I’m feeling particularly tired at the moment. A few years ago, I saw a fantastic video by Johnny Harris called Why You’re So Tired. He explains how the many small decisions we make throughout the day take a toll on our brains. My intense use of AI in recent months may have something to do with it.
AI does so much of the hard work for us, but it still needs us to guide it and make a lot of decisions. Claude’s auto-mode is great, but it still requires a lot of input. Personally, I LIKE being involved. The exchange and the decision-making are the fun part, where we get to express ourselves and exercise our creativity.
For people like me, who love computers and tinkering with them, AI is irresistible. It offers boundless possibilities to build custom software to solve problems in our lives, boost our productivity, start a side gig, or simply have fun creating something new.
I agree with Ben Thompson’s observation in his recent conversation with Joanna Stern that it feels like a return to the 90s, when computers were new and fun. Perhaps it’s a generational thing: our enthusiasm for AI reflects having been around long enough to know how far we’ve come since the early days of the internet, floppy disks and dial-up modems.
The irony for power users like us is that we’re not handing off tasks to AI and spending less time with our laptops, but the opposite. I’ve never spent so much time at my desk or tinkering on my home server via ChatGPT remote.
Like many others, I’m constantly thinking of new ideas and projects to build with AI. While one agent is working, I move on to another project. Each time I switch back, I have to remind myself of the context and details, work out what the AI has done, and decide what to do next. It’s exciting and intellectually stimulating, but it’s also exhausting in the way Harris describes: a constant stream of small decisions.
What limits how much I can build is my time, energy and mental bandwidth. Those hard limits are often frustrating, but perhaps they’re a good thing. There will always be more to do in the virtual world: one more app, another project, something else to optimise. I would never have built most of it before AI, so it’s okay if I don’t build it all now that I can.
It’s important to stop feeding the beast from time to time, step away, and focus on the real world and the people in our lives.