AI Made Me Faster at Procrastinating
A painfully honest look at how I used cutting-edge tools to avoid shipping real work.
A few weeks ago, I caught myself doing something ridiculous.
I was surrounded by all the tools that are supposed to make me faster, smarter, more efficient—ChatGPT in one tab, Cursor humming in the IDE, Claude on standby for the longer stuff—and somehow… I had spent the entire week refactoring a feature that hadn’t shipped.
Not building. Not testing. Just circling the drain of “making it better.”
That’s when it hit me—not like lightning, but like a slow, shameful realization:
If you’re not shipping weekly, you’re not taking advantage of AI. You’re just bikeshedding with fancier tools.
The New Age of Productive Procrastination
We used to say we couldn’t move fast because the tools were slow. Hard to deploy. Annoying to configure. Models too dumb. Infra too brittle.
Now?
We’ve got tools that can scaffold your backend, write your tests, spin up a UI, generate your changelog, draft your release notes, and create your launch tweet — all before lunch.
So what do we do?
We spend two hours arguing with GPT5 about the tone of our 404 page.
AI hasn’t just made us faster. It’s made us better at procrastinating. We can now fine-tune our mediocrity at lightning speed. Polish things that don’t matter. Add “clever” touches no one asked for. Debate prompt styles like they’re sacred texts.
It’s amazing. It’s also a trap.
Your Fancy Setup Doesn’t Matter If Nothing Ships
Every dev team and weekend hacker has access to the same models now. Same open weights, same frameworks, same “build an agent” tutorials.
But some teams are shipping on Fridays.
Others are still fiddling with prompt chains.
The difference isn’t in talent. It’s in rhythm.
Shipping frequently is the new moat. Not because it makes you look good on Twitter, but because the ground underneath is moving. Fast.
A month of “thoughtful planning” can kill your idea before it meets the real world.
But What If It’s Not Ready?
It won’t be.
It never is.
You’ll always want to refactor one more function. Tune one more embedding. Rename one more internal config. You’re not alone — I’ve been there. I still go there, a little too often.
But here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: Nothing improves faster than something you’ve already shipped.
You can’t get feedback on a figment. You can’t iterate on invisible.
A Week Is Enough (Even If It Feels Too Short)
Weekly shipping is a forcing function. It makes you prioritize what’s real over what’s “clever.” It exposes what matters to users versus what just looks impressive in dev chat.
If I can’t scope something to ship in a week, chances are I’m biting more than I can chew.
Some weeks it’s a feature. Some weeks it’s cleanup. Some weeks it’s a one-line fix with a changelog that makes me cringe. That still counts. That’s progress.
The Real Timeline of One Shipping Week
Monday: Noticed my onboarding sucked
Tuesday: Asked ChatGPT to rewrite it (it made it worse, then better)
Wednesday: Wired up telemetry to track rage clicks
Thursday: Built a barely-working feedback button
Friday: Hit deploy. Apologized in advance. Sent it to users anyway.
No magic. Just momentum.
The Ironic Truth
AI is supposed to be a productivity multiplier.
But if you let it, it’ll multiply your perfectionism. Your indecision. Your procrastination.
You’ll feel productive while achieving nothing. Like a hamster with a prompt window.
And the worst part? It feels like work. It’s dangerously satisfying.
Which is why now, more than ever, we need to build muscle around shipping, not just building.
In 2007, PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf said, “PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?”
That’s the thing about good tools — they’re boring when used well. You don’t marvel at your toothbrush every morning. You just get on with it.
AI tools should be the same. Invisible. Unremarkable. Part of the rhythm.
Ship first. Marvel later.
So What Now?
Set the bar low. Something new every week.
Doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. Just real. Just live. Just something you can point to and say, “I learned something from this.”
The ones who keep shipping — even small things — are the ones who win this cycle.
Not because they outsmarted the world. But because they stopped arguing with their tools and started using them.