Ben's Bites Author on AI Overwhelm: Unsubscribes 60k Readers and Declares a 'Move Slow with AI' Experiment
Ben's Bites · rss · 2026-10-29
Ben Tossell, author of AI newsletter Ben's Bites, reflects on burnout from AI overload: seeing people run 20 personal agents made him realize he was automating everything for its own sake.
Core points
- Citing "The Sane Asylum" and Jack Raines' "Can vs. Should," he argues AI turns everything into a slot-machine pull: starting much, finishing little.
- He unsubscribed 60k+ readers who never opened the newsletter — bad for sponsor optics, but "that's not the point."
- Companies hire only for pain; why hire (and manage) agents for painless tasks? "It works for me. It's a computer."
30-day experiment
- Morning pages to clear his head; only build with agents what's fun; no new tools unless they solve real pain; no AI-summarized long posts — read or ignore; do nothing just because "it makes money."
Feed notes
- Google released Gemini 4 Carbon (beats Argon on benchmarks, cyber defenders only) and Genie 4, a world model that generates and edits 3D scenes.
- Suhail's new company Particle trains coding models to reach answers with fewer tokens.
- Study: experts go along with an agent's random choice 86% of the time.
- Simon Willison says vibe-coded games have hit an inflection point — they're actually fun now.
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