The Solution Might Be Cancelling My AI Subscription
hmmz.org
The author built many AI projects but finds them mostly useless and hard to maintain. AI tools increase distraction and shallow work, hurting real focus and productivity. To manage this, the author thinks limiting AI use is the best way forward.
9 Jun 2026
friction = focus, focus = product
One of my early AI experiments, exploring AI as a lens in Marshall McLuhan-like thinking, was to connect speech recognition to a pipeline that generated blog posts on the other side, in the belief it would encourage me to capture my thoughts. All I needed was to press the voice note button in a Telegram channel, and out pops an Opus-formatted post.
The output was unbridled garbage. Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all. Quality writing is not conversational English simply cast through a lens: conversational English is low-bit rate noise, quality writing attempts to capture high bit rate information with better formed concepts, and this should have been obvious before I began.
I have no idea how to manage AI at present except by curtailing use, because a tool producing a cheap reward with minimal input and no friction can only be a liability, and achieving that realisation is probably the only real contribution of AI to date.