What a time to be alive

Hello again my friend,

The last few weeks have left with a rush in my guts that I’ve thought about, but never voiced out loud.

What a time to be alive.

I used to feel so frustrated that I couldn’t code, or design, or whatever else bothered me that week. It wasn’t just me, and obviously we all carried on anyway. The dues we paid then are coming through now with AI.

I’m still cranky sometimes, but for completely different reasons. Now, it’s like I don’t have enough time in a day. It’s like I can’t wake up early enough to get the dopamine hits of seeing Claude complete a days worth of work in an hour.

What used to cost $100,000 a year is now available for a few hundred dollars a month and are at my fingertips. I can sit down on a Saturday morning and ship something that would have taken a team of people and a real budget just two years ago. I can’t get over it.

Yet, these late nights leave that electric feeling to build inside with nowhere to go. The pressure has never been greater. The pace has to pick up, a “sense of urgency” is table stakes. Everything is about speed now, which I love. But it comes at a cost.

I think that’s what most people don’t talk about enough.

Let's lock in.

When everything becomes possible, nothing feels finished.

10 tasks become 100 only because you know you could do them. And knowing you really could, but haven't, creates a specific kind of stress.

The pressure in our industry in particular is so real it keeps me awake some nights. If it hasn’t hit your industry yet, it will soon. Everyone is racing to use this technology to move like rockets. The fear of falling behind isn't some abstract career advice. I see someone on Twitter ship an app in a weekend and suddenly my progress feels slow. You see a company automate half their workflow (and can so many people) and wonder if yours is next.

Personally, you can follow the AI's recommendations and fly. You ask Claude to build something, it builds it. You ask it to research something, it researches it. You move at the speed of your own ambition with almost zero friction.

Professionally? You have to fit within the constraints of your workplace. The security reviews. The approvals. The "we need to evaluate this as a team" meetings that take three weeks. The infrastructure that wasn't built for this. Then the meetings and thousands of pings on Slack that pull you from what you’re trying to do.

So you end up flying in some areas and crawling in others. That imbalance is brutal, because time that could be spent building is spent overcoming this friction. The work very quickly becomes a grind of troubleshooting the way you're supposed to do things. And that grind just wears on your mind.

The dopamine hit when AI gets it done in few minutes is unreal. It's genuinely addictive. You feel like you're operating on a different level.

And it motivates you to work more. To build more. To keep going.

But what's the cost? Life.

The work-life balance everyone talks about striving for is suddenly out the window. I’m not going to dinners, laser tag, or any of the FIFA matches coming to my city.

Not because my boss is demanding more hours. Because I am. The feedback loop is so tight and the reward so immediate that stopping feels wrong. Infinite possibilities, infinite dopamine, the most incredible time to build things all combine to create this trap.

Take it too far, and there goes years of your life. Hopefully it’s worth it. It doesn't look like suffering. It looks and feels like productivity. Until one day, it doesn’t.

I'm not saying this is right. I'm sharing what I'm doing in case it resonates.

Starting work early, leaving a little late, but spending the solo time building with AI. The extra hour isn't for emails or Slack. It's dedicated building time. If I'm not talking to Claude during that window, I'm doing it wrong. The quiet hours before everyone's online and after they've logged off are the most productive hours I have.

Connecting with builders in Discord communities. A lot of these new companies use community to reach new users, and those communities are full of the most incredible builders I've ever interacted with. The signal-to-noise ratio is insanely high because the people there are actually doing the work.

Spending my own money. I'm lucky that beehiiv gives us a budget for AI tools. But having your own subscriptions lets you try functionality without worrying about security policies, pushing code to the wrong environment, or anything like that. The freedom to experiment without constraints is worth every dollar.

Way less time socializing. I go out less. Even less than before, and I barely went out to begin with. It's either time building or time with family. That's the trade-off I've made, and I'm at peace with it right now, even though I know it's not sustainable forever.

Not watching content about all this. This sounds counter-intuitive, but I think so much time is wasted watching and listening to the latest in AI that it takes away from the actual building. The YouTube videos, the podcasts, the Twitter threads breaking down every model release, most of it is noise. Those Discord communities I mentioned have all the context I'll ever need, filtered through people who are actually shipping. I'd rather build for an hour than watch someone talk about building for an hour.

I'm not writing this from the other side. I'm writing this from the middle of it.

The opportunity is the biggest I've seen in my career. The pressure is also the biggest I've felt. And the balance between the two is something I haven't figured out yet. I don't think anyone has.

But I know the kind of person who will succeed. There’s a simple test I picked up from a guy named George Mack on Twitter, so credit to him.

Imagine you are in a prison in a foreign, third-world country. You don’t know anyone, don’t know the language, nothing. Neither does anyone you know.

But you have to call one person to somehow get you out of that prison. Who do you call?

Make a list of people who you think could get you out.

Those are the people who will probably succeed in this new era. Who will manage the stress, the friction, and make concrete success out of all this. Now, to be fair, these people would be successful anyway if they want to be.

And that’s the point. It’s not about career, or tech anymore. With infinite possibilities, the knowledge, tools that can do so much for so cheap (cheap for now), the character of the person suddenly matters all that much more. More on this next week.

What a time to be alive.

Thanks as always for reading.