what is this feeling?
I’ve been having an odd experience lately which I’m not quite sure how to process. Over the past year, life has changed dramatically with the advent of various AI tools being leveraged as thought partners, automation drivers, and building resources. Personally, I dove in headfirst and started attacking every single mild annoyance of mine as a now completely solveable problem in a fraction of the time it used to take.
Over the course of the last year, I have:
- Installed most every smart home device I wanted, and every automation my little heart could dream up (there are so many…)
- I even got a 3D printer so I could print my own housings (among other things) for smart sensors I decided to make instead of buy
- Created and deployed my first application (wedding photos app)
- Created and deployed a PWA app for a community organisation
- Built a computer with 48GB of VRAM that I can run local open weight models on
- Created my own agentic development workflow (and iterated over it several times)
- Built my wife a fully functioning video streaming platform for her pilates classes
- Hijacked my doorbell’s camera, speaker, and microphone to let an AI Agent act as my personal digital doorbell butler
- Built myself a RAG pipeline to learn about doc loading, chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, re-ranking, retrieval
- Built several small tools for my own personal problems (whatsapp task pipeline for my wife’s requests, a tmux tether to reach my coding sessions from any device with slack, a few others)
- Created own website to write about my projects and share general anecdotes about my recent adventures
Eleven things that would normally have kept me busy for months each are now all done in less than a year. Granted, I spent an enormous amount of time working on all of these things with AI - going back and forth debating what the right solutions would be, experimenting, failing, learning, trying it again.
What’s honestly left for me now is the day to day maintenance. I even went so far as to have the video platform for my wife professionally audited. Fixed the few bugs it surfaced and wrapped those learnings back into my development workflow to prevent recurrence.
The barrier between wanting to do something and actually doing it has become so low that I find myself a little dry on ideas/inspiration - which honestly has left me feeling a bit bored. Not because I have any lack of motivation or am burnt out on projects - but because my ability to produce solutions has outpaced my capacity to be annoyed by inconveniences. Which is a very strange place to be indeed…
Now, if someone could please annoy me with some inconvenience so that I can have another project to work on - I would be much appreciative.