A one-person army, master of none?
Adapted from a LinkedIn post published in April 2026.
Two impressions from being a one-person army building with AI: I do a lot in parallel, but do I do any of it well? And does working with AI increase my intellectual laziness?
Master of none?
I’m running several completely disparate projects in parallel, almost at all times. I’m building evaluations to compare language models, using other models to grade their answers (hey, I can’t scale!), and building evaluations to make sure the graders are actually good.
Then I’m in a full-contact fight with mobile browsers to understand why the hell a text box won’t simply expand and snap to the top. You thought AI alignment was a challenge? Try aligning stuff on a feed in a mobile browser.
And I’m refining the philosophy of the app. How do I stay in the spirit of a mindfulness app that offloads important thoughts and gives me the peace of complete continuity?
Am I good at any of these things? Am I over-relying on AI?
Intellectual laziness?
I worry the precision and clarity of my language is suffering because the models are so robust to my expressing myself poorly, ambiguously and incompletely. I can get away with murder when I talk to Claude Code or Codex. They understand me most of the time.
It takes a lot of discipline to remain the curator of the vision. I find it tempting not to read every word of a long design brainstorm, and just go with whatever the agents are proposing because I’m tired of reading walls of text. The risk is that if I give an inch, I’ll give a foot next time.
I find the hyper-productivity of working with AI so addictive that I end up working long hours into the night. I have to remind myself of the lessons from ultramarathon running. Recovery is essential. Here too I need to take time off, even if it feels like crazy wasted opportunity, so my brain can rest and my mind recuperate willpower. So I can maintain my motivation and focus, and keep the ship steered towards my vision.
Despite these concerns, I am having the time of my life. I hadn’t felt this productive and energized in a decade and a half, maybe longer.