Coding Psychosis

What one week getting drunk with Claude Fable 5 taught me about power, scarcity, and initiation.

It was 3am on a Wednesday and I couldn’t sleep. All the energy in my head was swirling, my chest activated, my body hunched over. I was sitting in front of Claude Fable 5, vibe coding, like I had been for days.

I realized I could suddenly in the snap of a finger build most of the software tools that I use on a daily basis. I was now going through and canceling one software subscription after the other. First my CRM, then my email marketing software, then my community management platform. One by one. I was building my own tools now, more bespoke, more mine, and with Fable 5 I could do it with one snap of a button. Any crazy idea I had, I snapped my finger and created it.

Boy, was I addicted. I was addicted and I was in a fury. If you hadn’t followed the news at the beginning of the month, Fable 5 was unlocked only for a week and I HAD to use it as much as I could. (Of course... until Anthropic kept extending every week it eventually wrapping it into subscription plans (you bastards))

I was stunned at myself. Even when I put myself to bed, I couldn’t sleep, and all I wanted to do was come back and vibe code. I was stunned by all the parts of myself that don’t usually make themselves known in my day-to-day life. In this madness with Fable 5, I let them take over. I was eating worse, not exercising, pulling on old addictions to regulate my system. For about seven days I let myself go down this little dark spiral. In the grand scheme it wasn’t that dark. But compared to where I normally live, it was pretty dark.

And the whole time, some part of me was watching it happen with a certain kind of horror.
It had me really connected with our relationship to power and scarcity.
That part is what I want to write about. Because it definitely was not only me.

Meet the drunk magician

Somewhere in that week I realized I recognized the guy in the mirror. An archetype. I’ve started calling him the Drunk Magician. He’s drunk on two things at once, and that’s what makes him dangerous. The first is power: he can cast spells. The second is scarcity: it’s last call, and he’s slamming as many drinks as he can before the bar closes. Let’s explore both of these aspects more.

Power without apprenticeship

I keep thinking about Fantasia. Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the little kid who puts on the wizard’s hat, gets the brooms hauling water, and then can’t make them stop. That’s me. I picked up the hat. I have access to this magic and I don’t know how to control it yet.

It’s worth taking the magician seriously, because it’s a real archetype. At his highest, the magician is an objective guide, a catalyst, a problem solver who turns unstructured information into meaning. A software developer at his best is exactly this: someone manifesting systems and tools for real transformation, bridging different worlds and realms, an inventor. That’s the beautiful version.

The shadow is the detached manipulator, using misdirection, deceit, and secret information to control others for personal gain. And there’s a second shadow in the Fable stuff that I know intimately: the eternal apprentice, the one who hoards prototypes and never executes. Fable can get you to 80 or 90% of an idea, and you sit there in a pile of almost-finished magic, often with cynicism and jealousy toward the people who actually ship.

I know this shape from somewhere with far higher stakes: my own years apprenticing with ayahuasca.

At the beginning of that journey I was blessed to find the perfect teacher for me, someone who taught me so much about integrating science, spirituality, and psychology with the shamanic view. I owe him a lot. He was also happy to let me start serving the medicine well before I was ready. Ready means something specific here: having done enough shadow work that my unconscious wounded parts weren’t the ones running the show.

Ayahuasca amplifies all of it, because it’s a shadow medicine, one that brings these unconscious forces up to the surface over and over and over. Serving it before I was ready was brutal. I had a messy first couple of years. Thankfully no participant was severely harmed, but my teammates, my peers, and the people around me took the brunt of my unhealed, wounded parts. I came out the other side with a deep appreciation for initiation, and for what it costs to skip it. That’s a longer story than this piece can hold.

There is a deeper cut though. No matter how healed or integrated you are, the moment you step in to serve what is basically liquid power, you meet your own shadows around power (including, sex, money, and validation.) Something changes the instant it’s in your hands. Nobody is exempt.

Now look at what we just did with AI. We handed ourselves something enormously powerful with none of that. We do this as a species over and over. We build something really powerful, and then we stand there as uninitiated children, stumbling our way through learning how to use it.

Last call at the bar

Now the second drunkenness, and this is the one I don’t think we’re talking about enough.

Fable 5 was here “for this week only.” The second I heard that, something in me went: I’d better drink as much as I can. That’s the scarcity response, and it’s ancient. It’s the hungry ghost, the one with the huge belly and the tiny throat, never able to take in enough.

Sit in that energy for a minute and listen to what it actually says. There isn’t enough time. There isn’t enough money. There isn’t enough power. We need to build faster than China or we won’t be okay. I need to use Fable 5 as much as possible or I will fall behind everyone else, and that won’t be okay.

Underneath all of it: I’m not enough. You’re not enough. The universe isn’t providing me enough. I can’t trust the universe to provide, I can’t trust God to give me what I need. So I have to take what I need while it’s here, and hold onto what I have while it’s here.

When you’re in that place, it’s really hard to make a clear choice. Every decision in the whole world gets colored by this one thing. It’s hard to be genuinely in service of something greater than yourself. It’s hard to do something for the sake of love.

It would be so nice to write a sweet card to my friend who’s having a hard time, except I can’t, I have to go work and make money. It would be really good to let this thing I built with Fable 5 get tested by a small group of people first, to see what it actually does, what side effects might show up that I can’t see yet. But I can’t. I need to launch it and get revenue as fast as possible.

An apprenticeship is made of time. Someone older than you holding the pace, telling you not yet. “This week only” is the exact opposite. It’s designed so you never slow down long enough to grow into what you’re being handed.

This is not just me

This is the whole internet right now. Rooms full of vibe coders, an entire industry, all of us drunk on the same two things: magic we haven’t earned, and a clock that says grab it now.

It would be really good to make sure this AI alien we’re developing doesn’t quietly, deceptively kill us all. But we can’t. We have to develop it faster than China. You can see how shitty decisions get made. A whole civilization at last call.

Sobering up

The way out, for me, was old and unglamorous. I had to see the thing for what it was and pull myself out. All right. This is broken. You can’t do this anymore. You have to stop.

I went to the first three steps of the 12-step for reference.

1. I admit I am powerless over the wizardry of Fable 5, and that my life has become unmanageable.

2. I came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. I make a decision to turn my will and life over to the care of a power greater than myself.

Invoking the steps allowed me to meet my whole system with humility. The steps asked me to put both down all of it. To be small enough to admit I’m not running the show, and held enough to feel I’m part of something that is.

So the reset i have been on since then:

• Took a full week clear of all AI.

• Reinstating my phone and technology boundaries, off after a certain hour at night, off until a certain hour in the morning.

• A purge from caffeine. Two weeks minimum, to give my system a real reset.

What’s missing

I can’t pretend I have the way through this. I don’t. But writing it out, I can at least see the shape of what’s missing, and it has a name. Initiation.

Every culture that ever handed its people real power built an initiation around it, and they tend to share three features. It’s an ordeal, it’s supposed to be hard. It’s held and mirrored by an elder, someone carrying wisdom who paces you through. And it invites a death and a rebirth. When you go through a real death and rebirth, you can’t help but have a spiritual experience, an experience of deep meaning, of connection to something bigger than you.

That last part is the one I resisted longest. I’m a recovering atheist and rationalist, and the “higher power” language in 12-step used to make me want to leave the room. From where I’m standing now I finally see why it’s foundational. The real inflation of the drunk magician is the enormous I. The big superego. I can do it, I’m the creator, I’m the one responsible for how this goes, I’m making this for me. Connection to something bigger is the one thing that dissolves that. It destroys the sense of separateness, and it lets you feel held and contained, an aspect of the whole rather than the center of it. And then comes the last question, the one that only shows up on the other side: how can I show up for that? How can I serve it?

I think there are two medicines here, one for each of drunkenness.

For the uninitiated power, the medicine is initiation itself. Being paced. Being held and mirrored by people who can see you clearly, so you can’t quietly inflate without someone naming it. The magician’s whole problem is that he’s alone with his power. He gets well in the company of others crossing the same threshold.

For the scarcity, the medicine is enoughness. The felt trust that the universe is actually providing, that I don’t have to take it all right now, that there will be more. That’s the same move as handing it over to a higher power, and it’s what finally lets you slow down enough to be initiated at all.

Here’s what I think ties the two together. The initiated magician isn’t sober because he has more willpower. He’s sober because some part of him trusts there will be enough. He isn’t grasping, so he can actually slow down, and slowing down is a key component of growing up. The grasping and the not-being-grown-up are the same knot.

I continue the process of untying these knots in my own body. This isn’t my first initiation and it won’t be my last. The grab for power and the fear of missing out are the same reflex, and I know how it goes quiet: not by white-knuckling it, but by remembering there’s enough. So, the boring medicine. A week off. Phone out of the room at night. No coffee. Fable will be back. I intend to be sober when it is.