AI destroyed my focus

I used to get so locked in while coding that I'd forget to eat. That doesn't really happen to me anymore and it's AI that changed it.

Hooked from the start

Back in school I was already coding in my free time, which in start-up years feels like a lifetime ago. I was honestly addicted to it.

I was also pretty early with AI. I was using GPT-3 before ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, back when it was only useful for the simple, repetitive stuff and I still wrote everything else myself.

Five to ten things at once

Now I don't write a single line of code anymore, and I don't read everything that gets written either. Coding by hand is over for me and that forced my passion to change along with it.

I used to be able to focus on one thing, one specific feature, and nothing else. With AI it doesn't work like that anymore.

As soon as you've sent a prompt, the AI goes off and works on it, so you start writing the next prompt for another feature, and then another one. Before I knew it I was working on 5 to 10 things at the same time and switching between them all day.

What it cost me

We all know multitasking doesn't work for deep work, and I still did it for months.

At some point I noticed I had a hard time thinking deeply about a problem, because I'd gotten so used to asking the AI to figure it out for me.

And after a couple of hours of task switching, I found it really hard to do any deep work for the rest of the day.

How I fixed it

So something had to change. I need to keep shipping, but I also want to be able to think deeply again, and those are pretty much opposite mindsets.

What I do now is schedule my deep work early in the morning, without any distractions, and only start building with AI after that. That way I get both in the same day, which I need, because I have to ship every single day.