Ben's Bites author reflects: AI is overwhelming, and I've been using it the wrong way

AI is overwhelming and I’m doing it wrong

Let’s think about what we’re doing hereOct 29, 2026

Let’s talk about this…Ben Tossell@bentosselli feel stuck with wtf i do for like 10 months

keep going round in circles. questioning and re-questioning everything. things feel exciting then dont.

what feels like a good business direction then doesnt.

touch grass, ai melting brains, i know i know but still8:41 AM · Oct 28, 2026 · 82.5K Views

163 Replies · 9 Reposts · 681 Likes

Where do I even start? It seems like a lot of people are feeling this too. The constant barrage of new products, models, capabilities, threats, whatever is one thing. But seeing people with 20 personal agents for managing their social content or just life.

What are we doing here?!

I read two excellent posts yesterday. Here’s a snippet from each

You’re doing your best to keep up. You’re 9-9-6’ing, sometimes 0-0-7’ing. You didn’t actually rest during rest week, did you? What are your agents up to? Hopefully getting a lot done while you’re reading this. Have you tried the latest personal assistant? Optimized your workflows to accommodate the strengths of the latest model? Have you gone viral on X lately? Have you been angel investing? Have you locked in your Bay Area mortgage? If not, you know you’re fucked, right? You’re enslaved to your keyboard, timeline, and Slack. You’re tired, but your ambition is also Icarus-ing. Your FOMO is spiking. Your capacity is redlining. Is your moral compass spinning?

The Sane Asylum by Colossus

I start far more than I finish. I have a course that’s ~70% done, I have a tool for non-techies using personal agents that’s 80% done. I have 2 outstanding funds with one I should finish fundraising for. I want to try a new sponsor model that I should ping companies about.

I should do things because they make business sense. But I only like doing things for the fun of actually doing it. I can only be motivated to do something if it feels like play.

And I think play is missing for a lot of people. We’re pushed by our companies or peers to do more. But more for what reason? It’s busywork. It’s cleaning my desk before starting what would actually be work. AI was meant to handle our work, but when it does it turns out there’s endless work that you can do.

Just one more pull of the slot machine.

You don’t need to try every tool under the sun. You don’t need swarms of agents running and optimising your life. I hate optimising anything.

The videos I did I found myself trying to pick them apart to optimise them. Am I trying to become a fucking YouTuber? Absolutely not. Don’t like the videos? Guess what? You don’t have to watch them. I’ll make them when it feels right, and I’ll try and make them good.

I’m thinking a lot about all of this stuff (as you can probably tell). I was the guy who shouted about not needing to code when the world told you you did. Now I’m getting lost in multiple agents trying to optimise and automate everything because it feels like I’d be more productive.

In a company you should usually only hire when there is a pain that hiring would solve. So why am I hiring (and managing) multiple agents for things that aren’t that painful?

Most people can only hold 4 things in their heads. That’s maybe a stretch for me 😂 but the point stands. Top engineers can churn out tons of work and multi-task, and those are the companies I want to invest in because that may be what it takes to build a generational $Trillion company . But for people who want to move fast but also considered, there’s got to be another way.

I want to focus on fun. AI absolutely gives me power to do things I never thought possible, but they don’t need to be valuable, they don’t need to run constantly. If I want to do something, of course I’ll use an agent to help me. But I’m not working for my agent, it works for me. It’s a computer. It’s not a person I have to keep busy and keep managing (and checking it’s managing it’s own agents). That sounds horrible.

I don’t have the answers. But for the next 30 days I’m going to try and do a few things:

‘morning pages’ - first thing i dump out my random thoughts on anything, clear my head

only use agents to build things I find interesting and fun

no new tools unless it’s clearly solving a pain for me

no summarising long posts, read it or ignore it

don’t do anything just because ‘it makes money’

I already can’t stop thinking of ways to package up some form of ‘move fast and slow with AI’ into a business. But I’m going to consciously spend much more time thinking about it before throwing it to an agent. I’ll play around with video, written, visually interactive, anything that gives me energy at the time.

I didn’t mean this to be that long. oops.

If this resonated or you’ve got feelings or thoughts on this, please hit reply and tell me - I want to hear it!

p.s. I have to give a huge shoutout to Ashe who DM’ed me after my tweet and we chatted on a phone call (omg whaaat). I’ve admired watching her go head-first into her own vibe and she gave me some great reflections back to consider what I am doing.

My feed

Google has 2 new models:

Gemini 4 Carbon. Much better than Argon in benchmarks, but only available to cyber defenders for now.

Genie 4. A world model that can create 3D scenes and edit them (like changing the weather or adding characters).

Suhail’s new company Particle is training coding models to get to an answer with fewer tokens.

4 personal agents go through a nine-task test. Which of them actually gets things done?

A free, open-source guide to assembling IKEA furniture, with 3D instructions and voice.

How agents influence experts - 86% of the time, the experts go along with an agent’s random choice.

Simon Willison thinks we’ve reached an inflection point for vibe-coded games. They are actually fun to play now.

Readwise Books - New reading and tracking app that can connect with your agents.

Clicky now generates custom visuals on your screen when you ask it about stuff.

AftersIvana@ivanainaiUnpopular opinion: the people getting the most out of AI are the ones who could do the work without it.1:33 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 223K Views

521 Reposts · 5.97K Likestenso@distributedkvngl this is getting out of hands. 5:42 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 156K Views

115 Replies · 219 Reposts · 2.22K LikesThariq@trq212very weird thing happening rn

technical people are sad, they think their skills are now useless

non-technical people are desperately wishing they were more technical so they could use agents better8:39 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 735K Views

1.03K Replies · 1.34K Reposts · 22.1K LikesDallas Tesla David@dallasteslaI called an all hands meeting with my Grok Bots and asked what kind of office they'd want to work in.

A few hours later they'd built it themselves...

It's a live view of my actual team. When a bot gets a task, it walks to its desk and gets to work. When two of them need to …8:08 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 170K Views

398 Replies · 101 Reposts · 2.56K LikesMatt Wensing 🐙@mattwensingOutside of coding, there’s a very real chance that people are equating the activity of agents for value creation.

It seems plausible that most agent activity outside of coding is not value-creating, but rather busywork.

No different than most of the labor of their operators.11:11 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 1.21K Views

11 Replies · 1 Repost · 16 Likesben hylak@benhylakevery product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath.

except for our product, of course.

in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much.

we're special that way.8:03 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 278K Views

139 Replies · 358 Reposts · 6.52K Likes

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