It just hit me that I have become a cognitive empty nester.

What I mean by that is: agents have taken on most of the work that used to fill my workday. And I’m having a bit of a hard time coming up with new things.

(This blog post is derived from this video on my YouTube channel.)

My professional life was filled by management and programming. I used to spend a ton of time doing the kind of information gathering and synthesis that managers do. Agents do all of that now: not just the coding, but all the knowledge work as well. The colored-pebble problem is now solved. The vast majority of modern knowledge work is solving the colored-pebble problem.

In my personal life: a lot of the time I spent on the computer was recreational, but a lot of it was also just life admin. Administrivia, planning, finances etc. Again, agents do most of that stuff now.

I still have big ideas—or so I’d like to think—but executing them is now much faster with agents.

“Just be more ambitious”

The standard line out of all the labs is: the models are so good, you just have to be more ambitious.

Like Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic was saying in his field guide to Fable, you’ve got to use Fable to find your unknown unknowns. Of course everybody wants to be more ambitious. I did that. I had a few ideas that I thought were deep and ambitious, but then I implemented them very quickly—over a weekend—because the agents did all the grungy work and served as sparring partners that helped me refine and clarify those ideas much faster than before.

At least for me, I can’t come up with that level of big, ambitious idea on a daily basis. That’s hard.

The absorption limit

There is still a limit to absorption.

There might not be a limit to creation. You can think up new ideas. You can implement them. But there is still a limit to absorption because, ultimately, unless you’re an artist or a mathematician, these ideas or products you’re building have to get absorbed and used by the world of people and atoms.

That world is still moving along at its own pace.

The world of atoms and people is not moving at the pace of the world of ideas, agents, and software. You could build a hundred products, but the world of people and paying customers is not ready to absorb a hundred products and pay for them.

So there is still that fundamental limit on how quickly the things you build can be absorbed by the real world.

Acceptance

I am making my peace with being an empty nester. All my cognitive children that kept me busy all day long have left and gone off to college. Now I’m left with an empty, quiet house, and I don’t know what to do with myself.