“Everything is now.” - Richard Seidl
Yesterday I sorted out my bookshelf. A book fell into my hands: Kamchatka, 2008. Back then I went on an expedition across that breathtaking peninsula, several weeks long. And to prepare, I worked through books like this one: page by page. Anticipation. I imagined what it would be like up on those active volcanoes, what the culture would be like, and whether we would have to protect ourselves from bears (spoiler: yes, especially when they romp through the tent camp with their cubs at 2 a.m.).
How would that go today? Three seconds of Google Maps, a 4K drone flight on YouTube, the 47 best restaurants on TripAdvisor, an AI-generated daily route and a personalized itinerary from ChatGPT. All there. Instantly. And somehow … Tolbachik is already checked off before I have even packed my backpack.
When everything is now
We live in a time in which time itself has changed. Not physical time, experienced time. Everything is available immediately. Every piece of information, all knowledge, every answer. No more waiting. No more searching … and no more ripening.
There used to be something like a natural delay. You had to go to the library. Call a colleague and hope he would pick up. Wait for the trade journal to arrive. This delay was not a bug. It was a feature. Because something happened during the waiting: we thought. We digested. Our brain sorted in the background, connected, matured. The answer that finally arrived fell on prepared ground.
Today the answer lands on bare asphalt. And the next one right behind it. And the next.
Compressed work
In parallel, we are experiencing a second compression: that of working time. This is not new, agile development already set quite a pace here. Shorter cycles, faster feedback, permanent iteration. That was and is good and right. But with AI in the toolbox, we are turning the compression dial up another notch.
Generate code. Derive test cases. Write documentation. Prepare reviews. Everything in minutes instead of hours. Which leaves more time for … well, for what exactly? For the next sprint. For even more output. For even tighter cycles.
We do not fill the time we gain with thinking, we fill it with doing. With even more doing. The hamster wheel spins faster, but the hamster stays the same.
The simultaneity
Both compressions together create a simultaneity. All knowledge is here now, and all work is supposed to be finished now. There is no more past to learn from (why bother, the AI has the answer) and no future to work toward (why bother, the next sprint starts the day after tomorrow). Everything acts in the now.
We have eliminated friction. The pauses. The spaces in between. And with them the space in which ideas grow, experience takes shape, and personality matures.
Building in small brakes
Don’t get me wrong: I love well-lived agility, and I value my AI tools a lot. But we haven’t found the knack of using these things purposefully, with a “why”. We constantly talk about making ourselves obsolete through AI. But why, actually? It is up to us to use AI the way we want to.
So what to do? Switch off the AI? Back to waterfall? No, of course not. But maybe build in a few deliberate brakes. Deceleration points. Friction on purpose. Fill the time we gain with things that bring us joy (programming, for example).
Slowness rediscovered
I am convinced: the big skill we need in software development is not agent orchestration or the next framework. It will be the ability to think deliberately in a world that delivers faster and faster.
And maybe we simply start by not accepting the next AI answer right away. Letting it sit for a moment. Checking it. Questioning it. And then, thoroughly old-fashioned, thinking for ourselves.