For a long time, I was convinced that the hardest part of my job was just the execution. Writing took forever, planning felt like a heavy lift, and decisions dragged on because everything moved so slowly. It was easy to believe that the effort itself was the problem—and that if I just had faster tools, everything would finally feel light.
AI definitely made things faster. But instead of feeling relieved, I just felt exposed. Once the easy parts of the work disappeared, the actual difficulty of what I was doing became impossible to hide from.
Speed removes the insulation
Before AI, friction was actually a kind of comfort. If something took a week to write, I could blame the timeline. If a plan felt fuzzy, I could blame the complexity. If progress stalled, I could blame a lack of time.
AI removes all of those excuses. When a draft appears instantly and it still doesn't feel right, you can’t blame the execution anymore. When you generate ten different versions and none of them fix that feeling of discomfort, you’re forced to confront a harder truth: the problem isn’t how you’re doing the work—it’s what you’re actually trying to say.
Typing was never the hard part
It’s becoming obvious that the physical act of producing work was never the real bottleneck. The hard part is judgment:
- Deciding what actually matters enough to pursue
- Knowing when to stop iterating and just ship
- Recognizing when something is actually good, not just finished
- Figuring out which trade-offs you can actually live with
These aren’t optimization problems a machine can solve. They’re human judgment calls. AI is happy to handle the surface area of the work, but it stops exactly where responsibility begins.
Why using AI can feel so frustrating
I think a lot of the frustration people have with AI comes from this exact moment. We expect relief, but what we actually get is clarity—and clarity is uncomfortable. When the tool removes our excuses, it leaves us face-to-face with our own uncertainty.
AI doesn't block your progress; it just refuses to carry the weight of the decision for you. If you haven’t decided what you’re aiming at, the tool is going to keep handing you polished, professional-looking versions of absolutely nothing.
The quiet shift in the feel of work
Once the easy parts are gone, work starts to feel different. It’s quieter, less dramatic, and much more internal. Progress stops looking like a high volume of output and starts looking like a series of commitments.
You’re no longer fighting with your tools. You’re wrestling with your own taste, direction, and restraint.
That’s not a failure. That’s just the work finally revealing itself.
How I’m adjusting
I try not to open an AI window when I’m feeling unclear anymore. Instead, I step away and ask myself a few blunt questions:
- What am I actually trying to decide here?
- What outcome would genuinely change something for me?
- What would I still choose if no one else would ever see the result?
Only after I’ve answered those do I let the AI refine or stress-test what I’ve already committed to. When I do it that way, the tool feels powerful again—not because it solved the problem for me, but because it stopped distracting me from the problem.
Final Thought
AI doesn’t make work easier; it makes the real difficulty unavoidable. Once the easy parts are gone, all that’s left is judgment, responsibility, and choice.
That discomfort isn’t a sign that something is wrong—it’s the signal that you’re finally working on the part that actually matters. I’m learning to stop mistaking busywork for hard work, and to recognize when the struggle has simply moved inward.