I Ran Out of Wanting - by William Martin

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I Ran Out of Wanting<br>A note from the far side of the backlog

William Martin<br>Aug 05, 2026

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I’m fucked. So fucked I can’t build a Lego lighthouse anymore. Are you an as-of-yet un-fucked person? Good. This one’s for you.<br>Picture them finished. Every project you ever half-sketched on a napkin. Every pipe dream you shelved because it needed years of your undivided attention. All of it done. Shipped. Live on the internet with your name on it. The entire backlog of your wild mind, standing up and walking around in the daylight.<br>Thanks for reading William's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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That’s the good ending. Not the hedged version - not most of them, not the ones that were realistic. All of them.<br>You’d swim laps in it. I would have taken that deal at any point in the last twenty years without asking one question.<br>I got here before I meant to. I’m writing back to tell you what’s actually on this side, and it isn’t what either of us pictured.<br>Here it is in one sentence: **you can get faster at building than you are at wanting.**<br>A few months ago I wrote about a harm reduction system I’d built for my own agent addiction. It worked. This is what happened after.

The whole thing starts four years ago, when I went all-in on agentic coding (meaning I stopped writing code and started supervising its creation). For the first stretch it was way more effort than doing the work myself, plainly and measurably worse, and I kept at it anyway. Every day it got a little easier. Every couple of weeks a better model landed. Things were moving breakneck.<br>By 2025 the next jump wasn’t more agents or better prompts. It was purposeful friction and greased rails. Friction against shortcuts and grease for best practices. The bottleneck wasn’t the model anymore, it was slop - and slop compounds, because every piece of it that lands in the codebase tells a story the next prompt has to read, so a faster machine mostly gets faster at making a mess. For six months I didn’t build a single thing I actually wanted. Nothing off the list. Nothing out of the drawer. Just gears, and then better gears. My entire output for half a year was a machine for making machines.<br>It wasn’t until I finally turned slop-mop on itself that the governor fell off the engine. A few well-placed query sentences began replacing days, weeks, months of grind.<br>Up until the mid 2020s, there had been a drawer full of things I was going to die without building. Suddenly the drawer wasn’t a tragedy. It was **inventory**. I dumped a lifetime of stick-men ideas into a queue and started putting flesh on them, one after another after another.<br>They came out faster than I could track, so I built a thing to keep track of the things.<br>Each idea became its own ship. Every spare moment became devoted to pushing the next ship out of the harbor. Watching another idea come alive. Then another, and another. There was no version of enough.<br>Somewhere in there I noticed I was talking about my own behavior the way you’d talk about somebody else’s problem. Not a good stretch. Not enthusiasm. Something with a shape to it.<br>So I did the only thing I know how to do with a problem. I opened a ticket on myself. The next item in the queue was a system whose only job was to make me use the machines less. It hijacks my computer on a daily schedule and blacks out every model I have access to. No override, no snooze. During those hours I couldn’t use one if I wanted to. I built it the same way I built everything else, out of the thing it was supposed to protect me from.<br>It worked. My head got quieter. I mostly did what it said.<br>Nothing broke. That is the part I keep going back to. There was no bug, no bad build, no moment I could point at afterward and blame. The blackout ran on schedule. Everything else did too.

For months I had four to six ships in the water at once. But as umpteen projects started to finish, the ships that needed tending started to dwindle. Just three after a while. Then suddenly two. Then just the one.<br>Then Pickup Flag Football went live. The last project.<br>I pushed the final ship out, turned around for the next, and there was nothing behind it. All user stories implemented. All known bugs addressed. All PRs merged. All queued research done. Inbox empty. Traffic normal. Sentry clear. I ran the whole circuit again in case I had missed something, and everything was still done. I went digging through old backlogs, trying to work up some feeling about features I had never wanted in the first place.<br>Then I spent the next five minutes staring straight at the damn wall.<br>For the first time in my life the queue was empty. I don’t mean between projects. I mean **empty.** The drawer I had spent forty years afraid of dying with things still in it was clean.<br>I had cycles available and nothing to spend them on.<br>So I went looking for something else. I’ve tried a...