These days I’ve found myself reading about hardware shortage and how RAM, disk, and NAND manufacturers have all their production for 2026 already sold to AI/Data center companies.
It had me thinking about the strange position compute finds itself in right now.
GPUs weren’t designed for AI. They were designed for graphics as in pushing pixels, rendering triangles. It turned out that the math for doing that at scale overlaps just enough with neural network math. The entire current AI boom runs on repurposed hardware.
AI compute today looks like early computing in some ways (expensive, power-hungry, room-sized) but with a key difference: the general-purpose phase is already behind us. GPUs served that role for over a decade, but now the industry is moving fast toward specialized silicon: Google’s TPUs, Meta’s MTIA, Amazon’s Trainium, Microsoft’s Maia. Even OpenAI is building its own chips. Every hyperscaler has concluded that off-the-shelf isn’t good enough anymore.
And then there are bets and promises. Wafer-scale chips that fit an entire compute cluster on a single piece of silicon. Designs that try to mimic how brains actually work. Optical computing, replacing electrons with light. And the long promised quantum computing. These aren’t products yet, they’re hypotheses about what comes next.
The pattern in computing history is clear: when you hit a physical wall something different emerges. We’re hitting those walls now. Current GPU scaling is running into the limits of what silicon can physically do and we’re solving it by just throwing more hardware and building bigger computing centers. Vacuum tubes hit the same kind of wall. Too hot, too big, too power-hungry, and the answer wasn’t more tubes. It was the transistor, which made everything that followed possible.
Yet almost nobody is talking about it. The conversation is all AI and agents, as if the hardware underneath were a solved problem. It isn’t.
Currently I’m between jobs. Nothing special, a lot of people go between jobs.
After working for several years on a fast-paced startup, you might be tempted to jump back to your next role. You could feel it or not, but you’re likely tired, even close to burnout.
Taking a break between jobs is not just about resting. It’s about taking a step back, reflecting on your work, and finding a new path forward.
If you’re looking for a break, take a break. And the most important thing, don’t try to plan ahead. Don’t try to have a schedule to follow. A break is a break.
I’ve already been a month in, and I’m planning to travel a bit, nothing crazy, just visiting some friends and exploring their cities. Invest time exploring my city since it’s always the most overlooked. Read a lot. Watch a lot of movies and series. Write. And if I feel like it, try to learn a few new things.
My entire strategy is to do the work only I can do.
Work that can’t be taught. Work that requires some unique combination of my skills, opinions, tastes, and experiences. Work that without me, wouldn’t get done.
Everyone’s talking about AI replacing jobs, automating work, making developers obsolete. The discourse is exhausting. Half the people are panicking, the other half are in denial, and nobody seems to be asking the right question.
The question isn’t whether AI can write code. It can. The question is whether AI can do your work.
If your work is following established patterns, implementing well-understood solutions, or translating requirements into predictable outputs. Yes, that’s going to get automated. It should get automated. That’s not a threat, it’s just what happens when something becomes routine.
But the work that sits at the intersection of your specific experiences, your particular way of seeing problems, your accumulated context, the opinions you’ve formed from making mistakes, that’s different. That’s the work that moves things forward in ways that weren’t possible before you showed up.
AI can generate code. It can’t decide what’s worth building. It can’t know which shortcuts are smart and which ones will haunt you. It can’t weigh trade-offs through the lens of having seen this exact thing blow up before. It can’t have taste.
The hard part isn’t identifying this work. The hard part is being honest about whether you’re actually doing it. The hard part is saying no to everything else. The hard part is resisting the pull to stay busy with work that feels productive but could be done by anyone, or anything, with the same instructions.
I’m not always good at this. I still catch myself doing work that doesn’t need me. But when I do manage to focus on the work only I can do, everything else gets clearer. The decisions get easier. The direction becomes obvious.
Because if you’re not doing the work only you can do, what exactly are you doing?
Last year I wrote about hitting 130 hours of working out. I ended that note with a line I repeated three times: “I’m going to keep making progress.”
I didn’t know if I’d actually do it. Part of me wondered if writing it down was just another way of setting myself up for disappointment.
This year was rough. The kind of year where everything important changed in the span of a week, and the months after felt like trying to find solid ground that kept shifting.
I still managed to work out for 166 hours. Still around 27 minutes a day. Still not impressive numbers.
But here’s what mattered: when everything else felt like it was falling apart, this was something I could control. I could lace up my shoes. I could show up. And on the days I did, it was the one thing that felt like forward motion.
None of these are numbers that would impress anyone. But they’re mine, and they represent something harder than any PR: consistency when it would’ve been easier to stop.
Life changes fast. Appreciate the people you have around you while you have them. And don’t waste your time with people who don’t deserve it. These aren’t fitness lessons, but they’re what this year taught me while I was trying to keep showing up.
Next year, I’ll keep making progress. Not because I have to, but because I’ve proven to myself that I can.
For the last few years, especially after the pandemic forced us to switch to remote work, I’ve been searching for ways to break free from a stressful, sedentary lifestyle.
I’ve been trying to be more consistent. I’ve tried different approaches, but each attempt would start with enthusiasm, only to gradually fade away.
This year something was different. I still don’t know what it was, but I’ve been able to keep making progress. I’ve managed to work out for +130 hours. Almost a 70% increase from last year. Around 20 minutes a day.
These numbers aren’t impressive, but they represent something far more valuable for me: consistency. I’m proud not just of the numbers, but of maintaining a regular routine despite facing significant personal challenges during the second half of the year.
Next year, I’ll try to keep making progress. I’m going to keep making progress. I’m going to keep making progress.
This is the closest I’ll ever publicly get to a year review and a new year resolution. I’ve created this page to keep track of my progress.