We Built A Cathedral In The Wrong City
I need to talk about something I don't see anyone talking about. And I think it might be the most important question of this entire era.
We're all so busy celebrating how fast AI makes us move that nobody's asking where the hell we're going. If Direction over Speed always mattered, it matters a hell of a lot more now.
I'll be honest. I'm addicted.
Every time I sit down with these tools, something happens to me. My imagination expands. I discover paths I never knew existed. Ideas I couldn't have reached in a thousand hours of solo thinking just... appear. And they're good. And they lead to more ideas. And those lead to more. And suddenly I'm three hours deep into something I never planned to touch today, and I'm exhilarated.
It feels like a superpower. It feels like the future. It feels like I'm finally operating at the speed my brain always wanted to move.
It's also a trap.
Here's what actually happens. You sit down with a clear intention. You know what matters. You know the one thing you came here to do. Then the agent suggests something adjacent. Something clever. Something you hadn't considered. And it's genuinely good, that's the dangerous part. So you pull that thread. And that thread leads to another thread. And now the agent is riffing with you, and you're building on each other's energy, and there's this incredible momentum, and you feel more productive than you've ever felt in your life.
And then you look up.
And you have no idea how you got here. You've built something impressive. You've moved fast. You've generated an enormous amount of output. But the thing you sat down to do? The thing that actually mattered?
You never touched it.
If we thought social media was addictive, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Social media hijacked our attention with dopamine hits from content consumption. AI is about to hijack our attention with dopamine hits from content creation. From building. From the feeling of progress. From the intoxicating illusion that because we're producing, we must be moving forward.
That's a fundamentally different kind of addiction. It doesn't feel like wasting time. It feels like the most productive day of your life. That's what makes it so much more dangerous.
The loop goes like this: The agent helps you do something. You're impressed. It suggests something else. You're curious. It delivers. You're excited. It expands the scope. You're inspired. It generates new ideas. You're energized. And around and around you go, this infinite vicious cycle of excitement and productivity, until you've built a cathedral in the wrong city.
And it's not just you. It radiates outward. You come out of a four-hour AI session with twelve new ideas and a completely different priority than you had yesterday morning. Your team gets the update. They pivot. They start building. Then you do it again two days later. And again. And now nobody knows what matters anymore, not you, not your team, not your investors, not your roadmap. What looks like momentum from the inside looks like chaos from every other angle. You're not moving fast. You're thrashing. And you're dragging everyone with you.
I've been building companies for long enough to know that speed without direction is just expensive wandering. But I've never experienced anything that makes expensive wandering feel this good. This productive.
Almost every person I know is feeling some version of this right now. We're all moving faster than we ever have. We're all producing more than we ever have. And I think a lot of us, if we're being really honest, have quietly lost the plot.
Not because we're lazy. Not because we lack vision. But because these tools are so good at steering us somewhere because we forgot where we are going. People have said in this new world, everyone needs to act like the CEO of their agents, so in that case it’s important to understand the most important job of being a CEO.
It reminds me of this line from the Ribbon Farm “CEOs Don’t Steer” article;
"The primary CEO function, and the trait the good ones are selected for, is to provide the gyroscopic stability required to keep a company vectored in the chosen direction. They end up in the jobs they do because they counterbalance an organization's natural tendency towards distraction, ADD and momentum dissipation. A typical company is a wandering, wobbling hive mind, liable to spend all its time chasing distractions if you let it.”
At the level of abstraction at which a CEO views what is going on, direction does not change, and more importantly, the CEO’s job is to make sure it doesn’t.
CEOs are orientation locks. The opposite of steering is orientation locking. To enforce Newton’s first law, the inertia one, on dancing human systems inclined to violate it. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t inertia that’s the problem for most companies, it is lack of sufficient inertia in the right direction. Enough to punch through any resistance that might be encountered. And the reason they lack the inertia is that CEOs aren’t steady enough in their jobs as orientation locks, providing a steady True North signal to everybody else doing more local kinds of steering work.
The primary CEO function, and the trait the good ones are selected for, is to provide the gyroscopic stability required to keep a company vectored in the chosen direction. They end up in the jobs they do because they counterbalance an organization’s natural tendency towards distraction, ADD and momentum dissipation. A typical company is a wandering, wobbling hive mind, liable to spend all its time chasing distractions if you let it, before dissolving into a bunch of clever tweets about crappy prototypes.
I keep coming back to this thought: the most valuable AI agent might not be the one that helps you do more. It might be the one that sits quietly in the background, listening to every conversation, watching every thread you chase, tracking every rabbit hole you dive into, and then taps you on the shoulder and asks one simple question:
What's the one thing that actually matters right now? And how do we get back to it?
Not the exciting thing. Not the new thing. Not the thing the other agent just suggested that sounds amazing. The thing you came here to do in the first place.
Maybe we don't need agents that expand what's possible. Maybe we need one that protects what's important.
I don't have an answer for this. That's not what this post is.
Something very big is changing. We can all feel it. The ground is shifting under every company, every workflow, every assumption about what a person can accomplish in a day. And most of the conversation is about capability. About speed. About output.
Nobody's talking about the cost of all that capability when it's aimed at nothing in particular.
If everyone is the CEO of all their agents now, then never forget the single most important job of being a CEO: make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction. Even more important, know which direction you want to go. And stay locked.
My greatest fear is waking up one day and realizing that we built a cathedral in the wrong city.