We are afraid of AI and afraid of not needing AI enough. There's this frantic energy to it all.
You need to be unemployed to keep up with AI but employed to afford the tokens. So the joke goes.
This is the part I left out when I wrote about ‘The New Employee’ recently, on what it takes to be future-ready.
It is now impossible to keep track of everyday updates to even one tool. I follow Claude Code's changelog daily, and even I am falling behind. OpenClaw didn't exist a month ago, but now each one of us wants to show off our setup.
What they don't tell you is that getting it to its full potential requires a million API integrations and tool setups that most people will never finish configuring. And nobody asks what you're actually supposed to do with it once it's installed. Not everyone's life generates that much work for AI.
New tools appear every day that make the previous ones feel ancient. We are all scrambling to find (or invent) problems our agents can solve, because the alternative is to admit we don't need them as much as we claim.
There's no way this many people genuinely understand this many tools at this depth. We are performing at a pace not designed for human beings, sharing screenshots of terminal outputs like they are evidence of competence. All to maintain this collective fiction so nobody notices we're faking it.
There's this constant anxiety that you're not doing enough, that you're falling behind while everyone else is mastering the next thing that didn't exist last month. Even the people at the frontier feel like they are falling behind the people building the next frontier. We are leaving our weekend parties early to get back to our agents.
Leaders have glimpsed what's possible with AI and they're pushing those expectations down onto smaller teams. Work that used to need twenty people now supposedly needs five, except those five are expected to produce like ten.
The best tools are starting to cost a lot of money. The moment you can't keep up and figure it out on your own, you're the line item that gets cut.
So we perform, we post, we pretend, all while that same quiet thought sits underneath.
Please don’t fire me. I know my AI.