The tools got faster. My life didn't slow down. Just sharing my journey on this new AI world
When I quit my job, I had a plan. I was going to build things. Ship fast. Use AI to do in weeks what used to take months. Claude Code, Cursor, agents — I had the whole arsenal. The future was here, and I was going to ride it.
The first two weeks were a blur. I coded from morning until my token limits hit. Then I waited for them to reset. Then I coded again. I skipped meals, ran on coffee, got terrible sleep. I wasn't just --dangerously-skip-permissions, I was skipping health, fitness, nutrition, socializing. Everything that wasn't shipping got deprioritized to zero.
I didn't notice it happening. That's the dangerous part.
The Expansion Nobody Talks About
Here's what the "10x developer" crowd won't tell you: AI doesn't save you time. It saves you execution time. And then your brain fills that gap with more ideas, more iterations, more ambition.
My last job was as a tech lead. I know what it feels like to orchestrate a team, keeping people aligned, reviewing work, making sure everyone and everything moves in the direction you actually want. Using AI agents feels exactly like that. It's nice, but it's a completely different kind of exhausting. You're not just coding anymore. You're managing. You're orchestrating. You're constantly course-correcting something that's fast but not always right, and I personally feel like I haven't yet managedd to achive having a AI co-worker in my team that completely disagrees on what I propose, not only because it knows better, but because it cares, it has the ownership that we always praised to hire for.
And it doesn't just consume more hours. It consumes more thoughts. Ideas multiply because execution feels cheap. "I could also build this." "What if we added that?" "One more prompt and this feature is done." The cost of a substantial improvement is always just one or two prompts away, so you never stop improving. You never stop.
That's not productivity. That's a trap.
The Guilt Loop
There's a small voice now. It's always there. Every time I write something manually, every time I pause to think instead of prompting, it whispers: you could be doing this faster.
And it's not just internal. You go on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Medium, Discord and everyone is shipping. Everyone is 10x. Everyone has a new workflow, a new plugin, a new model that changed everything. 10x is no longer good enough.There's a new baseline every week and you're always behind it.
The Thing I Lost Without Noticing
Two, maybe three years ago, my weekends looked different. I'd maybe start a side project. Read some docs. Explore a new library. Update my mental map of what's out there. Most of those projects never shipped. I'd get halfway through, learn what I needed to learn, and when the obvious thing started to be the next to do, I'll just move on.
That never felt like failure. Not once.
Because the project was never the project. The learning was the project. The growth was the point. The shipping was optional, and that was fine.
Now I ship things. I ship them fast. I have side projects that are actually done — live, deployed, working. And the path to get there feels empty.The Eureka! days vanished.
I don't learn on the way anymore. I prompt on the way. I have some projects where I don't know a single line of code. Not one. The AI wrote it, the AI checked it, the AI re-checked it. Before, I knew every line by heart.Even every non-written lines. The whole codebase lived in my brain, continuously being tested while I walked, showered, ate dinner, and sorry to admit but mostly when driving too. My mind would catch errors on a Saturday at 3am that no test suite ever would.
Now there's nothing running in the background (apart from the 3238 automated unit tests that never catch a thing). Because there's nothing to run, to revisit mentally. I didn't write it. I didn't suffer it. I don't know it.
The Realization That Hit While Writing This
I started writing this post to talk about the paradox of working more with tools designed to help you work less.
But halfway through, I realized I wanted to talk about how I feel, what my personal journey is, maybe this is not a post I should do, maybe it belongs to the real-world personal diary I bought a week ago and haven't even opened yet. But hey, it feels nice.
It's not like I miss the productivity of the old days. I was less productive then. Objectively, measurably less productive.
I miss the process. The slow discovery. The chewing glass. The deep understanding that came from struggling. The quiet satisfaction of building something you understood completely, even if nobody else ever saw it.
AI gave me output. It took away the journey.
And the anxiety isn't from the hours. It's from the emptiness of the process. Of going fast in a direction that doesn't feel like it's yours anymore. Of optimizing a process that used to have soul and reducing it to ai harness/model switching and token management.
What I'm Trying Now
I don't have a clean answer. I'm still figuring this out. But here's what I'm experimenting with:
Setting AI-free projects. Not because manual coding is more efficient, it's not. Because I want to keep some lower level brain muscle. The key for me is to do something useless, so learning is the only good outcome you should expect. Currently I'm not doing great at this as I also tend to de-prioritize this more than I'd like but, hey step by step. A good example is that I started learning Odin language for making a videogame.
Re re-defining "done." Before AI, "good enough" was a healthy stopping point. I'm trying to get back there. Not every feature needs one more iteration just because it's cheap to do, embrace YAGNI, once again.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The most enthusiastic adn early AI adopters are the first ones to feel lost. Not because the tools are bad, they're incredible and fun to use. But because removing the friction of execution exposes you to the infinite surface area of everything you could build.
And nobody's brain is built for infinite.
The tools got faster. My life didn't slow down. If anything, the speed made the emptiness louder.
I'm still using AI on daily basis, a lot, for almost everything. I'm still shipping, faster and better every day. But I'm trying to remember that the person who never finished side projects and spent weekends reading docs and debugging a project setup wasn't failing.
He was learning. And so do I.
If you're an AI-enthusiast developer who feels more restless than empowered, you're not doing it wrong. The tools are doing exactly what they were designed to do. The question is whether you're still designing your life, or if you've handed that over too.
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