Hello, friends. I’ve got a short essay for you this week.
Finding myself at the apex of a phase of extreme optimism for AI development, I noticed over the last few days that I’d swung too far into blind enthusiasm, bordering even on idolatry.
One sign of this starry-eyed fanaticism was the sheer number of redundant AI apps and tools I was using (and paying for). ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity… all with their own monthly subscription fees. Each had an icon on my phone’s home screen.
They all offer more or less the same features and capabilities, with only slight variations at the margins. Any one of them would have seemed magical just a few years ago—a groundbreaking tool of revolutionary power.
But five of them all at once just created friction and vibration—movement for movement’s sake rather than forward progress.
I rationalized that I was testing, researching. That I was learning something and coming back with useful knowledge to share.
In hindsight I think a lot of that time was wasted and represented idle fiddling more than productive work.
It’s not the tools that are so important, but the applications and the impacts. The individual tool matters far less then how it is used.
I want to refocus my energy on the applications and impacts of AI more broadly, rather than getting lost in the weeds of each day’s new feature announcements.
So I’ve set some intentional constraints and cancelled subscriptions to all but ChatGPT. I still have access to Gemini through my Google Workspace plan as well.
It’s not a cost issue, per se, at least not in terms of dollars. It is an opportunity cost. Time and mental cycles wasted.
I don’t want to venerate AI tools (or any other tools) on their own. To me, tools are useful and important to the extent that they serve some greater project—to the degree that they help create, build, and explore.
Too many tools, even great ones, just get in the way. Sometimes it’s important to clear out the garage, keeping the essential and letting go of the rest.