Over the last few weeks I’ve learned, the hard way, two expressions I didn’t know before. The first is “political psychosis”, which describes the anxiety and hypervigilance of voters during the 2026 elections here in Brazil. Basically, it’s the mental exhaustion caused by debates on social media. The whole of Brazil went through it.
The other is “AI psychosis”, the paranoia induced by excessive use of AI (which possibly caused the political psychosis in a lot of people around here). For me, AI psychosis showed up as a weird mental fatigue, triggered by using AI agents for coding.
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Chromium – used as the basis for Chrome, Edge and other browsers – has millions of lines of source code. One of the projects we are working on at Igalia is the semantic separation of the source code into smaller modules. There are several advantages to modularizing the code of giant projects like Chromium and, since it’s a reorganization without big changes in functionality, it’s an excellent fit for AI agents.
Without AI, my busiest day was landing 6 code changes in Chromium. Recently, with AI, I managed to land 16 in a single day.
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Was development on Chromium more productive with AI? Yes, almost three times as productive as my best day without AI.
Did I learn more about Chromium internals with AI? It depends. You kind of get a better overall picture of a few concepts, but you definitely miss some of the coding details.
Is my mind in a better place: more rested, healthier? Definitely not. Instead of using my free time to learn more or to work on something pleasant, I feel a lot of anxiety trying to be more productive, working on several things in parallel and so on.
Last but not least, was it worth reposting 50 videos a day on Instagram? Yes!
It’s a really tricky balance, for sure. The psychoses are real though. All I need over the next month is to delete social media, do less AI stuff and reconnect with reality. I miss having fun with the simple, real things.
