I’m staring at a MacBook I bought on eBay a few months ago so I could run OpenClaw, and at times it’s made me feel terrible.
By most measures, I am in a very small group. I shipped a vibe-coded subscription app, which probably puts me in the top 1% of builders globally. And yet I feel like I’m constantly falling behind. That OpenClaw machine isn’t even powered up.
A few months ago, it felt like the big unlock was having a good claude.md file. Then a few weeks later it was agents. Then everyone was talking about OpenClaw. Then skills. Every couple of weeks there is a new AI thing I’m supposed to be doing.
I can’t keep up, and you probably can’t either. But that’s okay.
The reality gap
There’s a big gap between reality and what we’re reading on LinkedIn and X every day. Someone right now is telling you they built an app in a weekend and it made $8,000 in its first week.
On the other hand, I vibe-coded a mobile app and it took me about four months. Then the App Store rejected it four times. It wasn’t a caffeine-fueled overnight success, but it taught me a lot and I’m still genuinely excited each time I see a new subscription trickle in.
To be honest, I’m a little scared to publish this. You’re going to know the truth — that I’m not keeping up. That agents aren’t doing my laundry. That my app isn’t making me rich yet.
Well, f*ck it.
Don’t misunderstand, I’m really excited about what AI is unlocking for me and for you. Whether you’re thinking about building your first app, already launched, or starting to think about growth, you should feel excited about all of it.
We are living in an amazing moment, and you can build awesome things. However, behind the scenes I think there’s an unspoken feeling of playing catch-up. A fear of being out-of-the-loop, or anxiety to say anything not-entirely-positive about AI. These feelings, and the opportunities AI brings, aren’t mutually exclusive. So here’s how you can do that without losing your mind as AI-pace anxiety accelerates and makes us all a bit crazy.
Asking AI to think for me was a bad idea
When I uploaded RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps report 2026 into ChatGPT with a prompt that said, “review this in detail and tell me what we should apply to OnTimer”, I knew it was bad.
That report is probably the most valuable thing I read each year as I help developers grow their mobile apps. And here I was phoning it in for my own app. I did read the report a few days later, but this delegation motion was becoming a bad habit.
I’d see a LinkedIn post about best practices for AEO and I’d delegate it to Claude Code. Someone would share a skill from their Github repo and I’d thoughtlessly dump it into Claude. And so on. No learning, just action.
Was the output better than nothing? Yep! In fact, often it was pretty good (LLMs are incredible). But did I learn anything? Nope!
I can justify it in my head: building OnTimer is my side project. I’m a professional growth advisor and I have work to do; I have a daughter who I want to spend time with before she goes off to college; I am busy, and it feels like I’m constantly trying to jump on a moving train.
Regardless of how busy I was, I came to realise that outsourcing learning wasn’t making me feel good about what I was building. And delegating my thinking wasn’t making me better at growth.
AI is amazing at helping us speed up processes, and that’s awesome. We should embrace that. But if it is replacing learning, creativity, and curiosity what’s the point?
There’s pressure to keep up (even when no one says it out loud)
The tech world has always been fast-paced. If you weren’t working long hours and sleeping on conference tables you were doing it wrong, but AI has taken that to another level.
There’s a new kind of pressure where it feels like if you say something negative about AI, or even just admit that you’re not using the latest tools, then you’re signaling that you’re behind. That you’re not technical enough — or worse, that you’re resisting progress.
So instead we leave it unsaid, and we just try to keep moving faster.
As I write this, Coinbase is laying off 14% of their workforce and their CEO’s letter all but says, ‘if you are not AI-first, you are last’. So I get the angst.
At the same time, every day I see posts that say you can’t build anything real with vibe-coding, that nobody is excited about the apps they vibe-code, and so on. Meanwhile, my vibe-coded app is available in the App Store.
So which is it? If no matter how fast you move and no matter how much tech you embrace, it will never be enough, how can you ever win? For a while I just tried to blindly accelerate. I bought the OpenClaw machine that still isn’t turned on. I outsourced my thinking to ChatGPT, and I tried to keep up with everything.
It didn’t work, and it certainly wasn’t making me smarter or happier.
Exit the echo chamber and find your footing
The loop that makes your head explode looks like this:
New shiny AI thing → X post says “winners are already doing this” → try to catch up → feel behind → next new shiny AI thing
When you’re in a loop like this, you don’t always realize it. For a while, the speed itself starts to feel like progress. You’re trying things, generating outputs, checking boxes, but your focus is all over the place.
That’s what happened to me. When I started outsourcing everything to AI, it felt like action. Things were getting done, and some of it was okay, but a lot of it wasn’t.
As an example, agents are awesome, and you can do some really cool things with them. But for the development phase of OnTimer, they were more of a distraction than a value-add. I had a simple goal to build and ship a subscription app, but I felt this heavy pressure to keep up with everything. So instead of thinking through how and why I needed agents to achieve my goal, I just started building them.
I was breaking my own rules:
- I wasn’t thinking things through
- I wasn’t building intuition
- I was just reacting
At some point, you have to stop and ask yourself a different question. Instead of asking “what am I missing?” ask “what actually matters for what I’m trying to accomplish?”
When I focused on that, everything changed. Moving forward became more important than moving faster, and for the first time in a while, I felt like I was getting ahead.
Focus on meaningful things, instead of everything
So what do we do? We have this amazing toolset. It’s getting more amazing every day, and we have no possible way to stay on its leading edge. We need a simple playbook to help us focus, learn, and keep building.
For me, the same rules that apply to growing a product apply here. Focus on value, understand your North Star, relentlessly prioritize.
The framework that worked for me was:
- Create an evaluation layer
- Build a backlog
- Operationalize
1. Create an evaluation layer
This is easy. Right now my LinkedIn has two headlines that are piquing my interest: “Build and Run Your First MCP Server” and “1,000 AI Marketing Prompts”.
My North Star today for OnTimer is to validate product-market fit. I just simply look at everything I see through the lens of “Does this help me achieve the goal or is it a distraction from the goal?
2. Build a backlog
Eventually emailing yourself articles and sticking post-it notes all over your desk gets overwhelming.
Do yourself a favor and create a repository. I just use a Google Sheet with a one sentence description of the new tool or approach, copy in links to where I can learn more, and add a score based on importance and urgency (as it relates to my North Star).
3. Operationalize
I schedule time on my calendar to dig into AI learnings each week. I even have an app that makes sure I don’t forget to do it (guess what the app is). The evaluation layer helps me focus on what I want to learn, and what the most meaningful learnings are for me right now.
Then my backlog helps me feel less anxious that I will miss out on things that might be important but just not super-urgent today.
I still offload and delegate a lot of actions to ChatGPT and Claude, but I force myself to never do that without first spending some time building a basic understanding of what the tool or system is, what it does, and why it is important.
The system that works for you might be different, but some version of an evaluate, backlog, operationalize approach can help you.
It’s not about keeping up with everything, it’s about keeping up with the right things to help you keep building what matters (including your own knowledge).
Take the wins, you’re further ahead than you think
AI should make you faster. But if it replaces the part where you actually think things through or develop your understanding, it doesn’t move you forward. It just makes you quicker at doing things that don’t move the needle.
Last week I was showing a friend OnTimer over Zoom. After he onboarded I watched him try to tap on a calendar event on his homescreen. When nothing happened, I realized there was a mismatch between user expectation and functionality.
Five minutes after the call I was in Claude Code building ‘event cards’ to fix this. I hadn’t thought through how these would actually be valuable for users, I just started building. Eventually I caught myself. I thought about my North Star and what I’m trying to achieve, and quickly realized this wasn’t the thing I should be focused on right now.
With AI it’s super-easy to get ‘ahead of your skis’. You can do anything, so you try to do everything. But there’s too much to consume: there are new tools, new playbooks, and new opportunities emerging faster than you can digest them. This isn’t going to slow down anytime soon, so we need to adjust our expectations of what ‘keeping up’ means in an AI-driven world.
The anxiety is compounded by social media which often overstates impact, over-hypes new and shiny things, and over-indexes on huge wins instead of the normal grind. There’s a lot of noise, and as a builder if you can’t cut through it, you’ll probably lose your mind.
AI is giving us incredible access to unlock ingenuity and innovation. If you’re building a mobile app or have already launched one, you are already in an elite group, and you should feel awesome about it. You’re further ahead than you think. Don’t let the feeling of being behind convince you that you actually are.