Biosphere 2 grew tall trees sealed in a dome in the Arizona desert. They had everything they needed to grow well, and they did. Then they fell over. They had no wind so never needed to be strong.
We're losing our resistance
Since I started using Claude Code back in the spring of 2025 I've slowly started to feel the resistance to work go away. At first, it was just little bits here and there, but on Sonnet and Opus 4.5 there was still lots of resistance. But now, I'm fully in the biosphere - resistance is primarily how many agents I can get spun up to do my bidding. Codex 5.6, Fable 5, etc - the resistance is gone.
Building more and more
I keep building more and more. Mobile apps, web apps, shipping and shipping. But without resistance I have been seeing my projects trees keep falling over. When I first started AudioBrevity I was just using some CoPilot auto-completes and it was hand-baked and it had my full attention and I wasn't going to let it go. Now, it seems projects come and go and I have to force myself to pay attention to them.
Without resistance I stop quickly
Since soft-launching NORDVEST I've been doing sales and marketing as well. I've used AI to remove as much friction from this as possible but I'm still highly engaged in this because I can't stand the things Claude or Codex write. I am still having to make phone calls, reach out, get rejected. ...and I keep finding myself just not doing things because it's not as easy as having my agents writing another few features. I've grown weak. My work muscles are atrophying.
The Fix?
If the wind's gone, I have to make my own. But I want to be careful what kind - because not all resistance is created equal.
Not No AI Tuesdays
I remember reading about 2G Tuesdays at Facebook Meta - one day a week they throttled the whole office to a slow connection so the team actually felt what their users felt. Should I do the AI version and turn the agents off on Tuesdays?
I think not. That's manufacturing fake friction - choosing to walk to work when I own a car. The resistance I actually need isn't artificial. It's already sitting in my inbox: the follow-up I didn't send, the handful of AudioBrevity users I never wrote back. I don't need to invent wind. I need to stop hiding from the wind that's already blowing.
Learning to stay
So the real question isn't how to make work harder in the right ways. It's how to keep progressing when the work stops being the easy, frictionless build - when it's the boring middle of a real thing that's gone quiet. Maybe I need a Brain Gym - but pointed at staying power, not just focus. A few reps I'm trying:
- Do the un-fun rep first. The fifth cold call before I let myself spin up another agent. Pay the resistance before I collect the dopamine.
- Stay with one tree. Give the quiet project my attention back instead of planting a new one - because planting is the easy, frictionless part, and I know it.
- Keep something AI can't do for me. I'm hand-writing this post instead of letting AI write it. Maybe more piano, maybe a new language - something with no agent to feed and no shortcut to take.
The trees didn't fall. I stopped holding them up.
Here's the part I don't like admitting. My trees didn't topple in some storm. A few people signed up for AudioBrevity - not enough to pull me forward - so I just... let it sit. NORDVEST's sales calls started great, then did what every B2B pipeline does: went quiet. People are busy. Nothing moved right away.
None of that is a failure of the build. The build was the easy, frictionless part - the part I'm good at now that AI made it cheap. The wind is everything else: the boring follow-up, the fifth cold call, sitting with a thing that isn't working yet. That's the resistance I used to be forced through, and it's exactly the muscle I've let go soft.
The trees didn't fall. I stopped showing up to hold them up. So the real question isn't whether the wind is coming - it's whether I'll still be standing there when it does.