As an automator — someone who has been automating processes since long before AI — Adam has always believed in the power of efficiency. For years, he spent hours automating processes that would take a few minutes, mostly all in the name of that satisfying feeling of solving a problem with code.
"I did that. I was the one that figured that out. I built that," he writes. "Now? That rewarding feeling that used to rush into my brain after those long debugging sessions is gone."
Over the past three years, he went from using ChatGPT as a coding assistant to building an entire CLI framework for automating online tasks. He now has skills for any specific knowledge set his agents need, scripts to accompany those skills, subagents for when his main agents need help, and workflows defined for just about everything.
He describes it as a personal "agent OS" — one where he can one-shot a request and be done with it.
Great. Easy. But fulfilling? Nope.
"I'm more productive than I ever have been in my life, but I'm not happy," he admits. "I used to enjoy starting a new project, but now it all feels like, 'What's the point? AI can just do it.'"
The satisfaction he used to get from building something is gone. "Being able to push a button and get back a result better than, or nearly as good as, what you can do is efficient but will never trigger that dopamine release every engineer needs to be happy."
There's also the darker side: the automation has become an addiction. "Every time I begin a task on my trusty laptop, my brain automatically goes to AI. Should I just create a skill for this task and have Codex do it? Why am I doing this by hand when I can just ask Claude Code to handle it?"
He estimates he gives into these urges 99% of the time.
The deeper problem: once you automate all the tasks you think are mundane, you begin to wonder whether your entire career is mundane enough to be automated. "Is my entire career just mundane enough to be completely automated? What do I actually bring to the table?"
He's tried to course-correct. He went on a failed experiment to build an affiliate marketing empire with AI agents and zero manual intervention — "Make me rich. No mistakes. ASAP" is not a great prompt. He's attempted to fight the urge to offload everything onto AI.
"As I've been writing this exact article about the drawbacks of AI, my brain has gone to AI editing and having it finish it," he confesses. "I think, 'I have enough of my voice in this already. I bet it could finish it...'
"That's where the temptation starts. If AI makes building feel easy and cheap, it's hard not to wonder whether it can turn that speed into money."
His conclusion is both honest and unsettling: "The longer I'm in this industry, the more I realize that while AI makes me incredibly productive, it might also be making me incredibly bored. And a bored engineer is an engineer on borrowed time."