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AI promises to do the work for you. It doesn’t. It moves the work from your hands to your head.
That’s the catch. The real cost of AI isn’t computation or hallucinations. It’s cognitive. More mental effort, not less. The effort just finds a higher floor.
“I Built a CRM in Two Hours”
You hear this every week. Someone discovers vibe coding. Announces it like a revelation.
Talk to them a month later. They stopped.
They stopped because the next step was thinking. Architecture. Edge cases. The hundred decisions that separate a demo from a product. AI handled the building. Nobody handled the thinking.
I barely write code these days, but my mental effort is through the roof.
Twenty-Five Years. The Effort Never Went Down.
I started coding at eight by reading the Commodore 64 user manual. Maybe it was ten, but I’d like to think I was younger. Been building software professionally since 2000. Twenty-five years.
The mental effort never decreased. Not once. Every new language, every new platform opened a door to a higher floor. Not easier. Higher.
New technologies meant harder problems within reach. Why would AI be different?
It isn’t. AI is the biggest door yet. The floor behind it is the highest I’ve ever had to think on.
Two Laptops, Four Editors, Zero Lines of Code
I barely write code now. But my cognitive load didn’t drop — it shifted.
Coding became reviewing. Building became coordinating. I run two laptops and four editors at once — not writing more code, but directing more systems.
An agent processes a request in a few minutes, and programmers, we are productivity junkies. The moment one finishes, we’re already prompting the next.
More output. Same hours. More mental effort per hour than I’ve ever spent writing code by hand.
But here’s the thing — now that I know I can produce code without effort, I spend more time thinking about what I *could* build now that I couldn’t before, because lack of knowledge, experience, and/or time.
I stopped coding. I didn’t stop thinking. Writing the code moved to deciding what’s worth building… next.
As I wrote in Stop Building AI Agents, the value isn’t in the agent executing — it’s in the workflow deciding what to execute. That workflow doesn’t design itself. You design it. With AI and with your head.
When Building Is Free, Thinking Is Expensive
Building software used to be expensive (too expensive!) That expense was a constraint — you couldn’t afford to build everything, so you never had to choose between everything.
AI removed the constraint. Now you can build almost anything, cheap as an ice cream.
But the bottleneck didn’t disappear. It moved from “can we build this?” to “what should we build next?“
Every possible direction, all at once. That’s not liberation. That’s cognitive overload.
Say AI solves “what to build” too. Automates the lean startup loop — finds the market, designs the product, ships it. Where does the mental effort go? More customers? More products? Colonize the moon?
It doesn’t vanish. It shifts upward. Always has. Exponentially.
Your Gut Is the Last Layer
A mentor used to ask me frequently: “What is your gut telling you?” when facing decisions.
I didn’t get it. We were building software and managing engineering teams. Gut feelings felt like the wrong tool.
Now I say the same thing when I teach people to work with AI. “I can’t give you a recipe. You’ll develop a muscle with the model over time. Trust your instincts — when to push, when to review, when to think more.“
Prompting is pattern recognition below the level of conscious thought. You notice something you can’t explain. You acknowledge it. Then you prompt the AI to validate what your gut already flagged.
I know — sounds like a Force metaphor. Bear with me here.
One of my favorite animated series is The Animatrix. One of its shorts tells the story about how the machines build their own city, their own economy, and beat humans at every game, which later, because of poor humans’ judgment, caused the war.
The question was never whether AI could outproduce us. It’s whether there’s a layer where your judgment still holds value. “What’s my new role here?”
There is. AI has inference. You have instinct. They run on different data. For now.
The bottleneck moved from your hands to your head — go through the door, but bring the same commitment and a lot of thought.
- AI Moved the Bottleneck to Your Head - 02/19/26
- Stop Building AI Agents - 02/17/26
- From SaaS to AI Agents - 05/27/25