I Used an LLM to Quit Vaping | samscript before<br>the browser paints. Runs synchronously, no defer/async.<br>-->Skip to content<br>Go back<br>I Used an LLM to Quit Vaping<br>10 Aug, 2026<br>AI DisclaimerI am not a writer, I wrote this mostly how I talk, with a lot of half sentences, and hyphens - I<br>have used AI to assist with grammar outside of that - but this is an attempt at a semi-structured<br>stream of consciousness blog post that I have been meaning to write for a while now - please be<br>kind, this is not my day job.

I’ve always had what some might call an addictive personality - once I start something that I enjoy, I can’t put it down, whether it’s TV, a new video game, or a project at work. This serves me well at times. I’m known at work as someone who won’t quit until I’ve solved a problem - a great asset for a software engineer. Most of this I can probably put down to my dopamine-chasing brain, and this led me to believe my nicotine addiction was something that would be harder for me to kick than most.

One fateful night, when I was about 26, I was handed a disposable vape, and three years later I was still unable to put it down. I’ve seen friends pick up and drop vaping over the years like it was nothing, but for me, I thought I was more addicted than most. I would have a backup on me at all times. I would take a puff when waking in the night. I would go to extreme lengths to make sure I could get my next hit of nicotine.

I wasn’t in denial for very long. There were a good two years of, “I know this is a problem, but I don’t really care,” followed by a year of stopping, then restarting the next time I had a drink, or the next time I hit a minor inconvenience.

Basically, when I wasn’t vaping, I wanted to be.

I was determined to quit, though, and I don’t like a problem I cannot solve. That led me to try some interesting ways to stop.

How LLMs did not help me

My first port of call was to ask ChatGPT - 4o at the time, if it matters - what successful quitting looked like, and what the best approaches were to stay off for good. Was it nicotine replacement, cold turkey, rehab centres? I wasn’t forking out for rehab, but I wanted to know what would give me the greatest chance of success.

This actually led to a book recommendation I’d heard of before, called How to Quit Smoking (or the vaping version) by Allen Carr. The success stories about putting it down and never picking it up again sounded too good to be true, and a bonus was that you were allowed to keep vaping until you finished the book - amazing.

But who has time for a book?

p+p]:mt-2 bg-accent border-accent text-accent-foreground ms-auto rounded-br-sm">Me: Hey Chat, give me the main takeaways from the book, stop me vaping forever, make no mistakes -<br>whatever.

Obviously, this wasn’t very successful.

After a few months of haphazard attempts at reframing nicotine based on a few bullet points - understanding the ideas enough to repeat them, but not really believing them when I actually wanted a vape - I gave in and read the actual book.

I like to think I’m very rational, and the book itself felt a bit too abstract for my liking. This might work for others, but when I was closing my eyes trying to picture my nicotine addiction as a monster living inside my brain, I wasn’t able to take it seriously enough to spend the time reframing my mind.

I put the book down, decided it was far too good to be true, and moved on.

A few more miserable months later, I found another book. The author was lauded by the no-drinking community for alcohol addiction, and they had written a book called This Naked Mind: Nicotine. More or less, it was the same approach, just written with a bit more of a scientific angle - and something clicked this time.

I started to believe what vaping was taking away from me, or more accurately, I started to realise I already knew what nicotine had stolen from me over the years: health, fitness, independence.

Both of these books work by outlining myths you believe about the drug you’re consuming, such as, “Vaping helps me relieve stress,” and then presenting you with facts and exercises to help you realise that no - in fact, vaping is causing the stress.

There are more myths and examples, but as I mentioned before, me summarising them here won’t help you quit, go and read one of the books - but finish this article first.

What ended up mattering more than I expected was the value of these books being quite, well, repetitive. Actually reading the arguments, over and over, was different, the repetition was part of it, the reframing was part of it, and even the bits I rolled my eyes at were probably part of it. AI is very good at compression, but this compression destroyed the thing I were trying to get from the source in the first place.

In this case, I didn’t need a summary, I needed to be slowly convinced.

So where did LLMs actually come in?

Well, there’s still a lot of work to do, even when equipped with all these new beliefs. The approaches...