Now It Runs Faster Than I Can Think
Tuesday morning.
I typed into Antigravity: “Create a blog section. Paginated index. Tag filtering. Use the design system.”
Got coffee.
Came back 12 minutes later.
Done.
Not “here’s a snippet” done.
Done done.
6 files created. 4 modified. Routing wired. CSS applied.
It worked on the first try.
I felt sick.
The Velocity Problem
2024: Agents were too slow.
2025: Agents are too fast.
I used to type. My thinking was throttled by my typing speed. I had time to reconsider variable names, rethink architecture, catch my own bad ideas.
That throttle is gone.
The agent generates 2,000 lines while I read 200.
I’m reviewing features I conceived 10 minutes ago. The implementation is already complete. I’m the bottleneck to my own tools.
The Loss of Intimacy
There’s an intimacy to writing code.
You know where the bodies are buried because you dug the graves.
You know why that weird if statement exists on line 402 because you spent 3 hours debugging the edge case that required it.
When an agent writes the code, you lose that history.
You get the product.
You don’t get the journey.
And the journey is where understanding lives.
I look at my codebase now and see strangers. Entire modules I don’t know. They work. They’re well-written. They follow patterns.
But I don’t know them.
I’m a tourist in my own repository.
Reading at 10x Speed
My job changed.
I’m not a writer anymore. I’m a high-speed reader.
90% of my time is in diff view.
Scanning agent logic. Spotting security holes. Catching architectural drift. Finding subtle business logic errors.
All at 10x the speed I used to work.
Slow down? Waste the tool’s potential.
Speed up? Let bugs slip through.
It’s a constant high-wire act.
The machine never gets tired. Never gets bored. It will churn out code, features, tests until I’m buried under a mountain of PRs from a single entity I supposedly control.
The Feature Factory
We used to joke about “Feature Factories”—teams that churned out tickets without thinking.
Now I am the factory.
When creation is free, we create too much.
Features “just because we can.”
Complexity because it’s easy.
The friction of coding used to be a quality filter. If it was hard to build, we had to really want it.
Now that building is easy, the only filter is discipline.
And discipline doesn’t scale like code does.