How not to have FOMO about AI

Most AI FOMO talk is about speed, skills, and being left behind. But it's not the right plane to be thinking in.

I've built hundreds of mature AI solutions both for myself and at Meta over the last year. The easiest part is building these--all you need is a bit of imagination and skill, and a computer with an AI coding agent. The harder part is to move beyond your walls and meet people with your product.

Anything we build in AI should bring us closer together as humans, and for that, we need to be with other humans, building together, towards something that will make our collective lives better.

But we default to building easy stuff - the next killer. It's easy to copy code, especially when you are not the one understanding and writing it. It's gotten ridiculous: 95% of engineers are interns of Claude or Codex, not the other way around.

With me so far? Let's take it one level deeper.

There are three types of people in AI today:

1. People who are focused on fundamental problems in their fields. They don't get caught up in the day-to-day noise. They build stuff for themselves on the journey, which they may or may not share. They are already so far along in their personal growth journey.
2. People who are worried about every new tool that comes out, question how they missed it, feel bad that they didn't think of it, and eagerly search for what they can build easily. They are afraid of being left behind. They might create stuff through AI and repost or talk about other advancements without understanding a bit of what they are saying, but that's how they justify to themselves that they are keeping pace. These people feel the most FOMO.
3. People who shut their eyes and minds to the change sweeping them.

In the list above, 2 is the hardest place to be because it feels like surfing a tsunami that will no doubt drown you. There's no point.

Don't get me wrong, there is value in building something that positively improves your life. You can build yourself a "notion killer" as long as you learn to build and use the product you build for at least a month, iterating along the way. But the purpose is truly to learn and grow. In fact, it's so easy to learn by building these days that it will be a waste of an opportunity if we don't.

If you've made it this far, let's talk about how to rise above FOMO and mediocrity.

Everything starts with imagination.

1. What world are we imagining for ourselves and our children?
2. What skills do we have to act towards that future?
3. Do we know other people who genuinely want to work towards the same future we envision? Can we connect with them as one tribe?

Ironically, this has nothing to do with AI, but you can use AI to find the answers efficiently. And when you do that, the products you build will make a difference.

There's a book -- Competing Against Luck -- by Clayton Christensen et al. One of the book's main points is this: Customers hire products for a job. People buy something to get a task done or to make progress in their life. The product is just the tool they pick for that job.

Make sure the tool you are building is something you are hiring to improve your life and the lives of those around you.