AI Intensifies Work. Good.

Matt Shumer’s “Something Big is Happening” crossed 75 million views in a week. Fortune ran it twice. Barstool Sports wrote it up. It left tech media and entered the water supply. Gary Marcus called it hype. John Palmer’s parody: “Something Small is Happening. I recently purchased a Mac Mini. I haven’t set it up yet.” All fair.

But something big is happening. I’ve been building through these shifts since my class got our first email addresses in college. Each one was an amplifier and an accelerant. Each one felt like the ground shifting. Where Shumer’s audience heard fear, I heard a window opening.

I have a Mac Mini with OpenClaw on it. It’s been running 24/7 since January. Not because I read a blog post about it. Because 30 years of building through every wave since Mosaic over a modem taught me what this feeling means.

Then Steve Yegge described what the intensity feels like from inside. He calls it the AI Vampire — the nap attacks, the “one more prompt” addiction, the feeling you’re producing 10x but capturing none of it. Simon Willison calls it exhausting. A Berkeley study in HBR measured it across 200 employees: task lists expanded, work bled into evenings, the solution was always one more prompt away.

They’re all describing something real. I feel it too. But there’s a variable nobody’s naming.

The Variable

It’s agency. Who controls the work and who captures the value.

Yegge’s vampire isn’t really about fatigue. Read it again — it’s about value capture. You’re 10x more productive. Your salary didn’t change. The company captured 9x. That’s what stings.

“Burnout’s not a function of how much work you’re doing, it’s doing work you don’t enjoy.” — Ben Thompson

I recognize that my career has always given me a lot of control — founder, CTO, operator. The intensity has always felt like mine. Not everyone has that. The vampire feeds on the people who don’t.

From Inside the Work

AI is an Iron Man suit. But the suit doesn’t work if you don’t move. Effort is the multiplier. AI amplifies whatever you put in.

I grew up in Iowa. Hard work wasn’t a diagnosis — it was the baseline. That disposition — not any specific skill — turned out to be the best preparation for every wave of change. You don’t need to be from SF or Stanford to ride this wave.

The whole discourse is people waiting for AI to get easier — waiting for the tools to stabilize, for the playbook to arrive, for the dust to settle.

Kara Lawson, the Duke women’s basketball coach, has an 8-million-view speech that cuts through all of it:

“It will never get easier. What happens is you handle hard better.”

That’s Jevons Paradox in human terms. Yegge’s 3-hour workday prescription is waiting for the easy button. The ladder keeps climbing. Retreating doesn’t slow it down.

Gregg Popovich had one quote on the wall of the Spurs facility, written in the five native languages of his players. It’s from Jacob Riis:

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

Learning AI feels exactly like that. A hundred prompts with no crack showing. Pounding out weakness, pounding in muscle memory. That’s the message for people scared AI will take their jobs: the answer isn’t fear, it’s reps. Hard work and a growth mindset. Those are the actual competitive advantages when the tools change every 2 weeks.

Here’s the honest part: I’m not above this. I’m inside it. I build machines to monitor machines. I get 70% through a project and get excited about the next one. The system I’ve built is now better than my ability to consume its output. But the pressure I feel isn’t Yegge’s vampire. It’s the distance between what I’m building today and what I know is possible. That’s not burnout. That’s the work telling you it matters.

Chopping Wood

“We’re all kind of desperate to make sense of how uneven things are.”

His answer is builders doing real work — procurement agents handling thousands of neglected line items, automating PO creation, pulling data off physical bills of lading.

“Stack up these small, boring, concrete wins week after week… pretty soon we’ll all be surprised by just how much wood has been chopped.”

That’s what this feels like from inside. Not a vampire. Not burnout. Chopping wood because the window is open and the work matters.

The fastest way to wisdom is to build. I’m not asking anyone to agree with me. I’m asking you to build something and find out for yourself.