After 1.5 years building AI workflows, he's taking a break — his scaffolding now holds the models back
Rare-Manufacturer896 · reddit · 2026-10-19
A telecom engineer reflected on Reddit after 1.5 years of intensive AI hobbyist use. He kept building at first — many skills, nightly runs, models checking each other — then progressively stripped it down to just looking things up as needed, because each new model required less scaffolding.
He realized his experience was both his edge and his trap: building on prior work blinded him to what new models do out of the box, and his carefully built structure was holding the models back, while casual users who simply state their needs keep closing the gap. He's taking two weeks off to gain distance.
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