I have 12 projects lined up this year and 2 of them are already out with the third one I am working on right now. On paper this should feel like momentum but instead I feel nothing. Just a strange quiet detachment. For a while I thought this was burnout or the usual mid-cycle dip but this feels like something fundamental has been rewired. I laughed at the idea of AI psychosis the same way everyone else did and thought I was on the right side of the tool using it without being used by it.

There is an easy button now for almost everything I used to struggle with. Code and architecture and debugging and deployment. Press a button and something working appears that is 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 and says why are you doing this the hard way instead of helping me figure it out. That voice is new and it is winning.

I think the reason I don’t care about these 12 projects is that I didn’t suffer for them. Walking was hard when I was learning it and I fell and got up and fell again and that struggle got baked into the act itself. School was hard with confusion and late nights and that quiet panic before something clicks and because I earned the understanding I valued it. Love is hard because it asks for vulnerability without offering any guarantees and that risk is what makes it real. Becoming good at something took years with small scars accumulated along the way and one day without realizing it I started owning the title I had been given long ago. That was the pattern where effort creates friction which creates investment which creates meaning and now the friction is optional.

I can build products without really building them and ship without wrestling with the problem and get to done without ever sitting in that uncomfortable space where nothing works and everything is unclear. The products work and they are live and they do what they are supposed to do but they feel like hot dogs which are technically food and functionally complete and I have no idea what went into them. I pressed a button and something edible came out and because of that I have no relationship with them.

The thing that bothers me is not that AI is powerful because it clearly is. The thing that bothers me is what it removes from the process. Software used to feel like a craft where I fought with it and shaped it and understood its edges because I ran into them myself. Now I feel like a manager of outputs where I describe and it generates and I tweak and it adjusts and I ship but I do not feel like I built anything. Somewhere in that loop I lost the struggle which was the thing that made me care about any of it.

I used to think efficiency was the goal of shipping faster and doing more and removing friction but now I am not so sure because friction was also the thing that made the outcome meaningful. Remove all friction and you do not just remove pain but also ownership. I wrote a post years ago about the future getting shorter the longer we wait and I did not realize then that speeding up the future also makes it feel smaller. When everything is instant nothing has weight.

Deleting AI tools feels naive and using them blindly feels dangerous. Maybe the answer is to reintroduce constraints and choose the hard path intentionally even when the easy one is available. I am starting to understand that I do not actually want faster outcomes but outcomes I care about. Right now I have 12 projects where 2 are out and the third one coming and they feel alive and none loved and that feels like a bigger problem than not shipping at all. I become the factory, the destroyer of crafts.

Give me a shout on Twitter. I am @troysk704.