The "occasional goofing off and wrecking everything" part is so real. What I've found is that the longer a context window gets, the more Claude starts confidently hallucinating its own previous decisions. We've started treating sessions like shifts: fresh context, explicit state summary at the top, specific task scope. Dramatically fewer "why did you just rewrite the entire auth module" moments.

The re-ignition thing resonates though. There's something about having a collaborator that removes the activation energy of starting. The blank file problem is real and brutal at 25, probably more so at 60 when you know exactly how much work lies ahead. AI doesn't eliminate the hard parts but it compresses the "ok where do I even begin" phase from hours to minutes.

What are you building?