Things got too easy with AI

AI provides incredible value to me and to many other people in our daily lives and work. It's now possible to do more, better, and faster than ever. But I realized that the progression of AI capabilities outpaced the progression of my goals.

I recently started thinking in retrospect about what I was doing and what I was thinking about in the past months, and it feels like I didn't really face any hard challenges in many months.

I can't remember the last time I was thinking about a problem for a week straight myself because it was so nontrivial. In most cases AI just one-shots stuff or does so after a couple of days of low-effort prompting iterations.

I was thinking a lot about different stuff, but it was more of a meta-analysis or idea generation of some kind. I didn't really struggle with the execution part for a long time.

Very often when I see something I'd like to try doing, it just works with AI very quickly. I just get quick dopamine from low-effort achievements. And it allowed me to minimize my effort in many ways while keeping the product of my work at a level not much higher than before. That's not what my goals should be.

I believe that I should aim much higher than I was trying to aim before. Higher than I could have ever imagined a couple of years ago. If AI makes it so easy to do things that took weeks before, I should do things that would take years before. I think now is the time when this becomes possible to execute.

I should try to keep the bar of my goals at the level where my own mental effort stays high enough, so that I'm not underaiming. I should stay at the limit of both my and AI's capabilities. It will probably maximize the product of my work.

And the first step is to discover where that limit actually is. I want to find out how far I can push before I start struggling. I think that incredible things can be done in a month of real mental effort of a single human supercharged with many AI agents.

I have a few ideas for what to try. Things that I didn't really think of until recently, because it was absurd for me to even consider trying them.