I was having a fun chat with my friend Aaron Wislang on Signal today, discussing how I'm getting so much done with Claude, while at the same time feeling absolutely exhausted, mentally. It reminded me of the first time I used Google...
I was in my office on 2nd and Howard street in San Francisco, taking a break from writing a really crappy ASP classic application. One of the people in my office, John, said "you guys really need to try Google. It's so much better than Yahoo".
I remember wondering what better than Yahoo meant. Searching is searching, isn't it? You match terms, maybe do a word proximity analysis with a token count or something... eh, let's try it.
I don't remember what, exactly, I searched on. Probably my name because didn't we all? All I remember is muttering "how... the F*** did that happen? That... is magic."
That question plagued me for about an hour. Someone knew an algorithm that somehow put the exact right page in front of me, right at the top. It was pure voodoo craziness! And then, like most tech breakthroughs, it just became part of my every day, like it was always there.
I now had a super power: I could find the answer to something in seconds. That included code, which meant I could "learn" new things (I totally would never copy/paste...) and ways to ship solutions for my clients.
And I did. I moved faster. I shipped more. I was on fire with possibilities ... and then I burned out completely in 2004 and moved to Kauai, never wanting to touch a computer again.
The Overwhelm is Real
There is a price for this kind of speed. Google search and Google Reader were a deadly combination. I could read my favorite blogs and then search for what they were talking about. One post I read in 2004 (or thereabout) talked about a thing called a "Build Provider" in Visual Studio. It would fire every time a build went off, and you could bind some code to it.
I Googled for an hour, and then 3 hours later I had my first big open source project off the ground: SubSonic. It was a full data access layer that just magically appeared for you when you built your project. I never would have been able to do that 3 years prior as I would have had to spend a few hours at Barnes & Noble finding the right books to show me what I needed to know.
Google did that in 2 minutes. Claude can do this too, and it could also build the thing in the same amount of time (well, almost). That's... wild.
Over the last few months I've been building things with Claude Code at a pace that doesn't make sense to me. Full applications in a weekend. Entire agent fleets that help me manage my business while I go make coffee. An email list service (because WTF why not). I rebuilt my entire publishing pipeline, rethought my content strategy, and scaffolded a course platform, all while my actual to-do list kept growing because I kept adding to it.
That's a trap. I can do more, so why don't I? I can do 10 times what I could do before. Coding, execution, planning... and I can do it better. So why do I feel completely drained and overwhelmed?
I was trying to get to sleep last night and my mind was a shivering mess. I kept thinking: this is why you created your Obsidian daily note system with Claude. You put everything there, and forget about it. So why wasn't I forgetting about it? Why was I believing that I needed to be thinking about this stuff, remembering little details, else it wouldn't get done?
I like my work. I like building things. I like thinking about building things. I love the feeling of shipping and learning and solving people's problems. Why in the world would I want to push that out of my brain!
The Movie Got It Right
There's a reason that Everything Everywhere All at Once resonated with people so much. Evelyn Wang isn't overwhelmed because she's incompetent. She's overwhelmed because she can suddenly see every version of her life running in parallel and she has to choose which one to care about. She has choices that she needs to consider, inspiration to motivate her, losses to mourn. This is mentally taxing!
That's the most accurate depiction of working with AI tools I can come up with, and the movie's release is miraculously prescient.
You can now build the course. You can write the newsletter. You can refactor the codebase, launch the side project, redesign the landing page, finally learn Rust (OK maybe not Rust, life's too short). Actually - why learn any programming language at all? Who actually writes code any more?
Have an agent watch your agents who are watching other agents so you can have full leverage over the insanity, doing even more work, getting even more done. Or maybe playing pickleball and making your partner dinner. While coding.
Pure madness. And I love it. I think.
Just... One... Little... Hit
I have 25 years of shipping software under my belt and I was spinning in circles like when I first discovered microservices and got in yet another argument with Jimmy Bogard. The possibilities are endless... so let's try all of them.
Eventually I decided to make a rule: Do Just One Thing. Every day has one thing that matters, and everything else is bonus. Not in a productivity-guru, manifest-your-best-life kind of way. More in a "Rob, you dolt, pick one and finish it" kind of way.
I like Stephen King's take:
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.
He writes a lot of books, and he's been very successful. He probably uses AI for things these days, but I highly doubt he uses it for writing. Where's the fun in that?
So that's what I did. Every morning, coffee in hand, I would sit down with my daily note and think "what's the one thing I want to do today?" and I would write it down with a little checkbox next to it.
It looks like this:
That's todays win. When I hit "Publish" in the next 30 minutes or so, I'll have won this day.
Or... will I? Because there is a LOT on my plate, and this is just the morning!
Normally I would laugh at this list and know that there's no way I could do all of it in a single day. But this isn't "normally", is it. It's a new day, people, and I know that if I just spent a little time prompting...
Ugh. I don't want to do more for the sake of checking boxes. I want to do less of the stuff I don't want to do in the first place!
The Weird Paradox
The people who are going to thrive with these tools aren't the ones who use them to do more. They're the ones who use them to do the right thing, faster, and then go outside. I think I'm getting there, but the climb is exhausting.
I built an entire agent that does nothing but ask me one question when I get distracted: "Is this higher leverage than the thing you already committed to?" Yes, I do understand that I spent time with AI to have it tell me to not use AI. Welcome... to the desert, of the real...
But it works, because the overwhelm isn't a tooling problem. It's a choices problem. And choices have been hard since long before any of us had an Claude Code sitting in our terminal.
So, What To Do Then?
If you're feeling the weight of being able to do everything, everywhere, etc., you're just adjusting to a new gravity. We went from "I can't build that, it would take a few weeks" to "I could build that on Thursday" to "one sec let me get my agents on it and I should have it ... 30 minutes" and our brains haven't caught up yet.
I can do things so quickly now that it feels like my brain literally bumps the side of my skull as the task I thought was going to take hours jolts to completion in 10 minutes.
It leaves me feeling kind of confused and empty... like... what do I do with myself now and then I need to context-shift into something else, which doesn't really need a full context shift because I don't need to think about it all that hard. Claude does. I'm still coming to grips with this: I need to let go, let Claude. That's not easy for me because I'm kind of a control freak.
Sure I can focus on just one thing, as I said above, I have to. Something that I create and take pride in. The rest is up to Claude, which I'm still getting used to.
I like things done a very particular way, and then I like to optimize that thing until it drives me crazy and I end up hating it. That's not an easy sentence to write, and it's taken me years of therapy to understand this about myself. I don't just write prompts and instructions for Claude, I write agentic symphonies because I can and then I wonder where my day went.
But ... oh... what a day it was.
Unfortunately, this is also the reason why I'm good at what I do. I have a Gordon Ramsey level of fiddly, fiery perfectionism that yields delicious results. I don't know how to move faster with this process and I suppose I really don't want to because who would?
Merciless Cutting
I need to let go of a lot of things if Claude is going to work for me. I know that, I think you're probably facing this issue too, but it's one thing to know something, another to actually get your shit together and do it.
This is my work, as summarized in financial form by Remit Sethi's book I Will Teach You To Be Rich:
Spend extravagantly on the things you love, and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.
I like it. Maybe we can bend this to AI and programming:
Work extravagantly on the things you love, and prompt mercilessly on the things you don’t.
I spent a lot of hours writing this newsletter, and it's not easy thinking about what I could have gotten done in Claude time. I don't care. This is what I love, and this is what makes me happy, and I'm glad I can spend time doing this because Claude frees me up from the other things that slow me down.
What other things, you ask? Well, on today's list of Rob's Things:
- Creating a ConvertKit MCP server so I can integrate this blog with a proper newsletter service.
- Recording 3 installments of my "Big AI" project where I record myself using a swarm of agents to rebuild my site.
- Editing 3 to 5 lessons of The AI Pro, which I really need to be finished soon (I'm getting there)
- Getting my new cohort off the ground. I was amazed at the volume of responses (it's closed now), and we're getting started next week.
And there's the rub. I love working on all of these things, but I don't want to hand them completely over to Claude. Only some of the tasks, like writing code for the ConvertKit thing, compiling the lesson text and pushing it to Ghost, and so on.
There's probably more in there, and I love exploring what's possible... but I'm still learning how to let go, and it's not easy, because it always feels like cheating. Do you ever feel this way?
Maybe I need to let go of that too.
Thanks for reading this. I genuinely love hearing from people who are navigating this same moment, so if you've got a story about how AI capability is messing with your head (or making it better), hit reply. I read every single one.
And yes, as usual, I wrote this post myself. It's my guarantee.
Cheers!
Rob
