I stayed up way too late last night. Claude got added to Xcode, and before I knew it I was three hours deep into refactoring four old app projects I’d almost abandoned. Not building something new. Resurrecting things I’d walked away from months ago, because suddenly the friction that stopped me was gone. That’s the part about this moment that’s hard to explain. It’s not just that AI makes new things possible. It’s that it makes everything feel urgent again.
Something shifted in the last couple of months. Not gradually, the way technology usually moves, but sharply. Coding agents crossed a threshold. Tasks that would have taken a weekend now take 30 minutes. You describe what you want in plain English, an agent goes off and builds it, runs into problems, solves them, and comes back with a working thing. It’s real. It’s not hype. And the pace is only accelerating.
I don’t think the human brain is wired for that kind of throughput. When every idea is 30 minutes from existing, you never run out of reasons to stay up. I’ve been subjecting mine to it for weeks now, and I can feel something in the margins. A restlessness that doesn’t turn off. A constant low hum of possibility that makes it hard to sit still, hard to sleep, hard to not reach for the next thing. My Apple Watch started flagging some health concerns a few months back, which was its own kind of wake-up call. I’ve since lost weight and closed my exercise ring every day for the past three months, something I should have prioritized a long time ago. I’m watching what I eat. The body is responding. The mind is another story.
Here’s what I’ve noticed, though. Over the past year, I’ve bought more vinyl records, 4K Blu-rays, physical books, and comics than I have in the past decade combined. The pace has been accelerating alongside everything else. At first I didn’t think much of it. Then I realized what I was doing.
I was building ballast.
A vinyl record takes about 20 minutes a side. You put it on, you sit with it, you don’t skip tracks. A 4K disc means committing to a movie from opening titles to end credits. A book requires hours. These objects have a fixed pace that I can’t accelerate, and that’s the entire point. They’re not nostalgia. They’re not some rejection of the digital world. They’re pace regulators. They force a rhythm that my screen-driven life no longer provides.
The irony isn’t lost on me. I’ve used AI to build custom tools that track all of these analogue collections. Vinyl, comics, films, books, each with its own little web app, each connected to APIs and LLMs so I can interact with my shelves in new ways. I’m using the thing that’s accelerating everything to deepen my relationship with the things that slow me down. That contradiction is the whole point. I’m not choosing between these worlds. I’m trying to make them hold each other in balance.
I’m not going to stop using these tools. They’re too powerful, too useful, too genuinely exciting. Last night’s Xcode session was thrilling in a way that programming hasn’t felt in years. But I’ve started to understand that the excitement itself needs a counterweight. Without one, the acceleration becomes the only speed you know, and you lose the ability to sit with anything long enough for it to matter.
This morning I made an espresso, put on a record, and sat in the garage for 20 minutes before opening my laptop. It wasn’t productivity. It wasn’t meditation. It was just pace. The needle tracking a groove at a speed that was decided in 1948, completely indifferent to everything that’s happened since.
That felt like the most important thing I did all day.