I sent this out last Friday, and now after a week has passed where I was AI-ing a lot, it feels even truer. I cannot stress enough how important it is to regularly (or entirely?) unplug from the robots and find hands-on, creative work to lean into. I’m pretty certain you’ll find a level of satisfaction and joy that you may not consciously realize you’ve been missing.

I’ve spent the entire day so far OUTSIDE of Claude, haven’t opened it once. Wasn’t intentional, it just turned out that the work I was doing didn’t need an assistant, and I happened to hit a good flow. I ended up slowing down, reading more carefully, and prioritizing my todos for the day to what I could realistically get done vs. piling on like 7 things in the background. And I gotta say it’s been lovely. I would argue it’s been one of the best feeling, productive mornings I’ve had in a while.

That’s not to discount the real wins that AI can bring (including a lot of help I got from it this week), but more that hey, maybe it’s OK, even good, to step away from the assistant here and there. I know it’s hard (impossible?) to accept or validate subjective measures like “feeling good” in work when objective measures (how much you did/shipped) are so prevalent, so I guess I just wanted to say there’s real value in feeling good in your work beyond shipping.

I fully acknowledge that not everyone has this luxury, whether it’s your job function, expectations, or customer pressures. Engineers in particular, so much of your work relies on those agents, so stepping away from them probably seems unrealistic. I just wanted to say out loud that it might be worth trying to find some space here and there, especially if you’re feeling fried at the end of a long week.