I Built a Filter for Everybody Except Me

A little over three months ago, I published a post with four AI agents in the title.

The title still sounds slightly ridiculous. The morning it described was real.

Three agents were working in three other browser tabs. One was auditing SmartCue. Another was working on Mark IT, my family's business. Another was setting up ads for Gramms. I was in the fourth tab, talking to a chatbot about my life.

The tabs were useful because they made the whole thing visible. I could look up and see work happening in four directions at once. That was the story in May. The guy who had spent most of his career able to describe things but unable to build them suddenly had hands everywhere.

By late June, some of the work had moved out of the tabs and onto a calendar. I had an agent reviewing Mark IT every Monday, deciding what needed attention and just doing it, no interference required from me. Others were asking customers for reviews or trying to revive old relationships. SmartCue had its own version. It fixes bugs and builds small improvements over the weekend, pushes them to our dev environment, and waits for me to approve.

I remember describing this into another one of these biography sessions from a balcony in Georgia. I said it was pretty exciting.

It was. It still is.

It had also started to feel normal.

The trip I was supposed to take off

A few days later, still in Georgia, I recorded a note about a trip I had planned to Sri Lanka. The idea was to take two weeks off and learn to kite surf. I wanted to leave the laptop shut. I was worried I would come home even further behind.

I already wrote about what happened on that trip, including the cut foot that sent me home a week early and the people I met while I was there. That essay did not include one other thing that happened.

The Sri Lanka trip ended up lasting seven days out of the planned 14. Maybe four of them passed without me really opening the laptop.

When I did open it, I worked on things outside my day job. I moved Gramms along. I built a wine app called Punt because I like wine, I use the apps that already exist, and I think they could be better.

The break did what I had hoped. I came home refreshed and full of MORE ideas. So it also gave me another thing to run.

Punt was not in the plan I use for the portfolio. I wanted to build it, so I did.

That is such a perfect description of the actual problem. And if you're following along, you probably saw this and said, "Robin, stop! Not ONE MORE THING!"

Why I need the filter

I am quite easily influenced by what is happening around me. I have no idea whether I am more affected than other people. I just know the effect it has on me.

I see what somebody else is doing and start wondering whether I should do it too. If I let enough of that in, I can forget what I wanted and others' reality starts to become mine. Took me a long time to realize this and I'm still working through it. So, over the past year, I have tried to become fairly ruthless about protecting my attention from other people.

I use the "Mark All as Read" button in WhatsApp almost every day so I don't read things and get affected. I deleted Instagram and Facebook, then Gramms forced me back onto Instagram, so I unfollowed almost everybody and kept roughly twenty accounts I actually wanted influencing me. I archive emails I don't need to act on, even when courtesy says I should reply. I decline meetings without a clear reason for me to be there. I am perennially offline on Slack and Teams. This probably rubs some people the wrong way. It also isolates me a little. I have knowingly decided to pay that price because I know what I need to do.

Then, after Sri Lanka, I heard myself say this in one of my introspection sessions with my AI (I realize how ridiculous that sounds!):

On the other hand, with all this drive to focus on a few things, I also see, realize, and acknowledge the irony that I'm trying to build so many things with AI.

There it was.

Every filter I had built pointed outward. None of them did anything about the demands I create for myself.

The sentence I did not understand

AI did not give me this appetite. I have always liked ideas, especially new ones. It simply shortened the distance between wanting something and watching it begin.

There is a line in the May post that I read differently now:

AI is good at doing the work I tell it to do, very precisely. It is bad at deciding what work to do.

At the time, I spent the rest of the post on the first sentence. I wrote about articulation, context, and explaining what good looked like. The second sentence was just sitting there.

The agents cannot decide whether I genuinely want another thing to own. They cannot tell me whether an idea is mine or something I borrowed from a person I was watching. They do not know whether I will still care about it after the interesting part is over.

I don't always know either. But maybe this session itself is Step 0 in that direction?

The list is still long

I would love to say this was followed by a ruthless pruning of the portfolio. It wasn't.

I am still interested in all of it. I still like waking up with an idea and seeing a real version of it sooner than I would have believed possible a year ago. It is really fun! I don't want to write it away because focus sounds more respectable.

I can see the contradiction. I have not decided what to do with it yet.

In May, I ended the post with a line I still like: "The work happens regardless."

That was the freedom I wanted. I could close the laptop. I could leave the room.

On WhatsApp, two clicks marks everything as read. I use it all the time.

I would genuinely like that button for some of my own ideas.

In the meantime, Punt exists.

Try it and tell me if it was worth it?