The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

In my side hustle time, I use coding agents to explore what if projects I would otherwise never get to build.

At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.

1.5 years in and I haven't burnt out. If anything, I'm ramping up. I'm no longer afraid of adding a web UI, or insane numbers of unit tests, or deploying other people's software.

What I'm not doing is using it to build products, but instead just doing so to augment the supporting stack. All of this is subject to change as the AI landscape evolves.

I'm actually not feeling the 'burnout', though I too have a bunch of projects sitting at various levels of vibe-completeness. Mostly one just kind of yanks on my attention a bit more than the others and so they end up getting a little neglected. I'm fine with it though, I love having all these little forever projects of mine finally coming to life. My worry is kindof the opposite, what happens when I've finished all the things. Will I run out of ideas? I hope not, but already some of my pet projects have reached a level of completeness where I just cannot see anymore to add, for me they have reached a level of done. That frees me up for the next project but what if I run out of projects!

It's wild we're seeing people rediscover the same solution to the same problems we've had forever: being precious about your darlings.

Code generators reduced the friction for implementing every shitty idea someone has ever had, but because developers seem to have never experienced throwing shitty ideas away (because if it was written in code it _has_ to be important right?) they treat everything coming out of the Codegen as a precious idea that eventually builds up to clutter one's brain leading to Implementation Fatigue the author experienced. The solution? Go through that same process but focus on one idea at a time and make it good.

It does make me wonder if the people experiencing this had hobbies outside of software engineering (let's say, anything creative) they'd be able to spot the signs earlier.

I totally agreed with Rick. A.I is a rabbit hole revealer. And it encourages me to go down them with its "Great Idea" spam.

Edit: Reveler vs Revealer

Appreciate the quote of the Essentialism book by Greg McKweon, which I am currently reading. Funnily enough I decided the book when I found out (on Imprint app) that one of the key values of the “essentialist” is playfulness. I was sold.

I launched 1 side project that could potentially help my main project every week, for the last couple of months. To me, it’s not draining at all. I love that the main barrier, time, has been removed. The nagging feeling that I am missing out, did not try, should be working on something, seeing competitors launch my idea. All gone.

I love it. Will any of them succeed? It’s early days, but seeing potentially life changing growth in multiple areas at once gives me a lot of energy.

> So logically, if AI can help us complete tasks 2-100x faster than before, we should be UNDERWORKED and experiencing ZERO burnout, right?

No. you got lied to by AI bros. 100x times the code (that if you burn enough tokens that you could actually hire someone to go thru your ideas and make them...) is not 100x times the productivity