A Higher Gear
The closest thing I have to a second brain is a directory on my laptop and a Claude Code session. I open a terminal, type /start-day, and my AI partner reads my journal, checks my calendar, surfaces reminders, tells me where things were left off, checks email and drafts replies. It works well - better than org-mode ever did, better than any productivity app I’ve tried. But it only thinks when I’m sitting in front of it. The moment I close the terminal, the second brain goes quiet.
I’ve been wanting something that doesn’t go quiet. An open-source agent platform called OpenClaw promised exactly that - agents with heartbeats, periodic check-ins where the system considers whether something needs attention. Cron jobs that triage email overnight, surface calendar conflicts before I wake up, notice that an invoice hasn’t been paid. The distinction matters: one system is a thinking partner I visit, the other is a staff that’s always working.
This morning I got ambitious and tried to set up an accounting agent. The bigger vision is to eventually replace the accounting firm I pay to handle things across my personal and business finances - but the starting point was deliberately minimal. Read-only access to QuickBooks, just enough to test whether an agent could surface what needed attention without touching the actual books. Even that turned into a mess. Getting API access meant registering a developer app through QuickBooks Online’s developer program, and when I finally got to the permissions screen, the only available scope was read-write. No read-only option. So the minimal safe starting point I’d imagined didn’t actually exist. Then the OpenClaw configuration got tangled somewhere along the way, and I found myself staring at a broken installation I no longer had the energy to untangle. I uninstalled the whole thing. Maybe I’ll come back when things mature, or when the next wave of ambition hits.
But the shape of what it could become is clear enough to think about, even if the reality isn’t there yet.
The end state I keep imagining isn’t a conversation with an AI. It’s the absence of all the things that currently crowd out what matters.
Right now, a typical morning involves checking three email accounts, processing invoices, following up on messages that fell through cracks, reviewing calendar conflicts, triaging reminders. None of this is hard. All of it is present - it takes up cognitive space, it fragments attention, it sits in the background of every conversation with a low hum of “I still need to deal with that.”
The promise of always-on agents isn’t that they’d do these things better than I do. It’s that they’d do them instead of me. And what opens up in that space is the interesting question.
I lift with my oldest son when we can make it work - a couple afternoons a week if we’re lucky, though the workout matters less than the time together. I homeschool my younger son - or try to, between everything else. My wife and I are touring colleges with our daughter. I play tennis with a lifelong friend. I pray, sometimes well, sometimes going through the motions. These are the things that, when I’m honest about it, make the actual substance of a good life - the relationships, the physical presence, the spiritual grounding that I consistently say matters most and consistently give the scraps of my attention after everything else has been handled.
The vision isn’t AI as companion. It’s AI as the thing that handles everything else so that when I’m sitting across from my son working through a math lesson, I’m there - not half-thinking about whether I replied to that email.
If the noise were genuinely handled - if the email triage and the invoice tracking and the calendar management and the reminder surfacing all just worked, reliably, in the background, without my involvement - what would I do with the space?
I’d like to say I’d pray more, be more present with my kids, read more deeply, invest in friendships with the kind of attention they deserve. And maybe I would. But I’ve had periods of less work before - between projects, during transitions - and the pattern isn’t always encouraging. Sometimes the space fills with different noise. New projects, new rabbit holes, new ways to stay busy that feel productive but aren’t the things I claim to care about most.
And there’s a more aggressive version of that failure mode - the one I’m most susceptible to. If AI handles the tedium and frees up two hours a day, the competitive instinct doesn’t say “go be present with your family.” It says “now you can take on more.” Another client, another SaaS idea, another repo. The rat race doesn’t disappear when the tools get better - it just offers a higher gear. Freed capacity looks a lot like opportunity, and I have a long pattern of seeing how far I can leverage myself, testing what’s possible when the constraints loosen. I suspect I have a lot of company in that.
What makes the pull harder to resist is that it’s not just ambition talking - it’s genuine excitement. This is a wild time to be alive with a technical background. The things I can build right now, the leverage I can get from tools that barely existed a year ago, the problems I can take on that would have been absurd to attempt solo - it’s thrilling. And the window is probably temporary. A couple of years, maybe less, before the tools mature enough that everyone has access to the same leverage.
Whether leaning into that window turns out to be the right call is something only hindsight will answer. But the pull is real, and it sits right at the center of the decision.
The technology doesn’t resolve this tension - it sharpens it. AI agents that clear the noise give me a choice that was always mine but is becoming more stark: use the space for presence, or use it for more. That’s not a software problem. It’s a formation question, and the person responsible for the answer has always been the individual. What I do with my time is mine to decide. The tools just make the decision harder to avoid.