Chop wood, carry water, empty brain.
On executive dysfunction, the friend who drives you home, and why the tool isn’t the villain
I’ve killed a lot of projects. Not dramatically, not with a bang — just the slow quiet death of a thing I was once genuinely excited about, now sitting in a folder called _archive or ideas-v3 or DO NOT DELETE (old).
Everyone’s crying that SaaS is dead, everyone cooked and there’s no UI/UX anymore, just chat. Well… I don’t buy it. At least not entirely.
Yes, a lot of workflows are collapsing into text and voice, with the AI acting as a proxy — a UI translator that interprets what you want and executes it by best effort. That part is real.
During my long career most of my colleagues had no clue about what we were doing.
I mean they knew what they were doing, in their own field. They knew how to write the code, how to design that button, how to do… their thing. Nothing more.
The other day I was debugging a project and asked my AI agent to investigate – which ended up planting this seed of thought in my head for this writing.
The agent started to hit the wall with some fancy JS rendered documentation page and had to run circles to find a readable source on GitHub.
With AI today anyone can build an app in a day, write an essay in a matter of minutes, make an illustration or painting within seconds. The time constraint almost fully evaporated.
But we are completely missing the point where our brain can really lay back into retrospective mode, can take a step away and think, reflect on the things going on. Pause a bit and take a breath.
“Knowledge is power” is commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon.
I think we all heard this a few times in our lives. We all know what it means. But we don’t really apply it to everything, at least not by default. Or it’s just me. Anyways.
When we talk about how AI is gonna end humanity one day — and this imagined date is actually getting closer every time we talk about it — everybody almost instantly thinks about the iconic opening scene of the Terminator movie.
Cold steel skeletons with red glowing eyes; walking on piles of human bones then cracking a skull under their feet.
When Covid hit, the whole world was like an ant hive during the heavy rain. Suddenly it turned out not everyone needs to be in the office, not everyone needs to commute, not everyone needs to do a flashmob at every hip place.
Then years later everyone wants people back in the good old hamster wheel. Yes I know, a lot of people did not like it to be home, with the people they “love”, but let’s ignore that for a moment.
Sometimes my friends tell me “You like to piss against the wind huh?”
Which is pretty accurate to be honest. Sometimes. Mostly. Whatever. Not the point here now.