Less Sleep
The essence of this blog post has been rattling around my head for a few months now. It’s not really substantive, but more like trying to describe an emotion or a feeling; a feeling maybe one shared collectively by others who have been reading, listening, or thinking about the topic of nearly every conversation in recent memory: AI.
There’s been a lot of keys typed about what’s happening now and what’s to come. My personal experience has been a pretty similar one to what I hear from friends, family, and the tech media in general, but it’s been such a powerfully transformative one that I still feel the need to write about it as best I can, even if the same thoughts have been described many times before by others. The change in thinking, the new perspective, trying to think about a world where this technology can continue to accelerate at breakneck speeds; it’s almost too big to really think through without trying to put thoughts to paper.
The most simplified version is: I have routinely been getting less sleep at night. Not because I have “The Fear” about an upcoming AI doomsday scenario (as referenced in The Thinking Machine), but because I’m just having too much fun at night playing around with the tools. I mean, it’s really incredible - every day, I have passing, transient thoughts about some cool project, or an interesting idea, or a question I haven’t pondered before. Most of the time, these are dead-on-arrival - maybe for the most engaging ones, I spend a weekend hacking at something and then I just realize it’s too much work for the payoff. I have gone through the end-to-end process before (check out some early blog posts of mine on things like varints in rust), but the ratio of ideas to tangible outputs has traditionally been rounding down to zero. Now, however, I can just fire off a couple of prompts and get something that works - which is just simply incredible.
I’m not talking about within the workplace - that’s a topic for a dedicated post - but personal projects. Some are fun, some are “art”, some are useful. Some get thrown away, but those have helped me actually understand why some software / tools I may not have appreciated fully before are actually the best form factor for a problem (I have tried four or five times to build a TODO app that’s catered to me, and it turns out a post-it note is amazing for 90% of the tasks I tackle in my life).
A lot of chatter has been about whatever world we’ll arrive at over the next few years has been around what humans will do with their time when we’re freed from all of our menial tasks and labor. I know with my extra time, at least for now, I’m trying to action on all of those previously bottled up idea fragments and start to see where they go. It’s a lot of fun! It’s freeing - and almost scary - in thinking about the possibilities when the cost of something goes to zero. Previously, those limits were good excuses as to why one couldn’t pursue this thing or why so-and-so was impossible. I’m finding that I’m increasingly running up against (and grappling with) the real reason why I may not have pursued a passion or evaluated an idea, which before was previously just shrouded in something taking too long to do.
My apologies if these thoughts aren’t coherent or insightful, and they’re certainly not mean to share a message or push a narrative other than a snapshot of what now feels like. I know June 2026 feels completely different from June 2025, and I’d wager a year from now will even more foreign. The ramifications are so big, the spectrum of outcomes so wide, and the writing helps as a thinking process. It feels like chopping at a tree of understanding, and each swing of the axe from a different angle cuts a little closer to been able to really grasp the collective change (and excitement or fear or whatever) we’re all feeling in some way.