Now everything I see on social media is about how to take advantage of AI, how we are falling behind, how everyone wants to turn everything into a race. If you are not using the latest model, the latest stupid prompting technique, yes, I am talking about loop engineering, apparently you are doing everything wrong and you will not be able to compete against the people who are doing it. If you do not have agents running at night to do your work, now it seems that if you do not make more than a hundred commits a day, you did not work.

But we have to ask ourselves: where is all of this taking us?

We want to turn humans into machines, and we want to turn machines into humans. We want AI to be more natural, more intelligent, to do everything for us. But seriously, is it natural for someone to make a hundred commits a day? Is it even normal to see hundreds of opinions about the same topic on social media in minutes? The clickbait, the new AI agencies selling how to use Claude, all of it just makes me want to throw up. I think fewer and fewer people stop to think about what the hell they are doing and why.

Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensees that “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” He was not talking about AI, of course, but the idea feels very close to what is happening now. We keep running because stopping would force us to actually look at ourselves.

Now everything is about speed, about who does it first, about who sells it first. And I made this mistake myself. I focused so much on shipping code that I stopped reading the code itself. I became a work machine, and I lost myself in the process. I wanted to become a machine, but for what? All of this only put thousands of errors into my code that now I have to find a way to fix, and it left me with a mental exhaustion that sometimes makes me want to leave this whole field.

Seneca has a line that fits this feeling perfectly: “Everywhere means nowhere.” When we are trying to follow every model, every technique, every tool, every opinion, and every new way to be productive, we end up touching everything and understanding almost nothing.

I am passionate about technology. I want to create something so impactful that it changes the whole field forever, but I want to do it my way, in my own style, not following someone else’s path. And if I fail doing it, well, at least I failed in my own style.

We seriously need to stop consuming social media, especially LinkedIn and Instagram, and think about what we are doing and why. Why do we watch a video of someone saying that the thing now is software factories? I feel that all of this, added to the progress of AI and the fact that people want you to use it for everything and integrate it into every product, means that all these tools that promise so much, and that supposedly will take us to a new era, only make us dumber and more distant from our reality.

Why do we not simply move more slowly? Why do we not enjoy the long roads? Why do we not become more perfectionist, going step by step, solving each problem, thinking about it, instead of delegating everything? It is beautiful to sit down and solve a logic problem, a math problem, instead of simply asking and getting the answer. Where did our curiosity go, and our desire to learn more? Why do we now want everything already digested?

Simone Weil wrote that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” I do not think you need to read that only in a religious way. There is something almost sacred in giving real attention to a problem, in staying with it, in letting yourself struggle with it before asking something else to solve it for you.

We are moving toward a future that we do not control, that we do not see, where we only ask for something and an AI creates it. But as usually happens, it will not create exactly what we asked for. It will add things, it will take other paths, and it will give us a distorted vision of what we asked for. We do not need all of this to program. We do not need the latest AI, or to spend thousands of dollars on tokens. I am not saying we should not use it, but we have to use it consciously, reading the code and thinking about the problem ourselves first, before anything else. I know it is important to go fast, but we also have to know when to stop.

Heidegger warned that modern technology can reveal the world as “standing-reserve,” as something waiting to be ordered, used, and optimized. That is what scares me about this culture too. At some point, we stop treating only tools as resources and start treating our own attention, body, curiosity, and time as things to extract from.

So fuck it, I will go slowly, and I will be human again.

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