My recent posts about AI have been optimistic. I still mean them. After spending the past couple of months rebuilding my workflow around agents, I hardly interact with the colleagues I used to study with, and working has become so rewarding that I find it hard to stop. Neither has made me want my old workflow back.
What changed in my studying
I’ve recently switched to Omarchy for the built-in agent integration and moved much of the “computer” out of my way. I spend less time coding by hand and more time studying with gnosis, while working with my agent to improve the tools around it. I’ve added FSRS, 3D models for anatomy, and agent support for creating custom study sessions.
For a concrete comparison, I can have my agent write lecture summaries in about two minutes. The same amount of work would take a colleague three to five hours, often arriving later that day. By the time the summary arrives, I could already have spent those hours studying it.
I used to have average grades and was probably the laziest student in my classes. Now I’m among the top students. I haven’t suddenly become obsessed with grades or developed a love for every subject in my syllabus. I’ve developed an itch to optimize my learning, and making software around it has become cheap enough to keep scratching.
I used to collaborate with colleagues to create questions and notes for our classes. We maintained shared resources and passed them down to the next generation of students. Even as the lazy one, I used to organize people so I could maintain my laziness :)
Now I hardly interact with most of them. Until they are agent accelerated as well, collaborating on this work slows me down. A lecture summary takes my agent two minutes and a colleague half a working day. Dividing up the work used to save me effort. Now it means coordinating with people and waiting for something I could already have in front of me.
Most of my colleagues aren’t into tech. Some still take notes with pencil and paper, while I’m having an agent turn lecture material into resources for my study environment. We sit the same exams, but I can no longer plan my studying around the pace of that workflow.
Working with people who also use agents is another matter. But that isn’t the circle I’m in. For passing my classes, setting up my own agentic bubble and staying inside it has become the most efficient option. I see less value in coordinating that work with other people now. I still want their company; I just don’t need to organize a study group to get a lecture summary written.
Maybe the issue is how much of my social life I built around getting something done together. There was always an exam to prepare for, notes to divide up, some task to coordinate. Remove the need for that work and a surprising amount of the interaction disappears with it. I probably need to get better at meeting people because I want to spend time with them, without needing a shared task as the reason.
Why I find it hard to stop
Almost every waking hour now goes into studying, improving my study tools, or working out. My sleep schedule was already messed up; now it’s closer to a vampire’s. My adenosine receptors probably consider caffeine a permanent tenant.
I study with the agent too. I have it teach me the material, explain things I don’t understand, and constantly quiz me. Studying becomes an ongoing conversation: I ask questions, try to explain things back, and answer its questions instead of just reading another page of notes. There is always something to respond to, and I want to keep going until I understand it.
Getting more done hasn’t made me want to work less. Between that conversation and improving gnosis, studying itself has become much more rewarding. When I notice a problem with how I’m learning something, I can have my agent help improve the tool and use the change in the same study session.
An idea that would once have taken a weekend of coding can now be worth trying before bed. Or I want one more explanation, then another round of questions to see whether I’ve understood it. Going to sleep means putting down work that I actually want to do. Being this engaged in studying is much harder to walk away from than being bored.
Freedom and dependence on compute
What attracted me to the hacker community was self-reliance. I wanted to learn how to adapt my tools to fit my needs, rather than accept whatever a guy in a corpo decided I should want.
I want to own my software and decide what it does. Agents have made that cheap enough to act on. Coding by hand is no longer worth my time. Knowing how to manage agents is worth more to me now than being able to write all that code myself. I’ve had them produce millions of lines, from Haskell to Python, that I could never have written in the same period even as a full-time developer.
Writing my own OS, from the kernel up, used to be an absurd demand on my time. Now I look at it and think about how much compute I could throw at it.
That puts an expensive condition on self-reliance. I can make the software do what I want, but keeping that ability independent of a model provider requires compute of my own. Having the source on my disk doesn’t give me the hardware to run the agents that produced it.
For the way I want to work, powerful hardware is becoming more important than the software I start with. I can have agents replace software. I can’t prompt a GPU into existence.
I hope more smart people work on chips, manufacturing, and production capacity so that what costs $100K in compute today becomes accessible for $5K in the future. One can hope. Self-reliance gets a rather different meaning when the equipment costs more than most people can afford.
Some people will want to yell at the cloud about this change. I still think it’s for the best. Programming often felt like a priesthood: learn the language before you’re allowed to ask the machine for anything. The “agent reformation” lets many more people build the software they want. But if the congregation still has to rent access to the machine from a handful of companies, we haven’t gone as far as I want.
I want the means of production on my desk. :)