My Abstraction Crisis: Staying Oriented While AI Keeps Moving the Goalposts

I’ve never been able to build this fast in my life. And I’ve never felt this unstable. The hardest part of building with AI right now isn’t writing code. It’s watching something you’re excited to build become “already handled” shortly after you start. Not because you failed, but because the level of the game changed once again. That mental whiplash feeds almost daily into what I’ve been calling my abstraction crisis. AI has changed the economics of building. Execution is cheaper. Tooling is denser. What used to take weeks now takes hours. So my bottleneck isn’t output anymore. It’s direction. What’s worth building when agents can turn half your backlog into working drafts overnight? What do you bet on when the foundations keep shifting in real time? The moment it hits One day I’m wiring tools together and I feel ahead. My workflow is smooth, my pace is high, and it feels like I found compounding leverage. Then the world shifts. A capability lands. An integration becomes default. Sudden