Revisiting AI Fatigue: Learning to Step Away [Raw Session]

00:00 — Revisiting AI Fatigue

Hey, welcome back to Slow Builds.

I wanted to revisit AI fatigue, but not the same way as the last video.

Last time I talked about this, it was more about around coding and constant feeling that we got.

And the fatigue it caused, AI has been causing, and it’s causing a lot of people, and I still believe it’s a massive issue.

How AI changes the feeling of programming.

you can go from being deep in the code to like now you’re not a coder anymore, you’re more like a manager, a supervisor, overseeing your agent’s coding really. You’re reviewing, checking, testing, and verifying. You’re managing the work instead of always being inside of it.

That part is still true for me, but this one is a little different. This one’s more about what happens after that because once AI makes more things possible you start feeling like maybe you should always be doing something and that is part I’m trying to deal with right now not whether AI is useful because it’s extremely useful it’s making making things that seemed impossible or so on are now within grasp basically so it’s not whether AI saves time it definitely saves time but But what happens when the time it saves just turns into more pressure?

What happens when every quiet moment starts feeling like unused productivity?

And what happens when stepping away feels like you’re falling behind?

And that is what I want to talk about through in this one because I think I’m learning that just because AI lets us work more does not mean we have to work all the time.

01:47 — AI Makes Work Easy to Start

The thing that feels different with AI is how easy it is to start work now.

Before if you wanted to build something, there was a lot of friction involved.

You had to research it, plan, document, write it, test it, constant fixing, rethinking, and even possibly just completely scrapping everything and starting over.

There were natural barriers in the way, and those barriers were annoying, but they always they slowed you down. Now a lot of that is condensed. You can have a rough idea and turn into a plan. You can have messy notes and turn them into structure just like these videos in a way. You can have a half-built project and get help cleaning it up quickly, getting it to a proper MVP. You can ask for test cases, refractoring, full architecture, get complete second opinions. You can even have it go out and research to see if the idea is even possible. A full rebuild doesn’t take weeks, weeks or months. It takes hours and minutes sometimes and again that is very useful but it also means work is always sitting there one prompt away and that is the part that gets me. I do not even need to fully sit down and enter work mode anymore. I can just send a quick message to a telegram or dispatch through Claude. One small prompt, a loose idea, an unfinished thought, and something’s moving. Something’s being outlined, written, planned, even built.

So then the question becomes, if it’s that easy to start something, why wouldn’t I always be starting something?

Why wouldn’t I always have an idea moving forward?

And why wouldn’t I always have a project being cleaned up and being ready for testing and users.

Why wouldn’t I always have AI working on something in the background for me constantly, continuously having my agents just running nonstop.

And that is where the pressure creeps in.

03:57 — This Pressure Did Not Start With AI

And I don’t think this is pressure starting with AI.

I think this has been around for a while.

I think AI is just a new version of something that we’ve seen before.

An email became normal in companies, it changed the pace of work.

People started feeling like they had to respond faster.

Before that, not everything needed an instant reply.

Then cell phones headed a whole other layer on top of that.

Now you can be reached even when you’re not at your desk.

Then the Blackberry took it further.

Work email was always with you on the go and be able to take the phone calls.

And then smartphones, especially the iPhone.

I took everything to a whole like just exponentially more productivity within your palm of your hand, email, text, calls, full on calendars, apps, every tool, every document.

Your whole job was just sitting there in your palm.

And if you let it, there was almost no downtime anymore.

You could always check something, always reply, always look something up, always fix one small You’re staying half connected 100% of the time.

And AI feels similar to me, but in a slightly different way.

Email made us reachable, phones made us available, smartphones made us portable.

AI makes us startable.

And that is the part that feels new.

It’s not just that someone else can reach me, it’s that I can reach back into work at any moment.

I can open another loop, I can start another idea, I can create motion even when I should probably be resting.

And if you’re the kind of person who already has a lot of ideas, I can get heavy fast.

05:46 — Too Many Open Loops

And that’s where I feel my life is right now.

I have a lot of things on the go, like my steady app, the book idea I’m working on, these videos, there are tools I wanna build with my kids, there’s a bunch of side apps, I got the open cloud going.

There’s just a couple of websites.

I’m helping other people or at least I’m trying to.

And there are random ideas that just pop up every single day.

And on top of that, there’s actual work work, like my real job, real responsibility, deadlines, real mental energy being spent.

And AI makes all of those things feel more possible.

And that is the good part about it.

But it also makes all of those things feel more present.

Like they are all sitting there waiting to be touched at any moment.

And if I have a free 30 minutes, I start thinking maybe even five minutes, two minutes before I run out, like I can jump on and send a prompt.

I like, I should touch the book, clean up steady a little bit, check in on my open-claw agents, should write something, plan another video, automate something.

Should I ask AI to organize my ideas?

I should get one small thing done, one small thing, and one small thing is fine, but when every break becomes one small thing on top of another, you never actually stop.

And that is the problem.

The work does not have to be huge to wear you down.

Sometimes it’s the constant opening and closing of loops, the constant touching of everything, the constant feeling that something could be moving if you just gave a little push, a little prompt.

That’s really all it is.

07:32 — Not Everything Has to Move Every Day

I think one thing I’m trying to learn is that not everything has to move every single day or every single moment.

And it sounds simple, but it’s hard when you care about the things you’re building.

If the book sits for a few days, I feel it.

I really do.

Study does not move and has moved in a while.

And the app ideas that I have are not touched.

I feel they’re being wasted.

But it does not mean I should work on them all the time.

can sit, some things can wait, and some things can be unfinished without even being abandoned really and that is a big distinction here. Unfinished does not always mean neglected.

Sometimes unfinished just means not today. So I’m trying to spread things out more. Maybe I touch the book a little bit each week. Maybe I touch open clock a couple times a week.

Maybe I move one app forward slowly.

Maybe I help someone when I actually have capacity, not just because I feel the urge or in the moment.

I need to step back and take my time.

It’s basically what I need to do.

Maybe some ideas just stay in notes for a little bit.

And that doesn’t mean they are dead.

It just means I’m not trying to carry all of them at the same time.

And I think that matters more now because AI makes it so easy to pretend you can carry everything. But you still have one brain, you still have one body, you need sleep, you need some quiet, you need time where nothing is asking anything from you. And AYA does not remove that.

09:04 — Work Work Has to Have a Line

The other place I feel this is my actual work because with software there’s always more to do. There’s always another bug, cleanup, an integration, edge cases, new testing, just another thing to think through basically.

And with AI it’s easy to keep going. You can tell yourself I’ll just ask it one thing. I’ll just clean this up. I’ll just outline this for tomorrow. I’ll just test one more path. Compare one more approach and then 30 minutes turns into an hour.

An hour turns into late nights and then you gotta be back up again in the morning and your body you like it causes bad sleep it causes little sleep and you’re waking up early to try to catch up on what you thought you were hoping to finish the night before and you start the next day tired and if you do that enough it catches up mentally and physically and that’s the part I think people are miss they’re underestimating at the moment this kind of work might not look physical but it still hits your body.

Bad sleep hits your body.

Constant context switching hits your body.

Living in work mode all the time hits your mind and your body.

So I’m trying to be more careful with after hours work. Not perfect. I still do it. I’m making these videos at night. Sometimes on the weekends. Well I have to because I can’t do work but but even like my other ideas and stuff like they’re done at night. I do a lot of extra work at night so I need downtime.

I still push into the evening sometimes. Sometimes 30 minutes here or an hour there. I always do at least probably five to ten hours an extra week of my real work on top of my other stuff that I try to do. Sometimes I want to get something out of my head and sometimes I want to move something forward but I’m trying to notice the difference between making progress and refusing to stop because those are not the same things.

Sometimes I’m not being productive and I’m just avoiding the discomfort of leaving something unfinished.

11:13 — Downtime Has to Stay Downtime

The main thing I’m trying to remind myself is that downtime has to stay down.

If I go for a walk, it does not have to become a planning session.

If I go for a run, it does not have to become a productivity tool.

If I watch a show, I do not have to feel guilty because I could have been building something.

If I sit there and do nothing useful for a little while, does not mean I’m wasting my life.

It means I’m taking a break and I need to take more breaks.

And I think for people who work a lot, distinction matters because your brain can start measuring everything.

Rest, quiet, family time, walk, show.

Everything gets filtered through whatever is moving something forward.

And that is a bad place to live.

You need time where you’re not producing.

You need time where you’re not optimizing.

You need time where your mind can relax, even numb time.

You think of them like my wife watches those, like Bachelor and Love is Blind shows, like those are just turn your mind off garbage TV basically.

And we all need that.

Me, I go to Seinfeld, I go to King of Queens.

I have my shows that allow me to just go to a place that I don’t have to think.

I know it sounds strange, but I think it’s real.

Sometimes your brain just needs to not be solving anything, not improving anything, not learning anything, not building, just coming back down.

That’s not a waste of time.

That is part of staying healthy enough to keep going.

12:47 — AI Should Give Us Breathing Room

The strange thing is that AI should give us breathing room.

At least that is how I want to use it.

If it saves time, I do not want every save minute to become more work.

If it helps me rebuild faster, I do not want that to mean I have to rebuild everything constantly.

If it helps me write faster, I do not want it to mean I should write every idea as soon as it pops in my head.

If it helps me code faster, I don’t want that to mean I should always be coding.

The code cannot just be more output forever.

At some point, the time saved should actually become time saved, time to breathe, think, make better choices, recover, step back and ask if the thing even matters because otherwise AI does not give you freedom.

It just speeds up the treadmill.

And I think that is a trap.

We look at the tool and think I can do more now, which is true, but maybe the better question is what should I not do now?

What can I leave alone?

What can wait?

Why do I actually need less motion, not more?

And that’s the part I’m trying to learn.

13:57 — Learning to Step Away

Like, so I guess that’s where I’m at with AI fatigue at the moment.

The first layer was realizing AI change how work feels, especially with coding, less flow, more review, more supervision, more verification.

It’s just a lot more mind work rather than doing.

But this next layer is different.

It is learning how to step away when the work is always available, when the tools are always ready, when the ideas are always one prompt away.

When everything can technically move because everything does not need to move.

Not today, not all at once, not at the cost of sleep or the cost of health, and definitely not the cost of never feeling present.

I still think AI is useful.

I know it’s useful.

It’s changing the world.

I’ve done many videos on it.

We’re going to see great things happen.

And I’m super excited about what we’re going to see and what I get to build.

I’m happy with what I get to do.

and I still think it’s going to change the whole world.

But I also think we have to be careful with it because just because we can work not stop does not mean we should.

Just because we can produce more does not mean every quiet moment is wasted.

And just because AI can help us start again does not mean we always have to start something new or start over.

Sometimes the work is stepping away.

Sometimes the progress is letting your mind relax.

Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do spend. Just don’t do another prompt. Don’t open another loop. Don’t start another project.

Just stop for a little bit and let downtime actually become downtime. Learn how to relax and not constantly think, “Well, I can spin this up. I throw this out. I see what happens in the morning. I should have my agents working nonstop.”

We all need to take a little break, take a breath, relax.

All right. Thanks for watching. I hope you like this one.