Fear of Missing AI

What I'd do without it (and why I'm afraid to find out)

Editor’s Note: This past week, the Every team decamped to Panama for Think Week—our twice-yearly tradition of building, shipping, and generally getting into productive trouble together. Alas, I was in Columbus, under a foot of snow, watching the energy unfold from 2,000 miles away.

In classic Katie fashion, I had a little trouble focusing. Discoveries and demos were flying in Discord, and I kept getting pulled into side quests of my own. By the time the week was over, I’d built an app for understanding and applying your writing taste (working title: Tastemaker), spun up a writing agent, and wrote three and a half articles with said agent—including this one. You’ll have to let me know what you think.

---

Fear of Missing AI

Until about two years ago, I cried at my keyboard more days than not.

Literal tears, because I could not stomach another day of grinding out copy with nothing but my brain and a blinking cursor. I was ghostwriting for founders, slinging SEO articles, doing work that paid but didn’t matter to me. Every morning felt like pushing a boulder uphill with my face.

That version of me doesn’t exist anymore. AI killed her. And I’m terrified of what happens if she comes back.

Some of that misery was about alignment—I was writing things I didn’t care about for people I’d never meet. But some of it was how my brain works. I’ve written before about having bipolar disorder, about the way my productivity swings between manic output and paralyzed silence. The old way of working wasn’t only hard for me. Some days, it wasn’t possible.

I learned early to keep my parachute packed. When things went bad at jobs, my work friends and I would remind each other: take your stuff with you. Don’t leave empty-handed. Whatever you built to make the work bearable—the checklists, the templates, the workflows—that’s yours. Grab it on the way out.

I still think that way. I’m always half-ready to jump out of a burning building with my bag under my arm, hoping I land somewhere the stuff inside will be useful again. The difference now is how much “stuff” there is: projects and style guides, skills and code files—all of it essential to the engine that keeps my day-to-day work life running these days.

I’m afraid of losing AI. I’m also afraid of depending on it. And I’m starting to suspect that both fears are the same fear—that the self I’ve built around these systems isn’t solid enough to survive without them.

AI fine-tuned my work life

I didn’t use to think of work as something worth being afraid to lose.

Then AI happened—and for the first time in a ten-year career, I found something I genuinely cared about.

ChatGPT showed up at the exact moment I needed it, and within months, I’d rebuilt my entire relationship to work. The tools got better. My alignment shifted. I went from crying at my keyboard to writing a column about how AI is reshaping what it means to work—and loving every minute of it.

Learning how these systems think became the first intellectual obsession I’ve had in years—the kind that makes me forget to eat, that sends me down rabbit holes at midnight, that makes the work feel like play. AI is the subject I write about, the method I write with, and a big part of why anyone pays attention to what I have to say. The capability and the passion fused together somewhere along the way, and I can’t untangle which one saved me.

The more sophisticated the tools become, the more I can shape them to the way I think. Early AI felt like a vending machine—type a prompt, hope for the best. Now I can teach it my thought patterns and my preferences, where I need guardrails and how I want to explore. When I’m stuck on how to structure an essay, I describe the problem out loud and ask for three different approaches. When a draft feels off but I can’t name why, I ask it to read against my own style guide and tell me where I’ve drifted. The result is something that fits—not a generic tool, but a system I’ve shaped to the contours of how I think.

That’s not dependency in the way people usually mean it. It’s investment. The more I put in, the more I get back. Which is part of why the thought of losing it hits different. This isn’t a subscription I could cancel and replace. It’s something I’ve built.

It’s not a perfect system. The image that comes to mind is a compass. True north is me—my voice, my judgment, what I think. AI can pull the needle off course if I let it. The work is constant recalibration, checking whether what’s coming out still sounds like something I’d stand behind. But the better the tools get, the easier that calibration becomes. I have more ways to say not that, this. More ways to steer.

For the first time in my career, the shape of the work fits the shape of my brain. I try not to think too hard about what I’d do without it.

Catastrophic forgetting, or the fear of it

If AI disappeared tomorrow—the tools, the workflows, the context I’ve built—what would be left?

This used to feel like a thought experiment. Lately, it feels less hypothetical. There’s a drumbeat now—AI is a bubble, the economics don’t work, the whole thing is going to collapse. I don’t know if the skeptics are right. But every time I see another “AI is over” headline, I notice how my body responds before my brain does. The overriding feeling: panic.

What would I do if AI disappeared tomorrow? Would I go back to word-slinging for hire? Ghostwriting for founders, churning out SEO copy, crying at my keyboard again? Or would I have to find some new intersection where my interests, my abilities, and my earning potential overlap? That kind of reinvention takes years. I only just figured it out. I don’t want to do it again.

I straddle two worlds. There’s the AI-obsessed corner of the internet—the newsletters, the forums, the people who build automated systems for fun and talk about it like a sport. In that world, what I do makes sense. Then there’s the world of the normies. People in my real life. People on LinkedIn. The skeptics who hear “I write with AI” and assume I mean “AI writes for me.” I absorb their judgment more than I’d like to admit.

The question I can’t escape: Can I really call myself a writer when this is my writing process?

There’s a mythology around writing. The solitary struggle. Wrestling ideas into existence with nothing but your own mind. Bleeding onto the page. I didn’t make this up—it’s the version of “writer” I inherited, the one that still has hooks in me. By that definition, I’m a fraud.

A writer is someone who notices something in the world and gives language to it. That’s the job. Notice, then name. AI doesn’t interfere with the noticing. The observations are still mine. The feelings are still mine. What’s changed is how I get from observation to language—and I’m not sure that part was ever sacred.

The two definitions sit side by side in my head, and I can’t make them shut up.

I keep a folder called “Validation.” It’s where I hoard nice emails, screenshots of wins, evidence that I’m good at what I do. I lost that folder once. It lived only on my machine, and I lost that machine in the desert. Long story. But I remember the weeks after—how I kept reaching for proof that wasn’t there. I started second-guessing work I’d been proud of. Without the evidence, I couldn’t trust my own memory of being good.

Now I think about what would happen if I lost the context I’ve built into AI. The instructions tuned to my voice. The files that know my preferences. The workflows I’ve shaped over months. If losing a folder of compliments could unhinge me, how much worse would it feel to lose the thing that makes my work possible?

Base model, or the self underneath

What I keep coming back to is that the self that built all this is the same self that would rebuild it.

The context I’ve accumulated—the instructions, the workflows, the carefully tuned preferences—that stuff matters. But it’s not where the capability lives. The capability lives in the judgment that shaped it. In knowing what to feed the system and what to hold back. In recognizing when the output sounds like me and when it doesn’t. It lives in the thousand small decisions I’ve made about how to work with these tools instead of being worked by them.

That judgment doesn’t live in a folder. It lives in me. If I lost everything tomorrow, I’d still know what I know.

I haven’t tested this, of course. I could write something the old way—me and a blinking cursor—and see what happens. But I don’t want to. I’m afraid of what I’d find. Maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe the fear is telling me something I’m not ready to hear.

Or maybe the fear is evidence. You don’t fear losing things you don’t care about. The intensity of this feeling is proportional to what I’ve built—a way of working that fits my brain, a subject I love, a version of myself that finally makes sense.

And maybe that’s what the fear has been telling me all along—not that I’m fragile, but that I finally have something to protect. Something I built on purpose. Something I’d fight to keep.

Tomorrow I’ll open Claude and feel my shoulders drop. The system will remember what I taught it. The work will flow the way my brain needs it to.

---

Notes and Errata

📖 Bible study update: I’ve now finished the entire Pentateuch and all four Gospels—what I’ve started thinking of as the “operating systems” of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, respectively. Next up: playing around with what an agentic Bible study buddy might look like.

🎯 Tastemaker check-in: I ran this essay through my new Tastemaker app to see how well it aligns with my aspirational voice.

My Tastemaker app tells me I’m drawn to philosophical systems thinking, compassionate pessimism, and the profound in the mundane. No lies detected.

Where it says it works:

“Analytical intimacy: You nail this perfectly—it feels like thinking aloud about a hard problem without being solipsistic.”

“You sit beautifully in the tension between dependency fears and creative fulfillment, between validation and authenticity, without collapsing the paradox into false resolution.”

Where it says it doesn’t:

“But it’s sitting more in personal essay territory than fully embodying your style guide’s call for ‘intellectual archaeology’ and systematic revelation of hidden structures.”

“You hint at broader patterns (the mythology of writing, the AI bubble, professional precarity) but don’t fully pull back the curtain on these hidden architectures.”

Fair. I’ll take it.

Stay curious,
Katie P.