For a long time now the news and the roundups have all said the same thing. AI will take away the busywork. It will kill the friction. It will hand you wings, a cure-all for whatever ails you.

I installed Claude Code, and the friction is gone. An idea now costs an evening to test, not a month.

Then it turned out the friction mattered to me, and once it was gone, I felt that in full.

I am not a junior who just discovered autocomplete. I have been writing code for twenty-five years.

Ideas drop like flies

For twenty-five years I had one quiet comfort: "if I ever really went for it, oh boy."

Somewhere in my head sat a drawer of ideas I would get to someday. Not because I couldn't build them. I just never got around to them. And an untested idea is pure hope. Maybe this one is the one. Maybe I am actually worth something.

Testing an idea was expensive: evenings, energy I do not have after work. So the drawer stayed full. Expensive means later.

Claude Code dropped the cost of testing to zero. Want it? Working prototype by tonight.

So I started pulling ideas out of the drawer, one by one. And they started dying. Quietly, fast, like flies. The one that was going to be huge turns out mediocre by the third evening. The next one is worse.

A month in, an ugly thing dawned on me. The idea was never the valuable part. The hope before testing was. The friction worked as anesthesia: it kept me from feeling that the drawer is mostly junk. I had an endless supply of brilliant ideas precisely because I never tested them.

The endless self-improvement loop

The second half is funnier, because it looks like something useful.

You sit down to do the thing. Say, post to Telegram. The built-in tools can't do it. Fine, let's write our own sender. And let's have the model run through the subscription I already pay for, not the API. And let's make the sender add its own workflows. And let's have those workflows write workflows.

# what I sat down to do:     post one message to Telegram
# what I had by 2 a.m.:
~/projects/telegram-sender/
  └─ plugins/                # it can add its own workflows now
     └─ plugins/             # and the workflows write workflows
# users: 1 (me)

By 2 a.m. I do not have a Telegram post. I have a tiny AI newsroom full of agents, with exactly one user.

Research is the same story. The built-in one is mediocre, so let's write our own. Properly. With blackjack and programmatic quality gates. Memory is its own saga: let's try a hundred implementations, bolt on codegraph, then something else. By morning it is a monster nobody understands. I look at it with a clear head, see that half of it has to go, delete it, and start a fresh lap the next day.

The thing I sat down to do never got done. But it's all perfect.

What used to save me was the price. Writing my own sender was a few days of work, so I grabbed something off the shelf and went and did the job. Claude Code made "let's just write our own" free. So now I pick "our own" every time. Every single time. Forever.

The friction was a brake

I put the two problems together and saw it is one problem.

The friction I grumbled about for twenty-five years was a brake. Expensive to test an idea, and the weak ones quietly stayed in the drawer with the hope. Expensive to roll my own, and I grabbed something ready and went to do the work. The barrier filtered junk on the way in and kept me out of the rabbit holes on the way out. The whole time I called it the enemy.

Claude Code removed the friction. And the brakes with it. Now nothing slows me down. Ideas die under instant testing. Self-improvement runs for the sake of self-improvement. AI did not remove the busywork. It removed the excuse. And behind the excuse, it turns out, no great version of me was waiting.

So now what

The funny part: by every metric I am more productive. Agents spinning everywhere, prototypes by evening, tools built to fit my hand, tests, gates. A perfect homemade sender that, for some reason, I never use. I have never gotten so much done.

There is just not much left to get done. The ideas are tested and buried, the dream right behind them, and all my energy pours into late-night platforms with one user.

I used to have an excuse: "once I clear the decks, then." Good excuse. Kept me warm for years. Claude Code took it. And it seems the only thing left for me to figure out, with its help, is how to put some friction back. Life used to install the brakes for me.

Seniors with a couple of decades in: was your friction load-bearing too? Or did losing it actually set you free?

Juniors: you started without the friction. Does any of this land, or does it read like a guy mad at his own productivity?