I Ran Out of Wanting
A note from the far side of the backlog
I’m fucked. So fucked I can’t build a Lego lighthouse anymore. Are you an as-of-yet un-fucked person? Good. This one’s for you.
Picture them finished. Every project you ever half-sketched on a napkin. Every pipe dream you shelved because it needed years of your undivided attention. All of it done. Shipped. Live on the internet with your name on it. The entire backlog of your wild mind, standing up and walking around in the daylight.
That’s the good ending. Not the hedged version - not most of them, not the ones that were realistic. All of them.
You’d swim laps in it. I would have taken that deal at any point in the last twenty years without asking one question.
I got here before I meant to. I’m writing back to tell you what’s actually on this side, and it isn’t what either of us pictured.
Here it is in one sentence: **you can get faster at building than you are at wanting.**
A few months ago I wrote about a harm reduction system I’d built for my own agent addiction. It worked. This is what happened after.
The whole thing starts four years ago, when I went all-in on agentic coding (meaning I stopped writing code and started supervising its creation). For the first stretch it was way more effort than doing the work myself, plainly and measurably worse, and I kept at it anyway. Every day it got a little easier. Every couple of weeks a better model landed. Things were moving breakneck.
By 2025 the next jump wasn’t more agents or better prompts. It was purposeful friction and greased rails. Friction against shortcuts and grease for best practices. The bottleneck wasn’t the model anymore, it was slop - and slop compounds, because every piece of it that lands in the codebase tells a story the next prompt has to read, so a faster machine mostly gets faster at making a mess. For six months I didn’t build a single thing I actually wanted. Nothing off the list. Nothing out of the drawer. Just gears, and then better gears. My entire output for half a year was a machine for making machines.
It wasn’t until I finally turned slop-mop on itself that the governor fell off the engine. A few well-placed query sentences began replacing days, weeks, months of grind.
Up until the mid 2020s, there had been a drawer full of things I was going to die without building. Suddenly the drawer wasn’t a tragedy. It was **inventory**. I dumped a lifetime of stick-men ideas into a queue and started putting flesh on them, one after another after another.
They came out faster than I could track, so I built a thing to keep track of the things.
Each idea became its own ship. Every spare moment became devoted to pushing the next ship out of the harbor. Watching another idea come alive. Then another, and another. There was no version of enough.
Somewhere in there I noticed I was talking about my own behavior the way you’d talk about somebody else’s problem. Not a good stretch. Not enthusiasm. Something with a shape to it.
So I did the only thing I know how to do with a problem. I opened a ticket on myself. The next item in the queue was a system whose only job was to make me use the machines less. It hijacks my computer on a daily schedule and blacks out every model I have access to. No override, no snooze. During those hours I couldn’t use one if I wanted to. I built it the same way I built everything else, out of the thing it was supposed to protect me from.
It worked. My head got quieter. I mostly did what it said.
Nothing broke. That is the part I keep going back to. There was no bug, no bad build, no moment I could point at afterward and blame. The blackout ran on schedule. Everything else did too.
For months I had four to six ships in the water at once. But as umpteen projects started to finish, the ships that needed tending started to dwindle. Just three after a while. Then suddenly two. Then just the one.
Then Pickup Flag Football went live. The last project.
I pushed the final ship out, turned around for the next, and there was nothing behind it. All user stories implemented. All known bugs addressed. All PRs merged. All queued research done. Inbox empty. Traffic normal. Sentry clear. I ran the whole circuit again in case I had missed something, and everything was still done. I went digging through old backlogs, trying to work up some feeling about features I had never wanted in the first place.
Then I spent the next five minutes staring straight at the damn wall.
For the first time in my life the queue was empty. I don’t mean between projects. I mean **empty.** The drawer I had spent forty years afraid of dying with things still in it was clean.
I had cycles available and nothing to spend them on.
So I went looking for something else. I’ve tried a lot of something elses since. Most of them warmed my hands a year ago. Some a month ago. Every one now comes back cold. Not hard. Not boring. **Cold.** I put my attention in and nothing lights.
It took me a while to work out why.
There’s an obvious read here and it’s meaner than mine: I’m burned out, I didn’t finish anything, I lost the ability to want things, and I’m calling that an achievement. I’ve held that one up to the light plenty. What doesn’t fit is that nothing about me got worse. The capacity is all still there, and so is the pleasure of using it. I could pick any of it up tomorrow and it would go fast and clean, and I’d enjoy myself the whole time - there is a warm, easy hum to watching a machine finish in an hour what used to take a week, and I still get it every single time. What’s gone is everything after. The doing still feels good. The having stopped paying.
It isn’t that the ideas ran out. Ideas are cheap and I still have plenty. What ran out was the wanting - forty years of it, accumulated slowly because everything used to be slow, and spent in four.
The other half is that I know what the fast version feels like now.
There is a Lego lighthouse in my closet. A year ago it would have been a good Saturday - slow, quaint, absolutely pointless, the kind of thing you do on purpose. I’ve picked the box up twice. Both times I caught myself trying to work out how to do it faster, or better, and there is no faster or better. The box is still shut.
Doing it the slow way doesn’t feel noble. It feels like waste.
Withdrawal is the closest word I have. Not sadness. A flat, well-lit room where the rewards used to be.
What I can report from this side
I treated my ideas as infinite because I had never been able to burn through them fast enough to find out. Then I did.
I had thought the gap between conceiving a thing and holding it was friction. It was where the wanting lived.
I built the brakes out of the same machine as the engine. They worked, and I got here anyway. There is no error message for that. I just arrived, one ordinary afternoon, at the end of everything I had ever meant to do.
Your mind is a house that was built under building codes from another era. The contractor you have hired is fast, cheap and tireless, and he is moving walls labeled *wanting* and *reward* without knowing which of them are load-bearing.
Neither do you. Nobody has ever had the blueprints.
I was so busy building I never noticed it happening. I ran out of wanting.
My contractor is still on the job, and he’s very good. Use the machines. Use all of them, as hard as you can stand. Just try not to accidentally fuck yourself into a person who can’t open a box of Legos.
References
*Links to everything mentioned above.*
- slop-mop, the rails. I wrote about building it here
- willville, the thing that keeps track of the things
- lessllm, the one whose only job was to make me use less
- Pickup Flag Football, the last ship out
The contractor moving the walls of wanting and reward hit me real good. I can say I am feeling something very similar and even tried building legos with similar results! I hope your wanting returns. Perhaps it is in a cocoon and will come out changed.