From someone immersed in tech stuff, but I'm sure he's not the only one doing this and it's going to get more ubiquitous until the stupid thing falls apart. Wtf is he going to do when the system fails and he has to go back to doing all that tedious leg-work himself? Will he even remember how? How will he adjust his expectations (or those of an employer) to a significantly lower baseline of productivity? I know some will say that most ppl go through life like automatons anyway, but there's something I find incredibly creepy about surrendering your will, thoughts, planning, finances etc to machines that are just spitting variations of your own data creations back at you. Or maybe some day they won't, and you'll be following the instructions of a corporate CEO, or a politician, or a military strategist without even knowing it.

He's perceptive enough to notice the downsides, but seemingly unable to extricate himself from it - or even feel the need too, apparently. And he already sounds like a f*ing chatbot with the choppy 'it's not x; it's y' phrases (sorry for going on about it again).

Terrifying, dystopian stuff...
I

*****

https://thetechcoach.io/newsletter/i-think-claude-and-i-are-moving-too-fast/

I think Claude and I are moving too fast

I built a Rails API in 45 minutes last week. Registration, login, session management, content endpoints and 112 rspec tests. This used to take me 2-3 days, possibly with tears. I shipped it before lunch and felt like Bradley Cooper in Limitless, the first act, where everything clicks and the world bends to your will.

Then I spent the next two hours untangling a session management bug that Claude had confidently introduced in minute 12, which I’d missed because I was already on the next feature. I’d moved so fast through the codebase that I couldn’t retrace how I’d got there. Limitless, the second act—waking up somewhere unfamiliar with no memory of the journey.

The deeper I go with AI, the more I recognise that it is not any single tool or workflow, but an attitude that shifts how you move through your day. You stop tolerating friction. You develop a kind of ambient impatience that bleeds out of the terminal and into the rest of your life.

I spoke to someone last week whose partner had complained that he’d started talking to her in imperatives. He blamed his constant, terse Wispr dictations to Claude. He was joking—mostly. But I recognised it, because I’ve noticed something similar in myself: the twitchiness when anything takes more than thirty seconds, the reflex to delegate a thought to Claude before I’ve actually had the thought. I’ve started treating my own thinking as a bottleneck to be optimised away, which is—if you stop and look at it—a genuinely unhinged thing for a human to do.

I know my limits with knowledge work and I can tell you that playing with Claude most of the day, I reach that place 4-5x faster than anything else I’ve ever done. I’ve never experienced anything like it. There are no guardrails, no speed limit. That sounds exciting and it is. But is also means is you can now smash your head against a wall at 20x the speed.

And because everything looks like work, you don’t catch it. You’re not doomscrolling—you’re shipping features, wiring up automations, generating reports. Sure, you need a second job to read all the reports Claude has generated for you. But things are happening.

I wrote last time about engineers building elaborate MCP pipelines to manage problems that really needed a boundary, not a dashboard. That piece was about other people’s avoidance. This one’s about mine. I’ve spent entire afternoons building Claude commands and automating reports—felt enormously productive doing it—and some of those commands are genuinely useful. Others were a way of staying busy while avoiding a harder question. The tool didn’t force that. But it made the avoidance feel like craftsmanship.

The real cost isn’t dramatic. It’s the slow erosion of your ability to sit with a problem without reaching for a solution. Especially in leadership, where the most valuable thing you do often produces no visible output: sitting with ambiguity long enough for the real problem to surface, resisting the urge to ship a decision just because you can.

I’m not arguing against speed. I use Claude every day. I built five new skills last week and I’ll build more. But the most sophisticated thing I’ve done with these tools isn’t a technical workflow—it’s learning to trust signals that don’t come from a terminal. A tight chest at 2pm. The realisation I haven’t looked out of the window since breakfast. The moment I catch myself composing a prompt about something I haven’t actually thought about yet.

Those signals are asking for the same thing every time: a pause. Not a long one—just enough to ask whether the thing I’m about to build is the thing that actually needs building. Enough to let a half-formed idea stay half-formed for another hour, instead of immediately asking Claude to finish my sentence.

AI compresses the pause between stimulus and response to near zero, if you let it. That pause is where judgment lives. Protect it.

*****

https://thetechcoach.io/newsletter/my-7-principles-for-replacing-paid-apps-with-free-skills/

My 7 principles for replacing paid apps with free skills

At 8 am this morning, I’m in the kitchen with a coffee, asking Claude what to work on first.

I haven’t opened Notion, Linear, LACRM, Things 3, Obsidian or any of the half-dozen to-do apps I’ve made my home over the years. I type three words into a terminal and Claude tells me what to do. It’s already read my projects, my journal from yesterday, and today’s calendar.

This is, I think, the most aggressive digital minimalism I’ve ever done. Not deleting apps, but categories of apps.

Let me back up.

A couple of weeks ago, I told you I’d replaced my CRM with a chat bar. What I didn’t say is that the CRM was the easy one. The CRM was where I started because the CRM was the most embarrassing—£20 a month for a dashboard that was, on a generous reading, hostile to actually getting anything done. Replacing it took a weekend.

The next thing to fall was project management. I had a Notion database with statuses and tags and a gallery view I’d lovingly arranged, mashed up with some projects in Things 3.

Now I have a folder of markdown files. Each one has a few lines of YAML at the top: status, area, next action, last updated. I don’t touch them; Claude does.

In the morning, I type /do what should I work on today? and Claude reads my values, projects, goals, progress, and then tells me where to point myself. When I finish something, I describe what happened, and the frontmatter rewrites itself. There’s no kanban, no tags.

Then the to-do app. I had a Things 3 list two hundred items deep, organised into projects and areas like an exhibition I was curating for an audience of one—me, in three months, who unfortunately would no longer care.

Currently, I’m using the same approach to rework my personal finances. I will not miss the three separate apps, nor the 40-tab spreadsheet.

Each rebuild looks the same. The starting impulse is to build a system, with a UI, and make it good. The correction is that the UI isn’t the point; the data and the conversation are.

Three rebuilds in, I have a solid set of principles I keep returning to. I hope you’ll find them useful in your own experiments:
The principles

The AI is the interface. Not under the interface. Not powering the interface. The interface. Don’t build a dashboard and bolt a chatbot to the side of it. Let the conversation do the work. Anything you want, you ask for. For most use cases, this will take the form of a skill (/morning, /crm, /triage, etc).

Build the data layer. Skip the presentation layer. AI needs structure—a database, a schema. It doesn’t need HTML. The minimum viable infrastructure is a place to store state and a way to query it. A folder of markdown files is often enough. I use SQLite where I need something more structured and searchable (e.g. for CRM contacts).

Do the work. Don’t build tools to help you do the work. The engineer’s instinct is to build a tool, then use the tool. Resist it. Have AI do the work now, with the thinnest possible scaffolding. Every hour spent on infrastructure is an hour not spent on the actual goal.

Ship in days. Let friction tell you what to build next. A database and one conversational skill is day one. Use it and start giving it feedback. These things are better built as you’re using them.

Automate the judgement, not the plumbing. Old automation moves data between systems. New automation makes calls: who needs attention, what to say, what’s falling behind. The value isn’t in the pipeline. It’s in the judgement.

Humans do human work. Connecting with people, sending the message, making the final call—that stays with me. Prioritising, tracking, remembering, summarising, nagging—that isn’t work I want to do. Let the robots do what they do best, and focus on the human interactions.

Don’t rebuild the old tool. Rebuild the workflow. The old tool was designed for a world without AI. A CRM replacement isn’t a better CRM. A Notion replacement isn’t a better Notion. A YNAB replacement isn’t a better YNAB. They all reduce, in this new world, to the same thing: a structured datastore and a conversation powered by a very smart agent.

The engineer in me still wants to build the dashboard. I still occasionally sketch out a beautiful kanban with smooth animations and a dark mode and, on one slightly unhinged morning, a custom font. I close the file.

I used to curate these systems for a future version of me who, it turned out, never showed up.

The conversation doesn’t need curating. It just needs me, this morning, with a coffee, asking what to do first.

—Dan