AI Creep

Your second brain grew a second brain. A field guide to agentic hygiene, with two prompts that clean house.

Three days after I presented at an academic conference, I went looking for the deck. I knew I had built it. I remembered the figure I was proud of, the one that finally made the incentive math legible on a single slide. I could not find the file.

I searched my Claude folder. Inside a directory I had optimistically named Active Work, I found four subfolders that all meant “content creation.” Two of them contained versions of the same deck. Neither was the one I wanted. Somewhere in a fifth folder there were three scheduled tasks built to coordinate with one another, agents running agents, quietly burning tokens toward an ambition I had set in a fever-dream session weeks earlier and had not thought about since.

I did what any reasonable person with a good tool and a bad system does. I started over. It was so easy to start over. That was the problem.

This is what I have started calling AI creep, and it is happening to a lot more of those “tech gurus” than you would think.

Who this is For

There are two very different problems in the AI space and they need opposite advice.

The first problem is the blank canvas. You open an AI chat window, you treat it like a search box, you feel overwhelmed by the demos of people building companies out of natural conversation, and you have decided to shelf the whole thing. If that is you, you are not behind. Go pick one workflow, one you already do every week, and hand it over to Claude CoWork and give it a fair shake. A great start? Building an evidence based powerpoint:

And my Techy Flows page has more tutorials.

No no, this article is for someone else. There’s a second problem is the one nobody warned you about. You are on the other end. You built the command center. You have a second brain, and it has developed a second brain of its own, complete with knowledge graphs. You have twenty agent subscriptions. You have tried every framework that shipped this quarter. You have buried your head in a keyboard for eight hours straight building “automations.” You have a Mac mini…Ok you have 2 Mac minis. You have absolutely googled headless display. You have a Telegram account now, and you never had one before.

And four years and several thousand dollars into it, you have a folder of half-functional websites, a lot of beautiful UI, and a life that is not meaningfully different than it was before you started.

Yep you’re the one I’m talking to. Welcome home sister. Welcome to AI Creep.