You can't keep up with AI (and that's okay)

I took about a week and a half off over the holidays. I did some minimal tinkering and built one little project, but mostly I focused on my family. I didn't consume too much content. Just unplugged.

When I came back, it felt like I'd been gone for a year.

It was a week and a half during the holidays, when most people are also unplugged. And I felt immediately overwhelmed — like I had so much catching up to do.

That feeling isn't unusual for me anymore. It happens on an almost daily basis.

The pace of change has fundamentally shifted

For years, I had a mantra I'd share with developers who felt overwhelmed by the pace of change. Back then, it felt like there was a new headless CMS or a new JavaScript framework every week. The FOMO was real.

My advice was usually: read about it, do some loose tinkering to understand the approach that tool was taking, but fight the urge to rebuild everything immediately. When you have a small project, pick up a new tool to learn and see how it meshes with your other preferences. Adjust your toolkit gradually as these tools earn your trust over time, and you get the sense that they will last.

While that advice is still relevant, the landscape is different today.

Rate of change is an order of magnitude faster

We're not seeing a new framework every week. We're seeing several new tools, new apps, and new ways to build apps every single day. New ways to set up your environment, new skills to teach AI agents — it's relentless.

Rate of adoption is immediate

The bigger shift is that the rate of adoption has changed. In the past, you could read about a new CMS in a day and build a proof of concept in a day. But you couldn't actually move an app to a new service in a day. That took weeks or months.

Now you can adopt new tools almost as fast as they appear. That sounds great, until you realize it also means the treadmill never stops.

The productive developer's balance

What I've noticed is that the developers who are most productive right now are the ones who have found a balance between adoption and distraction.

If you're ignoring what's out there, you're falling behind. You're moving slower than everyone around you.

But if all you're doing is chasing new approaches, you're spending more time experimenting than building. That's not productive either.

The sweet spot is adopting new strategies while maintaining a moderate amount of exploration. Tinker while you work. Use AI to help you adopt AI — you can literally tell Claude (or your tool of choice) to implement a new feature or pattern, see if it works, and iterate from there. You don't have to dig through documentation first.

That's the beauty of how AI works today: you can learn by doing, in production, while getting real work done.

You're always going to feel behind

The idea that's hardest to accept today is that no matter what you do, you're going to feel left behind.

It doesn't matter if you take a week off. It doesn't matter if you try to adopt every new thing you see. The list of ideas you want to explore will always grow faster than you can work through it. I've been writing blog posts for 15 years, and no matter how active I am, the list of ideas always grows. I thought AI might change that for me because I can move so fast in developing new content, but it just makes the ideas come faster.

I can't outpace it. You can't outpace it. Nobody can.

And that's okay.

Fighting for balance

Work-life balance is probably more important now than it has ever been before, and it's also harder to obtain. Machines and screens are always on and always distracting. We need to spend time with real humans in a focused way. We need to breathe outside air, touch grass, establish new hobbies that use your hands instead of your fingers on a screen.

But there will always be people who put in more hours. And today AI rewards time in a way that coding alone couldn't do. That's a whole other post in and of itself. But my point is that a healthy lifestyle that operates the way you want it to is far more important than anything you're doing with AI.

The world is moving really fast. It's more important that you have balance than that you catch every wave.

Keep a pulse, keep building

I think it's a massive mistake to ignore how web development is changing. But you also don't need to be the person who picks up every new model every single day.

Claude is moving fast. It's going to get leapfrogged by Gemini or Codex, then leapfrog them back. If you want to stick with one tool that's solving your problems, that's fine. You don't have to chase the leader board.

Take time off. Spend it with your family, with other people you want to be around, and explore the world outside of AI. You'll miss a lot of the advancement, you'll miss things in the world of AI, just as you'll miss sites during your travels. There's too much for one person to do and too much for one person to see, and that's okay.

When you get back, get back to tinkering. One of the benefits of AI is that you can tinker while you do your work. You can adopt new practices on the fly, without it being a separate learning project. Take advantage of that.

Remember that you're never going to understand everything, you're never going to try everything, you're never going to see everything. That's not failure; that's part of the human experience.

The goal isn't to keep up with everything. The goal is to keep building, to keep learning, to keep living, and to have a little fun along the way.