I’ve never been able to build this fast in my life.
And I’ve never felt this unstable.
The hardest part of building with AI right now isn’t writing code. It’s watching something you’re excited to build become “already handled” shortly after you start. Not because you failed, but because the level of the game changed once again.
That mental whiplash feeds almost daily into what I’ve been calling my abstraction crisis.
AI has changed the economics of building. Execution is cheaper. Tooling is denser. What used to take weeks now takes hours. So my bottleneck isn’t output anymore. It’s direction.
What’s worth building when agents can turn half your backlog into working drafts overnight? What do you bet on when the foundations keep shifting in real time?
The moment it hits
One day I’m wiring tools together and I feel ahead. My workflow is smooth, my pace is high, and it feels like I found compounding leverage.
Then the world shifts. A capability lands. An integration becomes default. Suddenly what felt like an edge yesterday feels ordinary today, and I wake up with that tight, anxious feeling of being behind.
Here’s a concrete example. One of my current side quests is building a “brain funnel,” basically a system to capture, sort, and resurface thoughts and ideas. Then I stumble across an open-source repo that’s already a high-fidelity version of what I’m building, finished enough to make my version feel unnecessary.
It’s not that I “wasted time.” It’s that I aimed at an abstraction that stopped being scarce.
And this is where I notice my own failure mode: I start scanning instead of building. I start re-planning instead of committing. Depth feels risky, because you can feel the baseline shifting under your feet.
Focus compounds
Here’s what I keep relearning the hard way: when the tools speed up, my brain tries to speed up with them.
I want to update everything. Rebuild my workflow. Start five projects because the frontier moved and I can “obviously” do more now.
That instinct feels rational. It could also be a trap.
Because what compounds isn’t novelty. It isn’t constant reorientation. It isn’t being first to duct tape the newest tool into a workflow.
What compounds is focus.
Focus turns a week of excitement into a year of progress. Focus is how you build something deeper than a demo: taste, structure, a point of view. Some people experience focus as limitation. For me, it’s essential for survival.
A framework that helps: two modes + one budget
What’s helped me more than any productivity hack is splitting my building life into two modes, and giving myself an “abstraction budget.”
Frontier mode: explore new models, new agentic workflows, new ways of wiring things together.
Production mode: execute and ship in a chosen lane with as little novelty as possible.
The budget part is simple: I have a limited capacity for “climbing layers” before my attention gets fried and I default into reaction mode. So I try to spend that budget intentionally in Frontier, and protect it in Production.
One practical rule that falls out of this: when I feel the churn starting, I go for a run before I change anything.
Questions for other builders
I’m posting this here because I’m pretty sure I’m not alone, and I want to steal better rules from smarter people.
• Do you feel this “baseline shift” effect?
• What’s your constraint for staying oriented?
• Do you time-box exploration?
• Do you keep separate “frontier” and “production” tracks?
• Or do you have a completely different mental model?
I wrote the longer version (with more detail + visuals) here: https://trolz.substack.com/p/my-abstraction-crisis-staying-sane
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