I don’t know what to call the exact phenomenon but it seems like everyone is trying to crack the nut of “AI harnesses”. People are building more harnesses than there are people using them!
I thought I had heard this referred to as a “brain bug” but searching for this term implies I imagined this. Nerd-sniping sort of fits, but not in a macro sense. Someone suggested “ear-worm for ideas”. Doesn’t quite ring.
Most productivity porn fits into this mold, and has long before AI. Whether it’s the hundreds of lines of emacs and tmux config files I have, or the umpteen todo/ticket/task trackers I’ve tried, or various workflow optimizations, it’s likely just a form of procrastination (obligatory second xkcd).
I think there are two things that are Different This Time™. One, the automation investment is much smaller when you can vibe code throwaway snippets for personal use (see: glue code) or even full-scale software. So the things that used to sit as “ideas” or dreams on a list or in your head can now become realities, and evict the brain bug out of your brain. This is good! Get those ideas out of your system so you can fill up with new ones. (In fact, I’ve been slowly working through using all my accumulated domains in part just to rid myself of the mental burden!)
The other thing about automation/procrastination specifically, though, is that we likely should each individually build our own little personal productivity app. We all work and think differently and the exact workflow or organizational quirks I like are not the same as yours. So why do we shoehorn ourselves into others’ tooling?
Recently I built a little agentic wiki/note-taking tool. It probably wouldn’t be useful for you, and I probably won’t release it since nobody would use it anyway. And it turns out it’s very freeing to be able to craft it exactly to how my brain works so it can solve my problems.
So in fact, I’d encourage everyone to build their own tooling. Build your perfect dashboard or email client or todo list, wiki, agent orchestrator, whatever you want to call it. Don’t build on others, go full Not-Invented-Here and make it YOURS. What’s even better, is that if you deliberately never make it public you don’t feel the pressure to make it look “legitimate” or polished or “real”. You can make it as wonky as you want, to match exactly how your brain thinks.
It’s a very liberating experience.