The Work Never Finishes. 0state

I can have five or six agents working and still feel like I should have started another one.

There is always something else. A feature I wanted to build. A business that needs attention. A piece of code that could be better. The tools have made it possible to get through work that would once have taken much longer, and somehow that hasn’t produced the obvious result of having less work to do.

I’m 43. I’ve been in technology since my early twenties, started and exited businesses, and taught myself along the way. I’m still running several businesses and pushing code daily. I love this work. That is part of what makes the question difficult.

It would be easier to explain if I hated it. You could say the job was making me miserable, tell me to take a holiday, and feel that we’d identified the problem. But building things is absorbing. Watching something work that existed only as an idea is a good feeling. Being able to do more of it is an extraordinary opportunity.

The opportunity does not come with a stopping point.

I know this habit

When I was younger, I put myself through all manner of hardship to prove that I was worthy. That I deserved a seat at the table. I can only speak for myself here, but a lot of what looked like adventure also carried that need.

I travelled alone for months through China and Central Asia, including Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. At one point everything was stolen. I lived on the street and loaded trucks to survive.

Those experiences helped make me the person I am. I learned things about myself that I could not have learned by reading another book about confidence. There is a difference between believing you can deal with something and having dealt with it.

But I also recognise the bargain underneath it: once I have endured enough, achieved enough, proved enough, perhaps I will be allowed to feel that I belong.

A business gives that bargain endless material. There is always another milestone that might settle the question. More money, a better product, another exit, a larger number on a screen. You can keep moving the condition for being satisfied without ever noticing that the condition was yours to begin with.

AI hasn’t invented that habit for me. It has given it a very efficient way to stay busy.

More capacity changes what you choose to do

When a task becomes much cheaper to start, more tasks begin to look reasonable.

Something that wasn’t worth a week may be worth an afternoon. Something that wasn’t worth an afternoon may be worth asking an agent to investigate while you work on something else. Some of that is valuable. Work that was permanently postponed becomes possible. Small teams can attempt things they could not have staffed before.

It also changes the queue. The list you are working through was never fixed. Completing one thing can reveal three more, and the cost of starting them can feel almost negligible.

Research on AI at work has described task expansion, multitasking, and work spreading into more of the day. I recognise the pattern: the time saved on one task becomes room to start another.¹

There is another distinction I find useful: how much faster something can be done and how much it was worth doing. METR separates those questions in its 2026 survey of technical workers. It asks workers about their experience; it doesn’t measure their output directly. The distinction between speed and value is the part that stays with me.²

Was this task important? Was it interesting? Did I start it because it helped the business, or because the capacity was sitting there? Those answers can overlap. I don’t think every enjoyable experiment needs a commercial justification. I do think I should know which kind of work I’m choosing.

There is still one person paying attention

Delegation changes the work I do. It doesn’t remove the responsibility for what I accept.

Across several businesses, each project can have a perfectly reasonable next task. The total can still exceed the attention one person has available. Looking at each queue separately makes it easy to miss that. Every request has a case. Every improvement has a benefit. There are still only so many things I can properly care about at once.

An agent finishing its task can create another decision for me. Does the result make sense? Is it the right thing to ship? Does it fit what already exists? More work in progress means more of those decisions arriving, even when the work itself is good.

I don’t want to pretend that automation only adds pressure. It can remove tedious work and give time back. The uncomfortable part is what I choose to do with the time. If I immediately fill it, the tool may have done exactly what I asked while the day remains just as full.

“I’ll stop when I’m done” becomes a strange promise when the work can keep generating its own next step.

There is a difference between a task I can’t stop and a task I don’t want to stop. A customer waiting on a fix has a claim on my attention. An agent offering three more improvements does not automatically have the same claim. I need to make that distinction before opening another branch, while I still have a choice about what the evening becomes.

Getting back into the body

I spent years training martial arts for hours a day. I loved combat: the feeling of being in the centre of chaos and being able to deal with what was coming at me.

That kind of practice gives you feedback you can’t talk your way around. Balance, contact, timing, fatigue, another person responding to what you actually did. You can have a convincing explanation in your head and still be in the wrong place.

I attribute a lot of my ability to stay centred to that training. It gave me a relationship with myself outside the stream of thoughts, plans, and evaluations. It is part of my education and part of why I can work the way I do without entirely disappearing into it.

The tech world can be extreme inside the head. A whole day can happen in abstractions: systems, money, imagined futures, possible failures. Physical activity gives me another kind of attention to work with.

I also don’t want to make every hour outside work justify itself by producing a better worker afterwards. Training has its own value. So does art. So does being somewhere beautiful without turning it into a plan.

Other people have a claim on your time

My girlfriend gets antsy if we don’t get out for some kind of outdoor adventure on the weekend. That has been good for me. To be properly with her, I have to disconnect from the work.

There is something useful about another person’s time being involved. A task can always be reopened. An afternoon together is happening now. Being technically present while thinking about a queue is a poor substitute for being there.

I need to make room for that time. The important people in my life cannot keep waiting for the work to finish, because I can always find more work.

I am also aware that I have choices many people don’t. Someone dealing with a demanding employer, insecure work, or caring responsibilities may not control when the day ends. Advice from a founder can become irritating very quickly when it treats every constraint as a mindset problem.

What I can examine honestly is the pressure I add myself, including when I have the option to stop.

You don’t have to earn every ordinary pleasure

I worry about people trying to work out who they are while every part of life is competing for their attention. That includes younger people who have never known a working world without constant digital contact. I wonder where they get the chance to find their own centre, away from the version of themselves the internet keeps asking them to become.

But I recognise the feeling of being behind. Of having been shown a life you’re meant to achieve and deciding that, until you get there, you haven’t earned the right to relax.

There is no obvious amount of success that ends that calculation. If you are not enjoying the journey, I wouldn’t assume the destination will suddenly teach you how.

I still want to build things. I still get excited by what these tools make possible. I want to keep the curiosity without handing every spare moment to the part of me that thinks I need to prove something.

Be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. Practise art, and do it for the sake of creation.