AI IS MAKING IT HARD TO STEP AWAY

Nick Grey posted something recently that made me stop and think. He’d been talking to builders working with AI agents and tools like Claude Code, and kept hearing the same thing: people had stopped going to the gym. Not because they were lazy. Because stepping away felt too costly. There was always something running, something to check, something that might be done by the time they got back.

I recognized myself in that immediately.

But when I sat with it, I realized my version of this anxiety isn’t really about the work itself. It’s about the person at the next desk — or the next Slack message — who isn’t stepping away. The one who’s shipping faster, prompting smarter, iterating while I’m on mile three of a run.

I’m not afraid AI will take my job.

A bold statement for sure. I am afraid someone using AI better than me will be seen as more effective, more valuable, more worth keeping around. That’s a different fear. And honestly, it’s a harder one to reason with.

Because it’s not paranoia — it’s somewhat true and has always been true. AI is compressing what used to take days into hours. The gap between someone using these tools well and someone not using them at all is real and growing. So the anxious math becomes: every hour away is an hour someone else is pulling ahead.

I use multiple AI tools at work. I’ve caught myself staying at the laptop longer than I should, not because the task demands it, but because stopping feels like ceding ground. That’s not productivity. That’s just fear with good PR.

Here’s what I keep coming back to though: the people I’ve seen burn out chasing that kind of edge don’t come out ahead. They come out depleted. And a depleted version of me, prompting frantically at all hours, is not going to out-think anyone.

Nick ended his tweet with “less prompting, more lifting.” The run isn’t falling behind. The run is how you stay in the game.