AI has deprecated something I didn’t even know I could lose. The ability to care about my own work.

I have 12 projects lined up this year. Twelve. On paper, this should be one of those rare years. The kind you look back on and say, that was when everything moved. Instead, I feel nothing. No anxiety. No excitement. No fear. Just a strange, quiet detachment.

For a while I thought this was burnout. Or maybe just the usual mid-cycle dip. But this feels different. This feels like something fundamental has been rewired. Like many of us, I laughed at the idea of AI psychosis. Thought I was on the right side of the tool. In control. Using it, not being used by it. But I’ve been oneshotted.

There is now an easy button for almost everything I used to struggle with. Code, architecture, debugging, deployment. Press a button, and something working appears. Not perfect, but good enough. Often better than what I would have written on my own, at least on the first pass. And now when I sit down to build something from scratch, my brain resists. It doesn’t say “this is hard, let’s figure it out.” It says, “why are you doing this the hard way?” That voice is new. And it is winning.

The Uncomfortable Realization

I don’t care about these 12 projects because I didn’t suffer for them. Pain is what made things matter.

Walking was hard. You fall, you get up, you fall again. Your body learns balance the slow way. That struggle gets baked into the act itself. Walking feels natural now, but it wasn’t free.

School was hard. Confusion, late nights, that quiet panic before something finally clicks. You earn understanding. And because you earned it, you value it.

Love is hard. It asks for vulnerability, and it offers no guarantees. That risk is what makes it real. Work was hard. Becoming good at something took years. You accumulate small scars. You slowly stop feeling like an imposter. And one day, without realizing it, you start owning the title you were given long ago.

That was the pattern: effort creates friction, friction creates investment, investment creates meaning. Now the friction is gone. Or at least, optional.

The Hot Dog Problem

I can build products without really building them. I can ship without wrestling with the problem. I can get to “done” without ever sitting in that uncomfortable space where nothing works and everything is unclear. And the result is strange. These products work. They are live. They do what they are supposed to do. But they feel like hot dogs-technically food, functionally complete, but I don’t know what went into them. I didn’t cook them. I didn’t even see the ingredients. I just pressed a button and something edible came out. And because of that, I have no relationship with them.

What It Removes

The part that bothers me is not that AI is powerful. It is. The part that bothers me is what it removes. Software used to feel like a craft. You fought with it. You shaped it. You understood its edges because you ran into them yourself. Now I feel less like a builder and more like a manager of outputs. I describe, it generates. I tweak, it adjusts. I ship, but I don’t feel like I built. Somewhere in that loop, I lost something I didn’t know was so critical: the struggle. And without the struggle, there is no attachment. Without attachment, there is no pride. Without pride, there is no care.

Rethinking Efficiency

I used to think efficiency was the goal: ship faster, do more, remove friction. Now I am not so sure. Because friction wasn’t just a cost. It was also the thing that made the outcome meaningful. Remove all friction, and you don’t just remove pain. You remove ownership.

The future gets shorter the longer we wait.

I didn’t realize then that sometimes, speeding up the future also makes it feel smaller. When everything is instant, nothing has weight.

No Clean Answer

Deleting AI tools feels naive. Using them blindly feels dangerous. Maybe the answer is to reintroduce constraints. To choose the hard path intentionally, even when the easy one is available. To earn some parts again. Because I am starting to understand something simple: I don’t actually want faster outcomes. I want outcomes I care about.

Right now, I have 12 projects. All alive. None loved. That feels like a bigger problem than not shipping at all. Seems like I have become a factory, the destroyer of craft.