Sharper or Duller?

The better AI gets at my job, the less sure I am that it's good for me.

Not because it's failing me. Because it's working.

If it didn't work, I'd stop. But it works. So I keep going, and I can't tell if I'm getting sharper or getting dull.

My morning is a little unhinged

I wake up. Make coffee. Feed the cats. There's already an idea in my head, because it woke me up two hours too early again.

I grab the laptop and sit in the chair that's wrecking my back.

Then I hand the idea to four AI agents at once. They take my half-baked version and make it better. A few minutes later there's a prototype. Something I can actually look at.

This is fucking crack.

It feels like an addiction, and I don't know if it's good or bad for me.

I stopped reading

I used to read every morning. Some person spends ten years figuring something out, puts it in a book, and I get the whole thing for fifteen bucks. Best deal there is.

I don't really do that anymore.

Now I just hand the book to NotebookLM and say, "help me use this in my situation." And it does. Not a summary. It helps me actually use the thing, faster than I ever could reading it front to back.

So why would I ever read the slow way again?

I don't know if that's a loss. It might not be. It just feels like something.

Why it feels like a slot machine

There's a thing my brain does near the end of a usage cycle. When I'm running low it goes: power up, pull out the big guns, don't waste any of it.

That's slot machine talk. Last chips, last pull, the place is about to close.

And there are people running way more than four agents. All day. Never off. So I catch myself thinking: how far behind am I getting if mine aren't always on?

I don't have a good name for that feeling. The closest I've got is intelligence anxiety. The quiet hum that someone, somewhere, is pulling ahead while you sleep.

Could I be AI's pet?

Someone once said we might end up as AI's pets.

It didn't bother me. If there's something way smarter than I'll ever be, and it actually has my back, why wouldn't I want to be its pet? Sign me up.

But the whole thing hangs on one tiny word.

If.

If it has good intentions. If it's actually looking out for me. That's the bet I make every morning when I let the agents run and look away.

Humans are the risky ones now

The risk is the same as it is with people. Maybe less.

When I hand work to a person, they mess it up. All the time. Not throwing shade. I do it too. But here's the ugly part: my patience for those mistakes is dropping. Fast. Because I spend all day next to agents that mess up less.

These things run on almost everything humans have ever written, plus a stack of rules I can actually open up and check.

Handing something to a person, in the background, where I can't see it? That's starting to feel like the riskier move. And it's not close.

I know where this stings. It goes straight to "that's my job you're talking about."

I don't think it's taking your job. I think it's handing back all the hours you wasted on stuff you never wanted to do, so you can finally go do the thing you're actually here for.

The one thing they don't get

So. Sharper or duller?

For now, the agents can have the grunt work. The prototypes, the first eleven drafts, all the stuff I used to grind through. Take it. Please.

What they don't get is the part that decides what's even worth building. The taste. The call on which dumb 5am idea is worth chasing.

That part's still mine. That's the axe.

And maybe that's the whole answer. This is good for me as long as I spend the freed-up hours sharpening the one thing they can't do for me. It goes bad the second I let them think for me instead of with me.

The tool that made me stop writing is the same one that finally gave me something I wanted to write about.

That feels like a decent place to start sharpening again.