How AI Can Fundamentally Change Your Relationship With Work
(4 Minute Read) When you enjoy solving problems and AI starts solving them for you
šš¼ Welcome to A Founderās Life for Me (FLFM). Iām Alek, a repeat founder. Iāve built and sold one company so far. I share what Iāve learned in 5-minute reads.
How AI Can Fundamentally Change Your Relationship With Work
Iāve been building products for years. The part I loved most was the problem solving.
There is something deeply satisfying about bumping my brain up against a problem it hasnāt seen before. You get stuck for hours. Sometimes days. When you finally cracked it, you step away feeling satisfied. For me, itās the same feeling I get after a hard workout. My body feels tired, and feeling tired feels rewarding.
My brain has been feeling more and more deprived of this feeling.
What changed?
It will come as no surprise that, over the last couple of years, Iāve adopted AI-assisted development as my primary way of building. Iāve cycled through GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code (currently Claude Code). All of these tools accomplish the same thing; I am building faster than I ever have.
Where I used to ship one small feature in a day, I can now ship five meaty ones. I can collaborate with AI and quickly generate thousands of lines of useful code. I can say āDo the work for [this] ticket.ā And, the work gets done.
The output is better, too. More polished. Things Iām genuinely proud to put my name on. When you know how to use it, the ābuild it with AIā button doesnāt just get you to ādoneāā¦ it gets you to ādone well.ā
But, I shutdown my computer at the end of those productive days and something is missing. My brain didnāt have to break a sweat.
Coding used to do two things
Iād always thought about coding as a similar hobby to playing the piano. Iād thought that both activities were ones where āSatisfaction comes from working through the struggle.ā Mastering a difficult part of a song, or figuring out a challenging code optimization problem seemed comparable enough to me. After recent changes to my workflow (which I touch on below), Iām now thinking of satisfaction in two buckets:
(The process) Engaging my brain on hard problems
(The outcome) Build something that I (or others) get utility from
When Iām playing the piano, satisfaction is all about the process. I donāt perform for others. When I play a song for myself, Iām satisfied because I struggled through the process and Iām building the skill.
When Iām coding, satisfaction is becoming more about the outcome. The process is getting easier and less engaging. Iām not wrapping up a coding session with a satisfied nod and thinking, āI did that.ā Mostly, AI is ādoing it thatā for me. So, the feeling of accomplishment is dwindling. Satisfaction is only coming from the outcome (the utility of the thing Iāve built).
What a coding session actually feels like
When Iām coding, there are still flashes of satisfaction from āthe process.ā
Before building anything, I spend time strategizing. I think through how a feature should work, and why it needs to work that way. That upfront thinking still engages the part of my brain that loves solving problems. Then, the AI takes over and my brain can largely disengage. I wait while it builds. I manually review and test the output. I course-correct and give the AI targeted feedback. After the initial planning, brain is still in the loop, but itās doing a lot less heavy lifting.
This isnāt the first time
This satisfaction shift reminds me of when Iāve transitioned from independent contributor roles into managerial roles. I always fear these transitions, wanting to stay close to the challenging technical work. But, once on the other side, Iāve always found ways to keep my brain engaged on new, hard problems.
I feel like Iām at the cusp of a similar transition with AI. Itās just that, instead of people taking over my work, itās AI agents. And, my role is shifting to becoming a āmanagerā of an AI team.
So, where does the satisfaction come from now?
The most satisfying parts of the āprocessā today is actually coming from AI orchestration. How can I break down my work into simple tasks that can be handed off to AI? Instead of building a ācomplex system of code,ā I get satisfaction from building a ācomplex system of AI agents who, ultimately, write code.ā
I still get satisfaction from the outcome of coding (when the things I build help people). But, the satisfaction from the process has almost entirely shifted away from writing code to orchestrating agents.
Learning to love the new process
What satisfies you about your work? Is it the process, or the outcome?
As AI agents dramatically change the way we work, the way we get satisfaction from āthe processā of working will also dramatically changing. I donāt want my satisfaction from work to depend solely on āthe outcome.ā Outcomes are hard. Outcomes are out of your control. And, the whole point of being self-employed is to maintain control over the satisfaction I get from work. So, I need to adapt. I need to change the way I think about āthe processā of building products and find ways to enjoy this new way of working as a āmanagerā of an AI team.
#Entrepreneurship #SelfEmployment #Startups #Bootstrapping #Founders
By sharing my experiences, I hope to provide advice to entrepreneurs facing similar challenges. Feel free to email me with any questions.