Use AI to slow down, not speed up
I've been burnt out too many times that I've developed the ability so sense when it's coming. Everyone burns out differently, but for me it's when I'm spending more time in the fire-and-wait loop than anything else. In my case -- I've been spending most of my waking hours working: dispatching tasks to too many different agents, shipping PRs, and figuring out what I can do next.
In my defense, I found it fun. Pushing work forward -- chipping away at tech debt and getting product stories shipped -- scratches that itch in my brain and generates dopamine. I'm someone who deeply enjoys incremental games (think: Cookie Clicker and Universal Paperclips), so the fire-and-wait loop keeps me happy.
But just like binging on incremental games, this endless loop of shipping things (with or without AI, but mostly with) takes its toll. My brain chemicals and internal calibration go haywire, and I end up still thinking of what to do next even when it's time for rest.
External stimuli and interruptions (meetings, change of plans, some new "urgent" thing) break my flow state and my body overreacts. Stress, panic, and levels of agitation that I know are beyond normal -- even for me.
That's my burnout tell. I'm too deep in that loop that I find no fun in doing anything else, and my reactions to anything that breaks my focus into it produces disproportionately negative stress reactions.
Last week I went on vacation in Japan with my family. We went to see Karuizawa for the second time, trekked up to some waterfalls, and enjoyed just seeing the sights through trains and occasionally stopping to smell the flowers.
As a personal rule, I decided to completely unplug. Forget about work altogether, and physically disallow myself from even checking in. I uninstalled Slack, Gmail, Github, put myself as only a fallback responder on Spike, and really consciously focused on the calm.
Running engineering at a startup doesn't come with the luxury of true disconnection though, and the worry of being too out of the loop was itself giving me stress -- so what's the middleground?
I needed something that kept me informed without letting tumble too deep into the weeds. AI agents.
My theory is that a lot of the stress, the disturbance in my flowstate, comes from the comically low signal-to-noise ratio these days: there's a barrage of information and noise from everywhere that it becomes tougher to hone in on just what's important.
The strategy I came up with involved creating multiple agents (a mix of Claude and ChatGPT):
- I created one bot for one particular area of concern: for example, a specific person who tends to have low SnR in their communication style; a specific project that runs in the background that occasionally needs my input; incidents and high priority events that demand attention
- I taught all of these bots to look into only specific channels, and I taught them how to discriminate between noise and signals that actually demand attention
- Then I created a CTO bot that I taught to distill and filter all the signals from the prior bots into a brief that's easy for me to look at
- Finally I created an Executive Assistant bot which I then taught to take the CTO bot's brief, along with personal stuff (like emails, reminders, and non-work calendar events), and then deliver a final brief on yet another level of abstraction
The end result was a cascade of filters -- information that trickles down slowly, but that delivers only things that I should actually pay attention to. Small enough to be an easy read, but carefully curated and deliberate enough to not miss out on anything important.
During my time in Japan, I could easily binge-watch a TV show while on the train, and nudge my EA now and then to see if there's anything I missed. Most of the time it would say no (as I designed it to) -- something like three lines and "nothing urgent." But I can prod it a bit more and not miss out on the small things.
I enjoyed this zen and heavily distilled approach so much that I've decided to take it with me after I got back from vacation.
See, the thing I've come to realize with really adopting AI into your core work cycle is that it works better as a sieve. Not a way to raise personal velocity -- a way to stop chasing it. Same necessary work, less noise.
It's about getting the same amount of stuff done without feeling like you're running after a train that's already left the station. It should feel more like sitting on the train and knowing that you'll get there on time, and meanwhile you get to spend time on things that actually matter.