Most of the people I talk to find that AI isn’t reducing the amount of work they’re doing, it’s actually increasing it. The leverage it gives you makes you take on more. The agents are available 24/7 and you can have as many as you can afford to keep feeding tokens.

On the flip side, though, I feel like my work is more flexible than ever in many ways too. I’m no longer locked into meetings all day, only productive at my desktop, and limited to when my coworkers happen to be around to be most productive. I can now keep things spinning at my desk, when I have a down moment waiting in line, or when I’m outside sitting at the park. The moments I used to spend doom scrolling, I now spend pushing agents forward.

I haven’t figured out the right balance yet and maybe there isn’t one. Maybe Agent Angst is just the new normal for anyone building with AI. But I do know that the moments I used to waste are now moments that move things forward, and that feels like a net win even if my brain hasn’t fully adjusted to it yet.

Have you felt Agent Angst yet? I’d love to hear how you’re managing it.

I’ve started calling this promptcrastination: using AI-friendly tasks as a sophisticated form of procrastination.

What promptcrastination looks like in the wild

Promptcrastination is often rooted in valuing output quantity over output quality, and with AI it’s really easy to output A LOT of quantity quickly with the illusion of quality.

Promptcrastination is when you:

• add another round of unit tests you don’t really need
• start building out a greenfield feature that sounds cool, but you don’t know has value
• generate 20 marketing angles instead of emailing 5 potential users
• build a new agent workflow instead of doing the uncomfortable work it was supposed to replace
• “research” competitors with AI summaries instead of talking to a real customer

Each of these can be useful. The trap is that they’re endlessly expandable and emotionally safer than the hard thing.

Why this happens (and why it’s rational)

AI amplifies what’s already true about human behavior:

• We avoid ambiguity.
• We avoid rejection.
• We avoid tasks where progress is hard to measure.
• We seek quick wins, especially when we’re tired.

AI gives you a slot machine for “progress”: prompts in, output out. It’s immediate feedback, low friction, low risk. The really diabolical thing, though, is that it looks like productivity and feels great in the moment.

So your brain does the sensible thing: it routes work toward where the gradient is easiest.

That’s core trap in a sentence: when capability shapes priorities instead of priorities shaping capability.

The cost isn’t time, it’s trajectory

The obvious cost is wasted hours.

The bigger cost is that it subtly changes what your “default work” becomes.

You start identifying as someone who is always refining instead of someone who ships and learns. You start optimizing for polish before you have signal. You get good at producing artifacts and bad at making serious bets.

You can end up with a very clean pile of output… and no meaningful progress. And it all feels great until you look back at your day, week, month and realize you’ve accomplished little of actual value.

How to fight it without rejecting AI

The goal isn’t “use less AI.” The goal is to stop letting AI decide what “productive” means.

A few tactics that work:

1. Prioritize your task list explicitly. Don’t have 5 things to do and do them in any order. Make the order explicit and enforce it. You’ll naturally want to gravitate to the “easy” tasks, but stick to the priority.
2. Celebrate results, not output. Keep your focus on the goal or outcome you’re trying to achieve and don’t get caught up in false productivity along the way. Write “identify 3 features that would get Acme Corp to switch” instead of “do market research”.
3. Measure contact with reality. If the work doesn’t touch users or potential users it’s worth being extra diligent to verify it’s actually a leverage point and not just more promptcrastination.

The takeaway

The solution isn’t to avoid using AI. It’s holding yourself accountable for whether the thing you’re prompting is the thing that actually matters.

Next time you catch yourself three hours deep in a beautifully polished something, ask: am I working, or am I promptcrastinating?

Now the economics have changed. What took 10 engineers and 18 months now happens with a small team and AI in weeks. I’ve seen it firsthand. Tools that crank out code, prototypes, even market tests faster than ever. So why keep grinding the the old way? That’s where Crouton Creations comes in. It’s my next project, a lab where I blend startup grit with AI’s raw power to build new products.

After years of scaling teams and navigating bigger companies, this is about getting back to what I love: solving real problems, fast. No fluff, just shippable stuff.

Why Now, Why This

AI has changed the game. I started tinkering with it for my own headaches, like automating tedious tasks or building quick apps to scratch an itch. Long story short, it worked so well I thought: why not turn this into a deliberate experiment?

• Scratch my own itch first. Every idea starts with a problem I face. If I wouldn’t use it daily, it’s dead on arrival.
• Bootstrap by default. Profitability from day one keeps things lean. Control beats chaos every time.
• Small team, big speed. No meetings marathons. Just me and a couple sharp collaborators iterating in days.
• Embrace the fails. Some products will flop. That’s ok. Document it all, learn quick, pivot faster.

Ultimately, Crouton Creations is about playing to my strengths: building what works, without the pressure to scale at all costs. We’re shipping AI-powered tools – think productivity tools and utilities – that real people (starting with me) actually use.

This is my bet, but it’s not a risky one. I’ve seen what works when you strip away the theater and focus on real problems. I’ve built companies before. This time I’m just doing it faster and smarter, shipping AI-powered tools.

If you’re curious about what happens or want to help me figure out what bootstrapping a small, AI-native startup looks like, follow along. I’ll be sharing the wins, the mistakes, and the lessons learned along the way.

I’ve learned so much along the way and have met and worked with some truly great people. The time with Torbit and Walmart has meaningfully changed my life. It’s allowed me to learn about and build a bunch of really interesting products around proxies, load balancers, edge infrastructure, BPF, RUM, website optimization, edge security, and many other facets. Between the flexibility of working remote and traveling to various offices and markets, it’s let me really embrace my passion for travel. It’s allowed me to grow as a manager, mentor some great people, and build and manage a large distributed team which has been a really amazing experience. I’ve learned a ton about how large enterprises and eCommerce sites work from my time at Walmart as well. I had a relatively uncommon opportunity to continue to build what was very close to a startup within a large company and it was overall a great experience getting to see how that can work after a startup acquisition.

To everyone that was a part of that journey with me I want to say thank you. It has really been an adventure and I can’t image how my life would’ve turned out without this opportunity.

Now I’m excited to see what’s next. I haven’t yet decided on my next project or opportunity, but if you happen to have some ideas or roles that might be interesting feel free to reach out and let me know. I’m looking forward to starting the next big chapter and a whole new set of learning, experiences, and people to share it with.

At work, this was a common mantra for me in my 1-1’s with my teams this year. It felt like across the board we were often trying to find the most important things to focus on and focus more deeply on those things in order to make sure we got where we needed to be. This was a really challenging year at work and it required us to be much more diligent, focused, and disciplined about picking our goals carefully.

This also struck my wife and me in our travel planning this year. We managed to cross off some of our biggest bucket list items including Antartica and Egypt among several others, but we also traveled to far fewer countries and places than we have in recent years. We slowed down for a lot of the rest of our travel throughout the year in order to try to enjoy where we were more and prevent (or at least slow down) burning ourselves out as much.

On the personal development side I found it also applied. I found myself taking this year and focusing on one or two single goals at a time and planning them out a bit more deliberately across the months of the year instead of just trying to tackle all my goals simultaneously or continually adding new ones on as I go as I’ve been known to do in the past.

In the end, 2019 was a good year for me in terms of accomplishments and goals. I think focussing and being deliberate about them made it a much stronger year than the previous one. However it is also a year that has left me feeing drained and needing to regroup a bit. I’m in the midst of some life transitions that I think will continue on into 2020.

Here’s to hoping for a great 2020.

The final stats were:

• 145,000 miles flown
• 4 continents
• 22 countries
• 1 US Territory

It’s been a whirlwind of new experiences, food, and amazing sites and I’ve loved every minute of it.  Especially getting the chance to catch up with old friends, and make new ones, all around the world.

I’ve also found an odd joy in maximizing my travel rewards, status, and credit card spending to get the most of my new found travel expenditures.  I’ll probably elaborate on some of these in a future post.

So in short I’m thankful for a wonderful year that allowed me to travel the world with the coolest person I know – my wife.  Here’s to hoping 2016 is just as amazing.

All of these traps are easy to fall into, but are the wrong way to think about it. You are not your company. If you are, then you are either just starting out and can’t really assess this new creation yet, or you are probably doing it wrong. The idea of an entrepreneur is to ideally build a company that is bigger than the founder. In the early days you are critical, but over time your job is to build systems and hire people (or teams of people) to fill in these critical roles. In many ways the true measure of success is when you’ve managed to make yourself no longer a necessary piece.

In this way, the company’s success or failure is clearly separate from your own personal success or failure. The “I must be essential to my business” mantra starts to sound like more of an ego driven desire for importance than a cry of exhaustion. And the ability to sell a company that can operate and be valuable to someone else (especially in your absence) starts to sound like a success instead of “selling out” and “giving up your baby”.

When you are building your company, it’s going to be your life for a period of time. It’s long hours, constant fires, and completely all-consuming. It’s still important, though, to remember that the end goal is to build something bigger than you. To build something where you are not a critical piece of it’s successful daily operation. Something other people find value in with or without you. The sooner you can untangle the company and your own sense of worth and move to this idea of “bigger than me”, the easier it will be for you to be pragmatic about your company and ultimately be more successful; in particular when viewed over a career instead of just a single company.

I was at dinner a little while back with a friend and he told me a story I thought was worth sharing. It was about a friend of his who was obsessed with the TV show Jeopardy. He would watch it constantly and decided he wanted to try to get on the show some day.

Already, he was a fountain of trivia and random knowledge, but in preparation he spent all his time working through flash cards, reading a variety of related books and articles, and preparing his mind for the show. His one form of relief from this relentless shovel of knowledge into his brain was when his friends would convince him to take a couple minute break and play a video game with them. However he was awful at the video games they played. He was constantly dying, not able to hold his own, and didn’t really enjoy it much. He just had no hand/eye coordination and slow reflexes, and didn’t do well with these games.

So he continued to practice his flash cards, have people quiz him, just fill all his free time with preparation for the game show. Then he finally had his moment and got called up to compete in the show. This was it; his big moment. So he focussed even more on his trivia. No longer having time for the silly video games, he worked non-stop preparing, in any way he could think of, to dump more random facts into his mind.

He flew out to do the show, full of nervousness and excitement. He was finally about to get his dream and have his moment on Jeopardy. Once the show started he had confidence as he read over the categories. Then the first question (or answer I guess in this case) came and he excitedly reached for his buzzer, confident in his answer. However he was too slow, and didn’t get the points. As the game continued, he continued to struggle with the buzzer – and although he knew most of the answers he was getting no points during the game while he continually fumbled or delayed when it was time to buzz in. It turns out his short comings with hand/eye coordination and his reflex time were preventing him from ever getting a chance to use all that great knowledge he had spent so much time crafting and preparing.

In the end he lost, quite egregiously, not because he didn’t have the answers, but because he wasn’t able to buzz in fast enough. In all the preparation he had done for the show he hasn’t spent any time practicing the simple act of buzzing in. And without that critical skill, all the knowledge in the world wasn’t able to win him his moment on the game show of his dreams.

So don’t let your relentless focus get in the way of seeing all the steps in your goals. Because if you do, you might end up putting your dreams in jeopardy too.

Frontend web performance matters. This is the time it takes from the moment my browser starts a request for a URI to the moment the page is fully loaded (or functional and visible – different people want to measure different things). If you’re not convinced it’s important consider the fact that Google includes page speed in it’s prioritization algorithm and many different studies (including our data from Torbit) show a correlation between site performance and conversions.

Ok great, so performance matters – now what? Well in the past it turns out it was actually pretty hard to reliably measure frontend performance on your site. There was synthetic testing (basically a fixed browser in the cloud that would hit a site and record timing data), but this was not usually representative of actual end users because the testing took place on big internet backbones with relatively fast computers.

So some sites starting doing various hacks to calculate the load time in the browser when visitors would come to their site. The initial implementations of this were basically just hooking into the browser onload event and subtracting the start time from a script inserted into the head of the document. Over time these hacks got a little more sophisticated (using cookies to track time since you started to unload the previous page, for example), but they were definitely hacks.

Then came the magic of the navigation timing API. Essentially this is a Javascript API available in most modern browsers that gives you direct access to a bunch of timing information about the page load on the current page.

With navigation timing you could now access a new property window.performance.timing that had entries for all the major timing events shown in the graphic above in milliseconds. For example:
window.performance.timing.loadEventEnd

Finally you can get access to the actual load time the current visitor experienced for the DNS lookup, the TCP connection, the transfer time, and fully loaded time (among others). Then you can use that data to either take an action for the current user or beacon it back to a central server for aggregation and reporting. This is fundamentally what all RUM tools do (including Torbit’s Insight product).

So if you’re not already using navigation timing give it a spin. You might be surprised to see how slow your site can be for some users.

One of the big headaches when traveling is converting money to the foreign currency of the country you’re traveling to. You often need local cash shortly after you land for taxis or other incidental purchases, but getting foreign cash while in the US or at the airport is often very expensive due to poor conversion rates and fees.

So what should you do? I suggest using a local ATM to withdraw some local cash instead. I can hear you already, “Really? Aren’t ATM fees just as bad, if not worse?”. And yes, in fact, they are often quite expensive. However there are a handful of banks that will actually reimburse your ATM fees, which suddenly makes the ATM conversion not that expensive. You essentially are just getting the current conversion rate of your bank, which in my experience is much better than the rates and fees that come with traditional currency conversion services. I personally use a Charles Schwab checking account, which I’ve been pretty happy with, for my ATM reimbursements. They just put a credit on my account at the end of the month for that month’s ATM fees – I don’t even have to do anything to receive it.

And perhaps the best part about this tip is that it’s actually often even more convenient than finding a currency conversion service. ATM’s are readily available in most places (especially transportation hubs) which makes converting cash a very simple task.