because action generates data and generative pretraining works on both ai and human.

codex 5.3 and opus 4.6 in the right harness are killing it recently. i am so impressed. however, writing code and doing many other things manually are still meaningful, not in a coping way.

ai can’t experience the world for me. can’t change my neural connectivity, can’t open new dimension or force me to see/think/understand differently. I have to do it myself, not for productivity, but to author meaningful change of myself.

doing stuff is both rl and generative training. action generates both artifacts and high quality learning signal because:

  1. action-driven info is grounded to reality, from env feedback loop.
  2. action creates deeper skin in the game than passive consumption.
  3. action in the form of generation forces output to task-specific token space. operating purely in latent space or in abstraction loses grounding. healthy mental or world model needs continuous reality check.

simply put, doing stuff manually calibrates internal world model, learns better, and keeps the authorship and agency. the same principle applies to both knowledge task and physical task.

then what should i do? given ai is so good today, and would only be even better tomorrow? delegation heuristic?

  • do stuff that helps asking old question better, and asking new good question.
  • do stuff manually once in a while to ground and master the operating abstraction level.
  • ai assisted prototype at one level higher, faster iteration, accelerated exploration, higher probability of catching serendipity.
  • ai assisted digging at one level lower. wider and deeper context is the creative foundation of thinking by analogy.

life is an exploration. when the cost of change (swe, general knowledge work, even physical task) is trending low aggressively, the cost of iteration drop, speed is up. perspective, direction and why are everything. ai are good at execution and getting better at making creative / strategic decision, but the authorship is gone with automation.

it’s not about what ai can do better. what i want, why and the exploration trajectory can’t be delegated. before ai, there are many people doing all things better than me at scale, but it’s my life, my family, my friend, my community. these can’t be automated and i have to engage with agency. i need to learn, change and evolve, which ai could help, but can’t replace.