The cost of cheap outcomes

So I went down the rabbit hole. Again.

The last couple of days I have been vibe coding my personal website. The one you are looking at right now. The skeleton was build within one hour, yep, one hour, 0 to 1. I was genuinely amazed. Back in the day, a site like this would have taken me weeks even months.

Then, as I always do, I spent hours polishing. The copy, the layout, the sub-pages, the small details here and there. Until 3 AM. More than one night.

By yesterday, my brain was flat. Or to be precise: I had so-called "judgment fatigue".

Here is the trade-off. When AI can code for you, the outcome becomes cheap, one second away. It feels like magic. But what's left for you is the judgment. Every outcome, you are still the one to make the call.

I have been thinking: the slow way had a hidden gift. When the making took longer, your brain had time to digest along the way. Judgment grew naturally out of the thinking process. You never had to react to your own idea right away.

But with AI, the desired outcome arrives almost instantly. The process gets compressed so short that you barely have time to react. And we all know, seeing an answer isn't the same as having an understanding. And judging it, outcome after outcome, is heavy work. Somewhere along the line, my brain simply couldn't keep up.

Any cure?

Unfortunately no. And I can't simply say "let's stop using AI", because there is no way back.

Then today, still in the middle of the fatigue, my AI daily newsletter digest offered a handy tip: when your brain is fried, paste your to-do list into AI, and ask it for 1) the smallest 5-minute next step, 2) the simplest order to do things, 3) and the one thing you should not do today.

Don't those three things need judgment? The cure on offer for my judgment fatigue is to hand AI the last judgment I have left: deciding what I do next.

I laughed.

I almost tried it.