I’m having the best time in my high-tech career — and my brain feels a bit toasted

I’m having the best time in my high-tech career — and my brain feels a bit toasted

A quiet note from the middle of an unexpectedly intense second act

There is a version of this story I would have told five years ago.

It would go something like this:

you reach a certain point in your career, things stabilize, your strengths are known, your weaknesses are managed, and your days become… predictable. Not easy, but contained. The problems are familiar. The pace is survivable.

That version of the story is no longer available to me.

Instead, I find myself in what is, objectively, the most exhilarating stretch of my entire high-tech career.

And yet — by late afternoon on most days — my brain feels slightly toasted.

Not burnt out. Not defeated.

Just… overclocked.

⸻

What changed is not just the tools.

It’s the surface area of thinking that suddenly expanded.

A task that used to require one lane of thought now opens five.

A problem that once had a known playbook now arrives as a blank field — with multiple viable directions, each worth exploring.

And then there are the AI agents.

They don’t replace thinking.

They multiply it.

⸻

There is another shift I didn’t expect.

For a good part of my career, I managed teams — especially internal tooling teams. I wasn’t the one writing every line of code, but I was very good at something else: breaking down problems, setting direction, and knowing just enough of the implementation details to keep things moving without getting lost in them.

I knew where things could go wrong.

I knew what “good” should look like.

And I knew how to guide a team there.

That muscle never really goes away.

⸻

What changed recently is… who I’m guiding.

Now I find myself doing something eerily familiar — with tools like Claude and Codex.

I don’t start from scratch.

I frame the problem.

I outline the constraints.

I nudge the direction.

And then — execution happens.

Not in days.

Not in hours.

Sometimes in minutes.

⸻

The strange part is this:

The shape of the work feels almost identical to managing a capable engineering team.

But the latency has collapsed.

What used to be a back-and-forth cycle —

spec → clarification → iteration → review → fix —

has compressed into something continuous.

You think, you prompt, you get a result.

You refine, you redirect, it adapts.

You are no longer pacing a team.

You are keeping up with your own thinking, amplified.

⸻

There’s also a quieter comparison I keep coming back to.

In my previous life, I spent a significant amount of energy on the people side of the work — scouting for the right engineers, helping them grow, figuring out how to bring out their best performance.

That part was meaningful.

But it was also… exhausting in a very specific way.

Not intellectually exhausting.

Emotionally and operationally exhausting.

Every decision had layers — skills, personalities, timing, communication styles. Progress depended not just on clarity of thought, but on alignment across people.

And alignment is expensive.

⸻

Now, that entire layer has largely disappeared.

There’s no need to motivate.

No need to calibrate personalities.

No need to repeat context three times in three different ways.

The system responds.

Immediately.

Consistently.

Without friction.

⸻

And yet, something else has taken its place.

The energy I used to spend managing people

has been converted almost entirely into pure thinking.

Fewer interruptions.

Fewer negotiations.

But far more decisions, packed closer together.

⸻

There’s another shift I’m still adjusting to.

In the past, a surprising amount of my energy didn’t go into solving problems — it went into fighting for the chance to solve them.

Getting the right engineering resources.

Making the case.

Negotiating priorities.

Coaxing for the output you knew was possible.

Even when everything worked, the cycle stretched — weeks, sometimes months — between intention and implementation.

And in that gap, momentum would fade.

Context would decay.

Good ideas would quietly lose their edge.

⸻

Now, that entire layer has thinned out almost overnight.

The bottleneck isn’t access anymore.

It’s clarity.

Because once the problem is framed well enough,

the result shows up — not in weeks, but in seconds.

⸻

Something that would have required multiple conversations, handoffs, and follow-ups

simply… appears.

Not always perfect.

But close enough to move forward immediately.

⸻

And that changes how you think.

You stop hoarding ideas for “when resources are available.”

You start testing them the moment they form.

You stop negotiating for bandwidth.

You start managing your own attention.

⸻

Which leads to a realization that still catches me off guard.

At any given moment, I’m effectively working with the most responsive “engineer” I could have ever hoped for.

Not because it replaces great human engineers — far from it — but because the interaction is so immediate, so frictionless, that the gap between intention and execution almost disappears.

It feels less like delegating work

and more like thinking out loud — with instant implementation.

⸻

And maybe that’s where the “toasted brain” comes from.

The pauses are gone.

What used to be a paced conversation

has turned into a continuous stream.

I’m no longer waiting on a team.

I’m keeping up with a loop.

And that loop runs at a speed where the only real bottleneck left… is my own thinking.

⸻

There’s one more adjustment I’ve had to make.

I’ve started to deliberately slow myself down.

Not by doing less,

but by sequencing how I think.

⸻

Mornings are for high-frequency work — problem framing, iteration, rapid loops with AI.

Afternoons are different.

I shift to slower, more linear tasks — writing, reviewing, organizing, sometimes just thinking without immediately turning thoughts into execution.

The goal isn’t productivity.

It’s recovery.

⸻

I’m beginning to see this as a new kind of boundary.

Not between work and life,

but within work itself.

Between high-frequency thinking

and human-paced reflection.

⸻

And in the end, this is what stays with me.

This is the best time of my working life.

Not because it is easier,

but because I can finally see — clearly — the distance we’ve traveled.

I’ve lived through the slower years,

the constrained years,

the years where ideas had to wait their turn.

Which makes this moment feel almost improbable.

⸻

To still be here,

long enough to witness this shift —

and more than that, to take part in it —

not watching from a distance,

but working inside it —

is something I don’t take for granted.