This started as a collection of diverse links, but AI is gobbling a massive share of my mental tokens.
My journey isn’t unique, and I haven’t shared it publicly, but I understand the hype viscerally now. Since late December 2025, I’ve finally picked up the new tooling, learning and building for myself. (Grateful to Aaron Newton for the bootstrap, notably with Claude Code!)
The pace is as non-stop as you allow it to be. James Gleick wrote Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything in 1999. A quarter century later, technology moves in even speedier cycles, grinding our civilizational gears. I don’t have answers, but wanted to capture the moment here to check back in a year, or five.
Claude Code broke through to mainstream publications in January 2026, signaling wider attention to the problem and opportunity: WSJ, January 17, 2026 Claude Is Taking the AI World by Storm, and Even Non-Nerds Are Blown Away (another link, unlikely to survive, but avoids paywall) and NYT, January 23, 2026 This A.I. Tool Is Going Viral. Five Ways People Are Using It.
Two February 2026 pieces got extra attention.
First, AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye gives the HBR imprimatur to the sense of acceleration that comes from the new functionality at all our fingertips. With that acceleration, we get (additional) anxiety. Their proposal in response: “…both individuals and companies should adopt an “AI practice”: a set of intentional norms and routines that structure how AI is used, when it is appropriate to stop, and how work should and should not expand in response to newfound capability.” Not addressed: does wider society have the will or means to change?
Second, Something Big Is Happening by Matt Shumer is a recent longer piece shouting that the world is changing because of AI, and trying to call the inflection point. Got lots of attention, even more than some of the developers below whom I value more highly. Broadly, I agree with calling the shift over the past quarter or so. But lumpiness across different ecosystems will give us multiple experiments in parallel to see what happens. And humans just don’t change that quickly, especially at the organizational level.(An aside: massive engagement on LinkedIn, but why didn’t Shumer use his own space, with a personal or corporate URL? Using LinkedIn and X didn’t limit attention paid, but platforms change.)
When all else fails, check in within Simon Willison. Deep Blue is the coined term (he credits Adam Leventhal) for the anxiety within tech at the changes AI is both enabling and forcing. Other senior leaders in engineering are publicly sharing their experiences, too. Kellan Elliott-McCrea. Michael Lopp. Steve Yegge. And Daniel Miessler has been living in this future for longer than most of us.
No tidy summary for a changing situation, and keeping up is a false hope. I am grateful for the new services I can build on my own, and using those to enable others in small, useful ways. At the level of an organization or civilization, when the gears are already grinding, any technical accelerant like AI just hastens the breakage.
