---
title: Am I getting dumber or just faster
date: 2026-10-11
place: Vancouver, BC
author: Sean Bruce-Hayes
---

# Am I getting dumber or just faster

Sunday is my mountain office day. I love hiking up Grouse, so I pack a laptop, charger, headphones and a change of clothes and take my work up with me. The weight is the point on the way up. The view is the point when I stop.

I've usually got three or four things going. Building and working in VS Code with both Codex and Claude at the same time, talking to Leeroy in the ChatGPT app and having him drive my browser on a task, sorting out accounting, working on the dashboard I use to keep track of my own stuff. And now writing this.

It's crazy how much I have my AIs doing now and how they talk to each other and sort things out that I used to be more involved in.

That's most of how I work now. Give something instructions, let it run, check it, send it back if it's wrong. There's usually a terminal still pondering something while I've moved on to the next thing.

I used to need someone else to do a lot of this. Someone who knew the platform, someone who could build the thing. Now I can get through a lot of it myself in an afternoon, without waiting for someone to be available.

But I was thinking about how much of it I actually understand.

I've never opened the PostHog dashboard. My analytics come through a dashboard I've had built, and that's what I look at. I use PostHog, but I couldn't tell you where anything is in it.

A few years ago I'd have spent hours in there learning where everything was. Now I'm looking for tools with a CLI so I can tell the model what I need and let it do the work.

It's quicker. I'm also not learning the tool the way I would have before.

I don't know if that makes me dumber. It does mean there are things I'm using every week that I'd struggle to operate on my own.

What I still have to do is read what comes back. I'll get a number that doesn't look right, or a summary of a deal that doesn't match the conversation I remember. I'll push back and it'll change its answer. That happens often enough that I don't just accept the first thing it gives me.

With those things, I've got something to check against. I know the deal. I know roughly what the number should be.

It's the stuff I don't know that makes me wonder. If I haven't learned how something works, how much am I going to miss when I check it?

I'm getting more done. I just don't think getting more done answers the question.