Momentum vs. Alignment Tax - Hidden Costs in Your LLM Session

Once I was in an interview, and I was asked what motivated me. My answer was momentum. And maybe that's why working with AI can be so engaging sometimes. And maybe it's also why it could be so frustrating. When we feel like we have momentum and we're moving more quickly than usual, that's motivating. But when you're stuck and you can't get the LLM to do what you want it to, despite prompting in 5 different ways, it's frustrating. A lot of times, we end up figuring it out and then we call the session "productive." We completed the task, shipped the thing, and then we're off to the next thing. But I think we need to pause at productivity and dig into that a little deeper. Because if productivity is the metric of success, we're missing a whole layer of work we’re doing. For example, over a ten day period I worked with Claude Code building, iterating, experimenting, shipping, documenting a personal project. I definitely had some of those frustrating moments, and it was important to me that