I think what you're describing almost feels like the "ripe bananas" problem. You've got six ripe bananas in the cabinet, so you feel compelled to eat them every day before they go bad (even though bananas are some of the cheapest fruit in many countries).
I don't think though that the solution is to create more output and get your value. A good frameshift might be seeing the investment as the ability to use AI heavily if you need it. It's the abundance mindset as applied to AI. Instead of "I need to eat all these bananas" it becomes "bananas are relatively cheap, so I always keep them around in case I'm throwing a banana party on short notice." The analogy falls off the rails there lol, but you see the pattern everywhere.
Anyway, on the front of humans being the bottleneck, you might like Rich Carr's work (https://substack.com/@braincentric). The thrust of it is that "more is not the answer," and setting up systems to filter the firehose before the human needs to sift it is a good idea to avoid bottlenecking. You could apply that here to say that it's more valuable to consumers to have a few low-output products than to consume multiple high output ones. The flip is that you're now charging consumers to *NOT* provide (lower-value) content. It's a trippy inversion. Kind of like how I pay a strength coach to make sure I *don't* do all the exercises I want to (and drive myself into the ground).
Rich also talks a lot about the skills to sift what's left over (He calls this problem "discernment"). He's also got a framework he calls Premium Thinking that you might find interesting. He doesn't know I'm endorsing him, but I've had some great back-and-forth with him and he's a sharp guy.
The ripe bananas reframe actually unlocks something I was stuck on.
My mental model was "I'm accumulating tasks I should be completing" → which creates exactly the stress of watching fruit go bad.
Shifting to "I have capacity on standby" changes the emotional relationship entirely. The goal isn't to clear the queue. It's to have the queue available. The inversion you're pointing to about Rich Carr is the thing that's been bothering me without me naming it. I've been framing this project as "building more efficiently." But the value I actually provide is editorial judgment.
Knowing which 5 of the 40 tasks Wiz generates actually matter this week - that's the irreplaceable thing. The discernment is the product, not the output. And you're right that it's a trippy model. Discernment is invisible. When a good curator works, you see 5 excellent things and wonder if they're even trying. The 200 filtered-out things never appear. The personal trainer analogy is the best articulation of this I've heard - you're paying specifically for someone to tell you not to do the thing you want to do. Most of the value is the no.
The challenge is that "I help you produce less (but better)" is a hard thing to charge for when every other tool in the market promises more. People don't feel the value of restraint until they've experienced the alternative. Going to look into the Premium Thinking framework. The name is slightly over-engineered but the problem it names is real. Thanks for the pointer.
Hey not a problem at all, and I'm glad you were able to unlock that :)
Your reply launched some other thoughts.
On first glance, it seems like marketing the value of restraint is difficult for the reasons you said. It's mostly invisible. But charging more for less is only strange in the traditional attention economy. In that arena, less is not more because more is more. More content leads to more shots on goal leads to more subs.
But there's lots of precedence for this in other domains. Instead of farming big numbers, likes, and followers, you're striving for high visibility and product differentiation. Maybe like Peloton, who offers a clean, minimalist, and streamlined stationary bike with prestige. Their notoriety far outstrips the number of people who actually own their bikes. Or early Apple, who only offered four-ish REALLY streamlined products and who made it their life's mission to strip away every button on the iPhone.
The strategy then shifts a little too. Instead of 80% of your time being content creation and 20% on marketing, you spend only say 20% of your time creating new products, and 80% of your time promoting and marketing. It might even be a little more sustainable than being on the creator treadmill the whole time.
Love this perspecitve. I think you are right. It matters less, for some operations and execution part and more for creative ideas and direction. So I would say there’s a shift in value.
this feels like the same trap honestly, just from a different angle. the faster things get, the less anything actually slows you down.
I’ve noticed finishing something early doesn’t give me time back, it just makes me start the next thing right away. I end up doing more just because it’s there
My first thought—“Because your products are intended for people”—what if you developed products or services where other agents are the actual customers or users?
Then the two of them could discuss and negotiate what’s still flawed or missing in terms of functionality and value for money, without you having to make the decision. All without your necessary intervention, right? You’d just set the desired outcome—satisfaction, profit, etc.—whatever you prefer.
Interesting take, but what would be the real value here? What kind of product for bot/agents make sense right now? IMHO → it would need to be something to either improve AI Agent architecture(but also opens to risk) or direct value for human behind that AI Agent.
If we're looking for where the architecture actually meets human value, I think the "missing link" is something like Trust-as-a-Service (TaaS) for the Agent Economy.
It’s basically the "D-Space" from Daniel Suarez’s Daemon brought to life. In the book, the "Darknet" operated on reputation scores and XP visible over people’s heads—a dead developer’s vision of a self-regulating society. We need a non-lethal, professional version of that for the Agent Age.
Here’s how a bot-centric trust product would actually work:
The Architecture (Chainlink & Mutual Rating): Instead of every dev cramming heavy, latency-inducing guardrails into their agents, bots "query" a real-time reputation score from a decentralized clearinghouse. To keep it bulletproof, the protocol enforces a mutual rating system: after every interaction, both agents must rate each other’s performance. This data is stored on-chain via Chainlink, making it immutable and platform-agnostic. My bot sees your bot’s "Karma Level" before we even burn a single token.
The Human Value: This gives us delegated peace of mind. The real value isn't a better UI; it's the ability to stop babysitting every task. I just set a high-level policy: "Only transact with agents that have a verified Level 50 trust rating on the network."
Basically, we’re moving from "isolated tools" to a "trusted network." We don't need better chat interfaces; we need a way for bots to verify each other's integrity using a transparent, automated ledger so we can finally step out of the loop.
Does that bridge the gap for you, or is the "Daemon" scenario exactly what you're afraid of?
Hahaha Pawel we are living parallel lives my brotha 😂
Once the AI’s are dialed in it’s wild how fast everything accelerates… and suddenly you’re not “saving time,” you’re just running 16+ hour days in a factory that literally never sleeps. I’m right there with you... lol sleep is basically a suggestion at this point.
But dude I’m having an absolute blast, almost none of this feels like work anymore. My biggest complaint is that I don’t have enough energy left at the end of the day to dive even deeper into the stuff that really excites me, like how quantum computing is eventually going to crash into all this AI magic. The whole idea is just fascinating as hell.
You nailed it, man. The productivity paradox is real… and weirdly addictive.
Oh, I think we have very similar feelings here. I am also having a blast :D
The thing is - when I hypefocus on that one thing and go all in, rest of areas of life…well, let’s say they become less important. But to stay sharp, I think we need balance! I need, at least!
I think what you're describing almost feels like the "ripe bananas" problem. You've got six ripe bananas in the cabinet, so you feel compelled to eat them every day before they go bad (even though bananas are some of the cheapest fruit in many countries).
I don't think though that the solution is to create more output and get your value. A good frameshift might be seeing the investment as the ability to use AI heavily if you need it. It's the abundance mindset as applied to AI. Instead of "I need to eat all these bananas" it becomes "bananas are relatively cheap, so I always keep them around in case I'm throwing a banana party on short notice." The analogy falls off the rails there lol, but you see the pattern everywhere.
Anyway, on the front of humans being the bottleneck, you might like Rich Carr's work (https://substack.com/@braincentric). The thrust of it is that "more is not the answer," and setting up systems to filter the firehose before the human needs to sift it is a good idea to avoid bottlenecking. You could apply that here to say that it's more valuable to consumers to have a few low-output products than to consume multiple high output ones. The flip is that you're now charging consumers to *NOT* provide (lower-value) content. It's a trippy inversion. Kind of like how I pay a strength coach to make sure I *don't* do all the exercises I want to (and drive myself into the ground).
Rich also talks a lot about the skills to sift what's left over (He calls this problem "discernment"). He's also got a framework he calls Premium Thinking that you might find interesting. He doesn't know I'm endorsing him, but I've had some great back-and-forth with him and he's a sharp guy.
Thanks for the interesting read, and cheers 🥂
The ripe bananas reframe actually unlocks something I was stuck on.
My mental model was "I'm accumulating tasks I should be completing" → which creates exactly the stress of watching fruit go bad.
Shifting to "I have capacity on standby" changes the emotional relationship entirely. The goal isn't to clear the queue. It's to have the queue available. The inversion you're pointing to about Rich Carr is the thing that's been bothering me without me naming it. I've been framing this project as "building more efficiently." But the value I actually provide is editorial judgment.
Knowing which 5 of the 40 tasks Wiz generates actually matter this week - that's the irreplaceable thing. The discernment is the product, not the output. And you're right that it's a trippy model. Discernment is invisible. When a good curator works, you see 5 excellent things and wonder if they're even trying. The 200 filtered-out things never appear. The personal trainer analogy is the best articulation of this I've heard - you're paying specifically for someone to tell you not to do the thing you want to do. Most of the value is the no.
The challenge is that "I help you produce less (but better)" is a hard thing to charge for when every other tool in the market promises more. People don't feel the value of restraint until they've experienced the alternative. Going to look into the Premium Thinking framework. The name is slightly over-engineered but the problem it names is real. Thanks for the pointer.
Hey not a problem at all, and I'm glad you were able to unlock that :)
Your reply launched some other thoughts.
On first glance, it seems like marketing the value of restraint is difficult for the reasons you said. It's mostly invisible. But charging more for less is only strange in the traditional attention economy. In that arena, less is not more because more is more. More content leads to more shots on goal leads to more subs.
But there's lots of precedence for this in other domains. Instead of farming big numbers, likes, and followers, you're striving for high visibility and product differentiation. Maybe like Peloton, who offers a clean, minimalist, and streamlined stationary bike with prestige. Their notoriety far outstrips the number of people who actually own their bikes. Or early Apple, who only offered four-ish REALLY streamlined products and who made it their life's mission to strip away every button on the iPhone.
The strategy then shifts a little too. Instead of 80% of your time being content creation and 20% on marketing, you spend only say 20% of your time creating new products, and 80% of your time promoting and marketing. It might even be a little more sustainable than being on the creator treadmill the whole time.
What I find interesting is this doesn’t just create more work, it changes what that work is worth.
If everyone can produce at this level, a lot of it stops mattering in the same way.
So instead of things getting easier, we end up managing more while less of it actually proves useful.
It might be that we need to shift away from more, more, more and consider limiting our scope so we don’t end up losing more than we gain.
Love this perspecitve. I think you are right. It matters less, for some operations and execution part and more for creative ideas and direction. So I would say there’s a shift in value.
this feels like the same trap honestly, just from a different angle. the faster things get, the less anything actually slows you down.
I’ve noticed finishing something early doesn’t give me time back, it just makes me start the next thing right away. I end up doing more just because it’s there
100% that! Plus, it is…fun :D
I won’t deny that - I am having fun, even though - I can also feel that it ruins my balance.
My first thought—“Because your products are intended for people”—what if you developed products or services where other agents are the actual customers or users?
Then the two of them could discuss and negotiate what’s still flawed or missing in terms of functionality and value for money, without you having to make the decision. All without your necessary intervention, right? You’d just set the desired outcome—satisfaction, profit, etc.—whatever you prefer.
Interesting take, but what would be the real value here? What kind of product for bot/agents make sense right now? IMHO → it would need to be something to either improve AI Agent architecture(but also opens to risk) or direct value for human behind that AI Agent.
If we're looking for where the architecture actually meets human value, I think the "missing link" is something like Trust-as-a-Service (TaaS) for the Agent Economy.
It’s basically the "D-Space" from Daniel Suarez’s Daemon brought to life. In the book, the "Darknet" operated on reputation scores and XP visible over people’s heads—a dead developer’s vision of a self-regulating society. We need a non-lethal, professional version of that for the Agent Age.
Here’s how a bot-centric trust product would actually work:
The Architecture (Chainlink & Mutual Rating): Instead of every dev cramming heavy, latency-inducing guardrails into their agents, bots "query" a real-time reputation score from a decentralized clearinghouse. To keep it bulletproof, the protocol enforces a mutual rating system: after every interaction, both agents must rate each other’s performance. This data is stored on-chain via Chainlink, making it immutable and platform-agnostic. My bot sees your bot’s "Karma Level" before we even burn a single token.
The Human Value: This gives us delegated peace of mind. The real value isn't a better UI; it's the ability to stop babysitting every task. I just set a high-level policy: "Only transact with agents that have a verified Level 50 trust rating on the network."
Basically, we’re moving from "isolated tools" to a "trusted network." We don't need better chat interfaces; we need a way for bots to verify each other's integrity using a transparent, automated ledger so we can finally step out of the loop.
Does that bridge the gap for you, or is the "Daemon" scenario exactly what you're afraid of?
Hahaha Pawel we are living parallel lives my brotha 😂
Once the AI’s are dialed in it’s wild how fast everything accelerates… and suddenly you’re not “saving time,” you’re just running 16+ hour days in a factory that literally never sleeps. I’m right there with you... lol sleep is basically a suggestion at this point.
But dude I’m having an absolute blast, almost none of this feels like work anymore. My biggest complaint is that I don’t have enough energy left at the end of the day to dive even deeper into the stuff that really excites me, like how quantum computing is eventually going to crash into all this AI magic. The whole idea is just fascinating as hell.
You nailed it, man. The productivity paradox is real… and weirdly addictive.
Keep crushing it buddy and have a great thursday.
Oh, I think we have very similar feelings here. I am also having a blast :D
The thing is - when I hypefocus on that one thing and go all in, rest of areas of life…well, let’s say they become less important. But to stay sharp, I think we need balance! I need, at least!