George Hotz published a post this week called “Every minute you aren’t running 69 agents, you are falling behind.” It’s satire. His actual point is that the AI anxiety is manufactured — just stop worrying, go create value, and ignore the noise.
He’s right about the anxiety being toxic. But he’s wrong that you can just turn it off. Because for some of us, the problem isn’t fear. It’s the opposite.
I’ve cut way back on drumming. I stopped going to the gym. My daughter goes to bed at 7:30 and I open Claude and I don’t close it until 11:30. Sometimes later. I’m not doomscrolling or watching TV — I’m building things. Real things. An app that’s in the App Store. Automations that changed how my team works. A home server. A blog. A compliance intelligence tool. Bots that run while I sleep.
I’ve done more in three months than I did in three years. That’s not an exaggeration. And it feels incredible.
The 1% Loop
If you’ve played Dark Souls, you know the feeling. You fight a boss for two hours and you die a hundred times, but each attempt you get 1% further. You learn the timing. You read the pattern. And you can’t stop because you can feel the progress — it’s right there, just one more run.
That’s what this feels like. Every evening I sit down and push something a little further. Ship one more feature. Fix one more scraper. Write one more post. And unlike Dark Souls, the progress carries over into real life. It’s not a game — it’s my career, my side projects, my ability to support my family. The dopamine is real and the output is real. That’s what makes it so hard to stop.
I haven’t found the edge yet. I keep looking for the thing AI can’t help me do and I haven’t hit it. Maybe I’m not pushing hard enough. But right now, every problem I throw at it, I can solve. Problems I couldn’t touch a year ago.
The Feeling I Recognize
I felt this exact way once before — in the early 2000s, making websites. I’d stay up learning JavaScript. I’d build pages for fun. I’d talk about the internet to anyone who would listen and then teach my friends how to make their own sites. That feeling of a new medium cracking open — where you can suddenly make things that didn’t exist before and share them with people — I thought that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
It’s happening again. And it’s stronger this time because the tools are so much more capable. I’m not limited by what I can code. I’m limited by what I can imagine. Which means I’m not limited at all. Which is exactly the problem.
The Wall That Isn’t There
I’ve always been like this. My partner knows it. If there’s a puzzle, I’ll work it until it’s done. I’ve always had the drive but not the means — I’d hit a wall. Can’t build that feature, don’t know the framework, would take six months. The wall was frustrating, but it was also a natural stopping point. It forced me to put the laptop down.
AI removed the wall.
The puzzle never ends now. There is always another thing to optimize, another idea to prototype, another post to write, another email to send. And I can run them in parallel now, which is its own kind of addictive. My partner told me it had to stop after I launched my app. I kept going. Not because I didn’t hear her — because I couldn’t find a seam to stop at. There’s no save point.
What I Don’t Know
I’m not burned out. I’m not unhappy. I love my job more than I have in years because there’s a real chance I can move the needle on any given day. I can change a workflow, build a tool, update a system — things that actually improve someone’s experience. I’m vibe coding during meetings that used to eat my time. I’m teaching colleagues. I’m creating value with software, which is the whole reason I got into this business.
But I’m also not going to the gym. I’m barely drumming. I’m feeling older and less healthy. My evenings used to be TV, exercise, music. Now it’s just Claude. I’m doing more than ever but I’m not sure what it’s doing to my brain. I don’t know what this costs yet.
I’m not comparing myself to anyone. I’m genuinely happy when I see other people creating — it feels like the early internet again where everyone’s sharing what they built. But underneath the excitement, there’s a question I can’t answer: where does this end? Not the technology. Me. Where do I end?
Hotz says stop playing zero-sum games and just create value. I agree. But he doesn’t address what happens when creating value becomes the thing you can’t stop doing. When the game isn’t zero-sum but it’s still consuming every hour you’re not sleeping or parenting.
I feel like an entrepreneur on a Friday night, working late because I believe in what I’m doing. That’s a beautiful thing. It might also be an unsustainable thing. And the honest answer is I don’t know which one yet.
I think a lot of people feel this way right now and aren’t saying it.