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AI seems to be accelerating this feeling, at least with many of my friends. There is a sense of malaise and frustration at what appears to be the slow erosion of intentional care and effort in our industry. Just let the AI do it, while you ... do other stuff.

I'm not quite there yet. I believe you can use AI as a virtual assistant that does the stuff that actually causes burnout in the first place. Creating and updating READMEs, ensuring the code on your docs is correct, writing a script that compiles markdown to a PDF - things like that.

I had not thought of it this way but I love the idea and it is very true and feels right. I often create posts that are just links to stuff I read on the internet. Typically I don't write any comment at all. I simply quote the relevant part of the link.

Here's how to leave a comment on this web site:

1. Read a post
2. Think, "I want to comment on this"
3. Draft a post on your blog
4. Add a hyperlink to my post
5. Paste an excerpt to which you want to respond
6. Write your comment
7. Hit publish

Many people have found the intelligence of AIs to be shocking. This will seem quaint compared to a far bigger shock coming: highly emotional AIs. The arrival of synthetic emotions will unleash disruption, outrage, disturbance, confusion, and cultural shock in human society that will dwarf the fuss over synthetic intelligence. In the coming years the story headlines will shift from “everyone will lose their job” (they won’t) to “AI partners are the end of civilization as we know it.”

If something is common enough to require a trustworthy NPM package, then it is also well-represented in the training set, and you can generate it yourself.

The core principle is simple: reduce the need for external context and assumptions. An AI agent is at its best when the next step is obvious and the tools are intuitive. This framework builds from the most immediate agent interaction all the way up to the complete system architecture. This isn’t to say today's agents can’t reason or do complex things. But to unlock the full potential of today’s models—to not just solve problems, but do so consistently—these are your levers.

My takeaway? Maybe instead of arguing about MCP vs CLI, we should start building better tools. The protocol is just plumbing. What matters is whether your tool helps or hinders the agent's ability to complete tasks.

That said, if you're building a tool from scratch and your users already have a shell tool available, just make a good CLI. It's simpler and more portable. Plus, the output of your CLI can be further filtered and massaged just by piping it into another CLI tool, which can increase token efficiency at the cost of additional instructions. That's not possible with MCPs.

Once you have a well-designed, token-efficient CLI tool, adding an MCP server on top of it is very straightforward.

If you are at all interested in publishing, there is no better role model than Kevin Kelly. He has been doing it for a life time in one form or another.

the way I approach publishing today is with as much self-publishing as I can handle. I’d write in public installments, as a subscription newsletter, or e-book single chapters, or simple posts on my blog. If I could find an audience that wanted more of the material, I’d rewrite, re-edit, re-compose the material into a longer form. I’d release that as an ebook, and/or on-demand printed book sold in my shopify shop. If the material was deep, or involved more creators than just myself, I’d consider crowdfunding it. Those presales allow me to target exactly how many copies to produce. I’d calculate the cost of drop shipping. And at every stage I’d be making some kind of visual version for YouTube and the other attention seeking channels, because that is where the attention is.

Genie 3 means that people are soon going to be exploring their own personal worlds which will be generated for them based on anything they can imagine – photos from their phone will become worlds they can re-explore, prompts from their own imagination (or that of another AI system) will become procedural games they can play, and generally anything a person can imagine and describe will become something that can be simulated. Additionally, world models like Genie 3 will likely become arenas in which new AI systems are tested, giving them access to infinite worlds to train within before being deployed into our reality. AI continues to be underhyped as a technology.