The new chaos of being able to build anything
The Inference
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The new chaos of being able to build anything<br>AI didn't free up my time. It made every hour more valuable, the work more demanding, and the pace relentless.
Michael Mayernick<br>Jun 30, 2026
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My friend Margaux has been writing thoughtfully about AI and cognitive decline, and when I started building with AI at the center of how we work, my own experience went in the opposite direction. AI made my work harder, quite a lot harder, and the gap between the research and what I’m experiencing makes me wonder if we’re asking the wrong question about what AI does to our work.<br>There’s a growing body of research, and it’s worth taking seriously: students using ChatGPT score lower on surprise tests weeks later, consultants given AI for tasks outside its capability perform worse than those working without it, EEG studies show weaker brain connectivity in heavy AI users. BCG just published a study where half of C-suite leaders say they’re already observing de-skilling in their organizations, and the skills they rate as most important (judgment, problem framing, creative thinking, causal reasoning) are the exact ones they see as most at risk. Researchers have started using phrases like “cognitive surrender” and “cognitive debt” to describe what happens when people trust AI outputs because they sound convincing, not because anyone verified them.<br>Thanks for reading The Inference! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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But most of the research is looking at people doing the same work they did before, just with AI handling more of it. The analyst still writes reports, but now AI drafts them. The consultant still does analysis, but now reviews AI’s analysis instead. And in that frame, yes, the concern makes sense, because you’re outsourcing the cognitive effort that used to keep those skills sharp. The question is whether that’s the only frame.<br>What happened when shipping got fast
A year ago, shipping a feature took weeks. Now it can take a day. There’s an assumption that should mean less work, but the opportunity cost actually runs the other way: when an hour of building is worth what a week used to be, every hour spent figuring out what to build next is a day not shipping. The work moved up a level, and there’s more of it than before.<br>When shipping is fast, the bottleneck shifts to knowing what to ship. How do I get signal from customers faster? How do I understand how the market is evolving? How do I build the whole system that ships a feature, writes the blog post explaining it, sets up the email campaign inviting users to try it, sends another email to leads, analyzes how many accounts were impacted, updates the marketing pages in our voice, learns from the result, and then figures out what to do next, all in one cycle? That kind of work is new. It didn’t exist a year ago because it wasn’t possible a year ago, and it requires more sustained attention and judgment than writing the code itself ever did.<br>So maybe the atrophy research is right about the situation it’s studying, but the situation is specific: work that stayed the same while AI absorbed the effort. If you’re an analyst who used to write reports and now reviews AI reports, the thinking that kept your skills sharp got outsourced, and over time you lose both the ability to do the work without the tool and the judgment to know when the tool is wrong. That’s real, and the research on it seems right to me.<br>My mind feels as engaged as it’s ever been.
But my experience has been the opposite. The old tasks got compressed or automated, and new, harder work appeared at a higher level of abstraction. Maybe my ability to write a specific function will decline. But my mind feels as engaged as it’s ever been, because I’m spending my days thinking about the landscape, how our market is evolving, how to build workflows that build on each other, and how to keep AI connected to our company’s voice, vision, and values as it handles more of the execution. That’s all work that sits above the code, and it’s more demanding than the code was.<br>Why I think this is easier to see as a founder
I think this is especially visible to me because as a founder, questioning how we work is literally part of the job. I don’t just get to reshape my role as AI changes what’s possible, I have to. Every week I’m asking how we should be building, how our process should change, whether the way we shipped last month still makes sense this month. The shape of my work is always in question, and AI made that questioning more intense and more consequential, because the answers change faster and the stakes of getting them wrong are higher.<br>That means I’m holding strategy, product, market, and the development system in my head simultaneously, while also steering AI to stay connected to our company’s voice, vision, and values as it handles more of the execution. That’s a lot of new cognitive...