never let a good crisis go to waste post

content/posts/let_no_crisis_go_to_waste.md

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+---
+title: "Never let a good crisis go to waste"
+date: 2026-03-29T10:53:45-04:00
+tags: ["LLM", "AI", "Life Optimization", "Productivity" ]
+---
+
+I recently have been thinking about the Winston Churchill quote this post is titled after[^1].
+Normally this is applied in political contexts, but I think it does a good job describing the last couple of months for me.
+For example, today I’ve been sick as a dog (probably with that new covid variant).
+Normally I would be trying to speed things along by rotting my brain on YouTube or other pointless entertainment.
+While there was some of that, I was really surprised to find myself wanting to write some code for a project I’m working on! And this wasn’t Agentic Engineering™.
+I was enjoying writing good old-fashioned, organic, artisanal, free-range, handwritten code.
+I knew I had to summarize (at least for myself) how exactly I got here.    
+
+## **The “crisis”**   
+
+Around last September I started working pretty hard in my free-time on a startup idea (state of idea still tbd).
+Even though I’m anti-social media, I decided to swallow the poison pill and get on LinkedIn to try and build some early traction/validation.
+When I got on, I started getting drowned by    
+
+- “AI has made programmers obsolete.”   
+- “Agentic engineering is the future”   
+- “If you aren’t orchestrating agent swarms you are falling behind.”   
+   
+That started to raise some hairs and my anxiety.
+Now at the time I was using Claude Code daily at work and for my personal project.
+I noticed that Claude Code was decent at my work tasks but not very good at my more innovative personal tasks.
+Then my feed started hitting me with news about the “inflection point” with Opus 4.6, full agent dev teams, mandated agentic engineering in big tech.
+The news about Gas Town and Ralph Loops made me feel like I was falling behind.
+
+Personally I saw big workflow and productivity improvements with AI tools. 
+This was particularly around search and boilerplate generation.
+Biggest use-case was copying patterns (although I always had to double-check it was actually implemented correctly).
+When I tried doing more complex changes, I saw the LLMs struggle.
+None of this suggested that full agent dev teams were actually feasible long-term.
+So I thought this was a skill issue.
+
+Now I have two kids and my wife raises them full-time.
+This means it’s on my shoulders to make sure we can eat and that we have a roof over our heads.
+I really had to figure out some way of getting through the AI apocalypse intact.
+I was mainly experimenting with different projects, different types of AI vibe coding (spec-driven, human in the loop, human-less Ralph loops).
+I’ve seen [articles suggesting it wasn’t just me.](https://www.businessinsider.com/sober-startup-founders-younger-drinking-less-alcohol-2025-8?)   
+## **The realization that I'm spiraling**   
+
+After several months of grinding with steadily growing anxiety, I came across Mitchell Hashimoto’s workflow.
+I wrote another post about it [here](https://www.alexselimov.com/posts/ai_confession/). 
+This was the first time I was exposed to a serious guy who wasn’t on the AI will replace us hype train.
+After this, I started paying attention to a lot more news that was also anti-hype:   
+
+- [Mo Bitar](https://m.youtube.com/@atmoio), guy that talks a ton about AI code quality and, more importantly, the impact of AI on our own brains.    
+- [Commentary on Metr article](https://entropicthoughts.com/no-swe-bench-improvement) suggesting code quality from LLMs isn’t actually getting better.    
+- [Metr article](https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/) suggesting AI doesn’t actually improve productivity.    
+- [Armin Ronacher post](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/) about comprehension debt and AI psychosis among vibe coders.    
+   
+Those resources, among others, talked me down from the doomer cliff I was on.
+I’m a lot more pragmatic now.
+Current AI can’t replace a good dev (it’s not a skill issue).
+There is no guarantee one way or another that future AI will be able to replace a good dev (I lean towards it won’t be able to).
+Regardless, the only thing I can do is continue to keep my coding skills sharp and keep using/exploring Claude code/codex, but without the anxiety.
+I don't think it's worth learning the modern advanced agent orchestration techniques since best practices around LLM techniques are constantly changing.
+In the last 6 months since I started paying attention, I've seen a lot of noise with different approaches.
+Two major changes I can recall off the top of my head are:
+   
+1. Claude.md is important, you can have claude generate it[^2] → agent generated Claude.md worsens results. Only good approach is minimal human generated[^3]
+2. MCP is the best standard for calling external tools → clis are the best standard for calling external tools[^4].
+   
+There is no guarantee that the prompting/orchestration skills relevant now will be relevant to a future LLM that can fully autonomously generate robust, secure, and production ready code.
+Those skills are also not relevant if LLMs continue to have the same issues they have today.
+Either way it's still useful to continue writing code manually.
+If LLMs don't get much better than demand for a dev that can actually write robust, secure, and production grade code will be high.
+If they do get better, then at least I will have refined my taste.
+I can always learn the advanced prompting/orchestrating skill-set later.
+
+## **The change**   
+
+Was this roller-coaster of anxiety pointless?
+I think the answer goes back to the quote of never letting a good crisis go to waste.
+I used the stress and anxiety induced by all of this to develop a habit of daily project work and generated a backlog of projects to explore.
+To try and find alternative approaches to surviving the AI apocalypse I decided to try publishing more writings (which I've been enjoying greatly).
+These have replaced the ways I used to waste my time, which I think is a huge net positive.
+The biggest change is just genuinely enjoying programming again. 
+I'm no longer spending my cognitive capacity on the soft LLM prompting skills[^5].
+Instead, I'm working on things I enjoy more like exploring new languages, developing my taste for code architecture, and solving hard technical problems myself.
+
+If you are worried about AI and the links I included above haven't convinced you otherwise, that's okay!
+Just don't let a good crisis go to waste. 
+Use the motivating power of stress and anxiety to drive you instead of letting it stop you.
+No matter how things play out, you will be better off!
+
+
+[^1]: This is attributed to Winston Churchill although supposedly this attribution is in question. The source doesn't really matter to me though.
+[^2]: The /init command generates an overview of the project structure and notes. This is still recommended by Anthropic in their [best practices](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices)
+[^3]: From [Evaluating AGENTS.md: Are Repository-Level Context Files Helpful for Coding Agents?](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988)
+[^4]: [Cloudflare suggested](https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/) that having LLMs generate code was a better approach to traditional MCP.
+[^5]: I became an engineer for the hard technical skills, not to be a manager!