It seems like one thing that is happening in recent years pretty consistently is a ramping up of intensity in general. One of these things is brought about by this "AI is eating the world" feeling. What I do feel in how my work has changed is that there is quite a bit more intensity in a lot of areas and it can be difficult to keep up. The flavor that affects me is probably not as ubiquitous but I do feel a FOMO-adjacent drive to keep up with the rapidly accelerating pace of technology. Compared to before I do feel like trying to keep up with things like LLM inference self-hosting or understanding machine learning concepts in general now that the tech is so much more impactful now than ever before is more challenging of a topic to keep up with than the typical kind-of-thing-i-like-to-keep-up-with. I barely get to satisfy my curiosity with the rate that I'm able to achieve with it, and already I'm far outstripping my available free time on it.

There is also a feeling that I've identified in which we just kind of have more shit to deal with. Like if you worked at a company and just watched your CEO going about his or her day. They just have a lot of stuff to deal with. And something I feel now with the status quo of going back and forth with AI all day long and slamming thousands of lines of documentation, designs and strategies, code changes, etc wtih AI, what's abundantly clear is you just have a ton more stuff you have to deal with. So it might be cool or whatever but in many ways it's not, it's so much more taxing on your executive function type skills and so on. I think overall it's probably good practice. Anyway the insight I had with this was whether the work you're doing is interfacing with humans or with AI, you can probably expect that on average, you have some kind of nominal signal-to-noise ratio. Let's assume that 90% of the stuff that "comes across your desk" is signal and 10% is unpleasant noise. By ramping up productivity you're likely ramping up the amount of noise by the same multiple. It's probably normal that it will be overwhelming in some sense.