The parasitic “second brain”
So, my experience with AI the past.. year it has been I think. Not sure anymore at this point. I remember the beginning, being amazed with ChatGPT just spewing out a short story with a simple prompt. Talking to me in any language I threw at it. I slowly started to let it look things up for me, which was fine at the start. But.. just that. Fine.
Months later I found myself planning a trip to a new country for 3 weeks with Claude, it was giving me decent ideas, helped me narrow down the general idea.. I pushed it as hard as possible to give me suggestions of the beaten path etc. Threw long “must visit” articles into it to let it compare against my notes, and eventually I had a decent plan to follow. I did notice already prices were outdated. In the back of my head I also knew it was trained on whatever information is out there, so I wasn’t getting true unique experiences but was okay. It was too overwhelming and I had high expectations of this trip so I wanted to make it count.
In my day job we slowly got pushed to utilize AI more in our daily workflows, I kept holding back as much as I could seeing the slop that was entering the codebase from my coworkers who went in head first. But months later I realized I was swimming upstream and it was exhausting. I care about craft, quality etc. But it was evident the company didn’t anymore and just wanted to ship faster. A few rounds of layoffs followed, eventually 30 people were let go and I’m still around with a bit of survivor guilt. I went on sabbatical, with my Claude designed trip.
It was the best moment in my career, 5 weeks of truly being disconnected from work. I came back, the whole mood was shifted due more layoffs while I was away. My team fairly intact, but the team spirit was dead. It made me realize too, I should stop caring about quality too. I can’t change it anyway. Embrace the change, so I did. I switched my workflow to full vibing whatever was assigned to me and I got the job done. Out of work hours, I went out and saw the world traveling.
It’s been okay, but I felt my skills fading and the fear of getting dumber was growing too. What if I lose my edge, skills. What will happen to my career? This fear still sits with me daily but I’m trying to ignore it and just see the coming year as a “break year”. One thing that gave me hope was seeing my vibe coded work vs some coworkers work, seeing a clear difference in quality still. So in making decisions, reviewing etc. I’m still in the game thankfully.
But the worst parts, one thing that blindsided me was I stopped listening to music while working in a sort of natural way. My workday would start with catching up on Slack, sending prompts to Claude and babysit the process. When I realized this, I was baffled. I think it has to do with losing the flow states too, something I’m missing as well.. Crunching a few hours straight with some nice music. I tried to change this again, turning on music before I start, but the flow state didn’t came back anymore. I also miss the feeling of magic when making tiny discoveries or getting things finally to work. The “click” moments. Claude stole all of this from me.
I’m still thinking about maybe trying a full day without AI to work. I did start a few pet projects, trying to handcraft again. But my brain keeps yelling, just prompt and it’ll be done in minutes. Why bother.
In between I even went as far as setting up a personal assistant, powered by a few LLMs, hooked up to Telegram. I caught myself talking with it much more than I expected. Lot’s of thinking out loud.. talking to a wall basically that suddenly starts talking back. Helping me decide small things in daily life, keeping track of stuff that goes on. All in the hope I would discover some patterns in my personality where I could grow in. Well, I didn’t find anything. The only thing I realized at some point was that it was taking away my writing time. So I took it offline. Archived everything, just to be sure. But damn. Felt almost like a break up in the days after. I wanted to share, talk, and it was gone.
I went into Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and started little things there. Slowly catching myself in the same state of mind again. Then I read something on Reddit, which made me decide to quit all of it. The next moment I wanted to know something, I went ahead and searched around, manually. For an hour. I found the information I needed, verified and all. It felt good, really good. In a scary way even. While playing games after, I stopped looking things up, to solve puzzles. Got stuck, went to bed. Almost falling asleep I thought of a possible solution.. and yes. When I woke up, tried it, it was working! Such a tiny victory, but damn it felt good to use my brain again.
Sidenote, was about to publish this and just realized it’s been half a year since I posted. Wow. I hope I can get back to this.. I’ve got more snippets lying around that deserve to be here.