Hi. It’s been a while.
I don’t know if anyone reads anything anymore, but a human wrote this.
I’ve had a feeling I couldn’t name for months now, and I want to write it down before I get so used to it that I stop noticing (and never really internalise it).
This week my Claude usage limit reset. We all know this little radial progress bar goes back to 0%, and it is not mostly blue, or worse red anymore, and wow, it feels good. Like I feel physically good, not just "oh nice, cool" good. It’s the kind of good you feel when you eat after feeling starved, or drink water after a long run. It is starting to feel like something your body was missing physically comes back.
I am aware of how this sounds. It's just a radial progress bar on a screen (what a nerd, right). I've been self-reflecting on this feeling for a few months now, and maybe this is how a new reality drops in and develops into an emotion (and some of us desperately need a name for it). In the days before the reset, when I'm close to the weekly "intelligence" limit, I just work differently. I hesitate before I ask anything, and I do some things the slow way because I want to save what's left for something "important" (token consumption anxiety anyone?). Then the reset comes and the hesitation is just gone. It is not exactly the equivalent of walking in the desert rationing your water, and it is not life or death … yet (insert Homer meme). But it is starting to feel that access to intelligence is soon going to be like access to necessities we take for granted.
I call it Intellifaction. The moment of satisfaction of gulping your daily or weekly dose of intelligence. Gulp, gulp, and I think of Popeye eating his can of spinach.
What surprises me more is how quickly this happened. Not far back, AI was something I tried on the side to see if it could do a thing. Now it's how I get work done, the same way my laptop is. I do't think about my laptop at all, until the battery is about to die. Same for electricity. It is just always there. Abundant, accessible, and reliable (well, mostly). I think most people who use AI heavily are in the same place right now. In such a short time, we got used to it the way we got used to electricity, computers, the internet, the phones in our pocket. You never really notice the day something stops being new and becomes something you can’t work without.
Programmers are probably the first to go through this properly, and we're going through it hard (brave warriors, or more like canaries in a coal mine).
Three things are happening to us at once.
The first, and the one that hurts the most, is an identity crisis. For as long as I've been doing this, code was the proof of my work. I could point at it: a pull request, or a diff, or a feature I shipped. This is basically gone, and I mostly spend my day reading code, docs and plans more than anything else. So what is the work now? This is what every programmer thinks about on a daily basis. Add on top of that the extreme pressure in most work environments now to produce more (some aspire to become a certified meat proxy).
It plays out differently depending on where you sit. A fresh graduate used to get better and evolve working on the small stuff (and eventually take more ownership), which is exactly what AI is best at now. So where do juniors learn? Seniors look safer because judgment, supposedly, is what's left, but they're also the ones with the most habits to unlearn, and some juniors who never knew another way can move faster. Then there are the Jevons paradox folks (on Twitter, and elsewhere): when something gets cheaper, we end up using a lot more of it, so cheaper code means way more software and more need for people who build it. Maybe. Others think it just means fewer of us.
If you're an entrepreneur, the question is scary too: is what I built still worth anything? Look at most SaaS doing a few million in ARR. A big part (though not always) of why it was worth something was that it took years and a team to build (or a niche that's overlooked by the big fellas). Now it is realistically replaceable by a determined maintainer, and sometimes that's the right thing to do. (They may not know about the hundred edge cases, the integrations, the support, and the customers who trust you not to break. But I'd argue this is automatable too.)
And it's not only programmers. Designers, and PMs too, and the lines between the three roles are blurring fast. Every knowledge worker is next, if they’re not in it already. Honestly, I think nobody knows how this unfolds, including the people who sound most sure. Even what makes a job fulfilling is changing.
The second is how fast everyone is being asked to adapt, and I can't think of anything in history like it. New models, new tools and new ways of working arrive every few months. The workflow I mastered last month is gone now. Adapt, human. There is no settling in, and no time to grieve the old way either. I've been writing software for a long time, and nothing has come close to this pace. There are plenty of good things that come out of this. Code, as delicious as it was when you got it just right, was real grunt work (I know you know, but you may not want to admit it yet; good ol' times, huh).
The third is the one the reset feeling is really about. AI is moving (or has moved, for some) from "let me try this out" to "I need this to get things done" to "I can't live without it". When something is an experiment, if I lose it, I'd shrug. When it's heading towards a need, losing it really hurts, especially if it hinders my access to more economic opportunities. If I lost access for a week, I think it would feel like a week without internet. I'd still work, just a lot slower and a lot grumpier.
So where does this go? I think it is not hard to imagine that intelligence is heading down the same road that clean water, shelter, electricity and the internet went down before it. No electricity, no work after sunset. No internet, no remote job, no online classes, no applying for half the things you need in life. Basically, economic opportunity disparity (and being part of a permanent underclass because you lack a necessity; how many times we have seen this movie before). If someone with access to intelligence can do in a day what takes someone without it a month, then not having it is way more than an inconvenience.
As it is with individuals, this pattern will continue to be exponentially more differentiating on a country or region level. Countries with the capacity to produce intelligence (the way some produce energy today) propel themselves into a recursive self-improving loop, versus ones whose Intellifaction per capita is low. I can see many ways this could go wrong as well (e.g. protecting our ever-decreasing and rarer-to-find human intelligence; why do I bother thinking when thinking machines can do it? Insert a million philosophical questions here).
These are all very early thoughts, reflections and feelings, and it's hard to see what the new reality will eventually look like. It is still good, for now, to get our weekly refill of Intellifaction.
Until things change, adapt, human.