This is undoubtedly a stressful period. And by stressful, I don't mean unhappy.
I don't believe stress is automatically tied to negative experiences. Even a happy and exciting period can be stressful. Right now, I'm simply doing a lot. I was already doing a lot before, and now, with AI, I'm doing twice as much—both professionally and in my personal projects.
What many people don't realize is that working with AI can be mentally demanding. Being deeply challenged during analyses, questioning assumptions, and making important architectural decisions requires intense concentration and cognitive effort. I've noticed that by the end of the week, I'm often completely exhausted.
There were at least a couple of weeks when, driven by the excitement that always comes with discovering something new, I let everything else fade into the background. I spent almost every day working for 15 hours straight, experimenting with AI and pushing it to its limits.
In practice, this meant doing my regular 8-hour workday and then immediately switching to personal development projects for the rest of the evening, with no real break in between.
The result was an enormous cognitive load. Yes, it allowed me to produce an impressive amount of work in a very short time. But in hindsight, the output didn't justify the cost.
I realized I no longer had the energy for human relationships. My tolerance for any kind of conversation had dropped close to zero because my brain desperately needed a break from the constant stream of information it was processing.
And that's the paradox.
If you use AI while still wanting to remain in control of what it produces, you must understand what it's doing. To do that, you often feel compelled to think faster, process faster, and reason faster just to keep up—or at least to feel like you're keeping up—with the AI.
But we're not artificial.
We're still human beings.
And every evening, I could feel my brain becoming more and more overloaded.
On top of that, I've recently developed an almost insatiable appetite for stories. For the first time in my life, I've started reading multiple novels simultaneously. My mind has been literally bombarded with information—technical information, fictional worlds, ideas, narratives—all demanding attention, processing, and storage.
What was missing was oxygen.
So last weekend, I went to the countryside with just one book and no laptop.
And I rediscovered the beauty of slowing down.
It also made me reflect on something: in this new future of AI-assisted development, there is a hidden cost that we should become aware of as early as possible.
It's absolutely right to embrace these new tools. Just as we've had to learn countless new technologies throughout our careers, we need to learn these ones too. Standing still is not an option.
But it's equally important to pay attention to the impact they have on our lives.
Not just on our productivity, but on our enjoyment of the work itself. On our ability to disconnect. On the energy we have left for the people around us.
So I decided to rein in my enthusiasm—at least in my free time. I cut back on the hours I was spending on personal projects and brought outdoor sports back into my routine. I also rediscovered the beauty of reading just one book at a time and immersing myself in a single story.
Even that small change felt like giving my mind the oxygen it had been missing.
Perhaps that's another lesson hidden in this new AI era. As these tools make it possible to do more than ever before, the challenge may not be maximizing how much we can do. It may be learning to focus on fewer things, giving each of them the attention they deserve.
Because efficiency is valuable.
But so is having enough mental space left to remain fully human.
