The Velocity Trap
Our obsession with speed is breaking us.
The tech industry is obsessed with speed, but the developers building it are starting to burn out from the pace.
Your Stack Is Now Deprecated
A developer's lament about taking a month off reveals the exhausting reality of our obsession with velocity.
A Reddit thread about a developer taking a month off only to return to a 'deprecated' stack hit a nerve this week. It perfectly captures the burnout from the tech industry's relentless pace. This isn't just about a few updated libraries; it's about the psychological treadmill of feeling perpetually behind, where keeping up with tools overshadows the craft of building.
The anxiety is real because the velocity is accelerating. Every new AI tool promises to 10x our output, but nobody is building tools to 10x our ability to review code, sanity-check a marketing campaign, or just think. We're optimising for launch speed, not developer sanity or product stability. The obsession with 'what's next' is creating a permanent state of professional FOMO.
This isn't a call to stop innovating. It's a reality check that a 'boring stack' is becoming a rational act of self-preservation. For leaders, this means building in time for learning and accepting that sustainable pace beats frantic speed. The industry needs to realise that the most important part of the stack isn't the code, it's the people writing it.
The AI Specialist Has Arrived
While we grapple with burnout, AI is moving from a generalist intern to a team of hyper-focused specialists designed to accelerate everything.
Lindy AI CMO: Your new AI marketing department
This is the embodiment of the velocity problem. An AI that launches thousands of marketing experiments in minutes puts immense pressure on the humans who must now analyse the results.
v0 by Vercel: The AI front-end developer
Vercel's tool generates production-ready React and Tailwind code from a prompt. It’s another move to accelerate the front-end, turning the craft of UI into an act of curation.
Alai: The AI presentation designer
Instead of just spitting out a slideshow, Alai gives you four design options for every slide. This positions AI as a creative partner, not just a mindless automation tool.
Building The New AI Plumbing
This new army of specialist AIs requires a new generation of infrastructure to function in the real world.
Starbase: An internet browser for your AI agents
To do anything useful, specialist AIs need to interact with the world. Starbase gives them a browser, effectively providing eyes and hands to operate on the live web.
Datapizza AI Framework: The open-source toolkit for building your own AI
For teams that don't trust black-box APIs, this open-source framework provides the tools to build and control your own AI systems. It’s a bet on transparency over convenience.
Quick hits
Microsoft Mico: Copilot's new animated sidekick
Microsoft is betting that making AI personable, not just powerful, is the key to mainstream adoption.
PushPost: Let your code do the talking
This tool automates the 'build in public' grind by turning your code commits directly into social media posts.
Phare Incident AI: Your AI for incident chaos
An AI that summarises outages so your on-call team can focus on fixing things, not writing post-mortems.
My takeaway
The real challenge isn't building faster AI, but creating a culture that can use it without breaking people.
We're getting AI tools that build, market, and design at superhuman speeds, but our ability to review code, validate marketing, and think strategically remains stubbornly human. This mismatch creates a new kind of bottleneck which is our own cognitive limit. The pressure isn't just to ship, but to keep up with machines that never sleep.
The next breakthrough won't be another tool that goes faster, but a process that helps us manage this new velocity sustainably. We need to shift focus from raw output to deliberate, thoughtful progress. The future is about curation, not just creation.
How do we build guardrails for a world where an AI can launch 10,000 marketing campaigns before you've had your coffee?
Drop me a reply. Till next time, this is Louis, and you are reading Louis.log().