Process Still Matters

February 6, 2026

It feels like the hype-cycle of AI is never going to end. If you've been online at all in the last year, especially in the twitter-sphere, it feels like its a never ending flood of AI and new world-altering claims.

"Software engineering is done as we know it"

"Writing 20k LOC a day now"

"Clawdbot(aka moltbot aka openclaw) is now doing automating 90% of my life",

On and on and on it goes. It is exhausting. And I've realized that this hype-cycle, in some way, feels like it is advocating for the end goal over the process of getting there. See, I think we all crave the "silver bullet". We want to skip the hard and tedious bits jump to the end. AI is constantly being promoted as this silver bullet to all things software. The narrative that I am seeing lately is that we just need more offloading to AI and we will immediately be producing more software and higher quality software. No need to step into the logic or details ourselves, we can just let AI do it, because the end goal is elevated over the process of getting there.

Note: I know sometimes we really do just want the end goal... I don't churn my own butter, refine my own oil, generate my own electricity, etc etc.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not anti-AI at all. I think it is immensely helpful, but like I have written about before, I think we need to be really careful about offloading our thinking and ignoring the process of getting to the end. I feel this temptation all the time, especially when I am trying to learn new things or in areas I am less experienced in. So often I can feel the urge to "just let AI do it". The other day I was re-writing some of my personal tools from Node.js to Go and as I got to parts I was unfamiliar with or less experienced in, I was tempted to just let AI migrate it for me. Could AI have done it? Easily. But if I just offloaded that difficulty, I would have learned nothing.

And really, this isn't just specific to software and AI, although I think we are feeling it a lot right now in the industry. But what about other areas of life? Want to be fit? Want to be good at an instrument? Want to be a better golfer? You name it, whatever it is, the process matters. We'd love to have a shortcut to success because it's easier and doesn't take our time. However, I think I would argue that the end goal isn't actually worth it without that process of getting there. I think the process in which we do things matters and I want to be careful about being intentional about pushing into the process and not wanting a quick solution.