AI Lets Me Game More - and Work Better

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Matt: All righty, everybody. This is yet another edition of the Web News, and we're talking about something that's relevant to us specifically. Uh, Mike brought up some stuff in the last couple weeks, and we've been chatting about it here before the episode, and it is, I mean, working title, AI Lets Me Game More.

But what we're really gonna be getting down to brass tacks in this Web News episode is what do you do with the time between agent runs, agent tasks, if you will? So if you've ever run an AI agent or even run, like, ChatGPT in deep research mode or anything like that, anything that has the AI kind of abscond away for, let's say, three-plus minutes, more like five-plus minutes, I would, I would say.

It can run off and do stuff for 20 minutes. It can run off and do stuff for five minutes, 10 minutes, 40 minute- whatever. Depending, it really depends on your prompt, of course. The point I'm making is, though, is what do you do with that time? Do you cram it full of other stuff to do? Are you trying to be extra productive?

Hey, the AI is being productive. I'll be productive at the same time, and [00:01:00] now I have, you know, two X the productivity. Are you gonna spend that time having fun like Mike has been doing, playing a bit of, like, sort of Game Boy games and things like that? So I will let Mike take it away from here because it was your idea for this edition of the Web News.

Also, before we do that, check out my new do. Huh? My girlfriend... You're damn right. I quite literally went into the barber and had a picture of Richard Dean Anderson from MacGyver and was like, "Here, I want this."

Mikhail: I thought they did a pretty good job

Matt: And, uh, yeah, I was really surprised by even... And what's hilarious is the barber was like, "I know I did this, but, like, it kind of fits you."

And I was like, "Yeah,

Mikhail: Yeah

Matt: like it." So

Mikhail: Good

Matt: I've gone from a, a clean-shaven, short-haired man with a natural bowl cut to a man with a, a full beard and, uh, a mullet in a num- in a sh- very short amount of time

Mikhail: Yeah. In like what, two years or something like that? I don't know. Yeah.

Matt: I took it, I took a year to grow the hair out 'cause I was gonna [00:02:00] do this earlier, but then I was like, I already had decently long hair, and I was like, "I'm just gonna try the long hair thing. I'm already almost there. I may as well answer that question." And then realized very quickly like, man, my hair is constantly in my face, and man, this is like a real pain to manage all the time.

Uh, so I decided against the long hair. But anyway, that's, uh, uh, this web news is not about my, my new do. It's

Mikhail: All right. Yeah, no, for sure. So something I, I'm kind of like looking at is, again, getting some more positivity around the AI space, because I think a lot of it, what we're doing right now is doom and gloom. A lot of the content we're creating and consuming is just like doom and gloom, and, uh, it kinda sucks.

Like I, I just don't... I hate that, like, negativity. So what, what does AI let us do today that it didn't let us do yesterday, right? Like, what is the thing that we can actually benefit from? And one of those things in my opinion is, hey, AI is doing a lot of the work that we used to be doing. And yes, you can technically then do more work, but as humans, we have [00:03:00] a capacity.

Like, we have an, a limit with how much we can actually focus on, how much we can actually like retain, and what kind of quality we can output if we're doing too much. And I've hit that limit many times where I've run five, six different agents doing five, six different tasks, even if they are kind of contextually similar. I've noticed that whatev- whenever I do that, I kind of like, I just feel exhausted you know, having to review one, two, three, four, five, six different things and go back and forth. So lately what I've been doing is I've been kind of trying to balance that out a little bit more. And I've realized that if you invest a little bit more time in yourself you give yourself some breaks, you give yourself your, y- you know, your mind some time to relax, I actually can come back to a task in a more focused state, do a better job.

So it's not gonna happen every time, but a lot of times what I'll do is- I, I craft the prompt, I go back and forth to, to get to a, a common place for an implementation, like a plan [00:04:00] with a, with an AI agent, and then I'll let it kick off, and then I'll grab something like a Game Boy. Like I, I, uh, actually Matt actually gave me one of these things.

It's an RS, this little like retro machine that, uh, has like, you know, you can play old emulator games that you own, uh, on it. And that's what I've been doing. Like I've been, I've been kind of enjoying the slower paced gaming and sometimes it's like a five-minute thing, sometimes it's like a 15-minute thing. Every once in a while it's a little bit longer, but like, a couple times a day. It's not, again, it's not literally every, uh, every session. A couple times a day I'll pick it up and have myself like 15, 20 minutes of gaming, which I did not do before AI existed. I was, I was pretty much not playing anything before that. Now I'm able to, you know, kind of slowly get through some old like Pokemon ROM hacks essentially is what I'm playing right [00:05:00] now, and I kinda like it. Like I, I think that if we look at AI from that perspective, and I know will be like, "Well, you're just wa- like, you know, you're, you're, you're eating our time, like the- you should be doing other work," and stuff like that, and I get that mentality as well.

Like, I get it. But I do think that if you're, if you want the most out of your employees, you need to allow them to have, have some sort of balance, Like, they can't always be on all the time, and now with AI it's like even more so. And if you allow people to be able to like recharge a little bit throughout the day, there is gonna be more benefits from a corporation's perspective as well.

Now, how you monitor that and, you know, how you, y- you avoid abuse, I don't know. I don't really want this episode to be talking about that. But regardless, from a personal level, I've have felt myself just feel better, like creep away a little bit from the burnout that I'm experiencing, have a little bit more positivity around the AI space and just, yeah, enjoy life a little bit more.[00:06:00]

Matt: I mean, one of the points of AI or one of the, the takes on AI is that it's going to relieve us from all this labor that we do all the time, the delivery people driving around, doing any sorts of random work, welding, typing, lifting things, moving things. It's gonna relieve us from multiple sort of positions, professional positions.

It's gonna relieve us from all this labor, and then we're gonna have a, a creative renaissance. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, we're gonna have a creative renaissance playing on, on Game Boys and, and that type of thing. But I will say that it, it is potentially the beginning of something like that, like you're enjoying yourself more.

Uh, in my opinion, if you have a more relaxed sort of brain, not only are you coming back to the task, like you said, better, like you're kind of a little bit relieved, and then you're back to work kind of thing after a five-minute session or so. So you're going and doing that. But then also, if you have a more relieved brain, I, I think you're gonna be more creative.

Like, maybe you're playing that ROM hack, you're gonna come up with an idea for an app. You're gonna come up with an idea for a game. You're [00:07:00] gonna come up with an idea on how to just creatively solve a problem at work. You're gonna have a, have a revelation about this or that. And, and people are... I'm not...

I'm the furthest thing from a psychologist or a doctor, but there, there's a lot of talk right now about digital minimalism, and what's weird is, is we're using the latest state-of-the-art piece of technology, which is the AI, to almost experience a bit of digital minimalism. What would Mike do or what would y- people do by default in, in 2026 between these AI sessions given the free time?

Probably open up TikTok and start doom scrolling. And I, I like TikTok. Like, I use TikTok. I like a, I like a doom scroll just like anyone else, but just like many things, it's best to do in moderation, and I find myself uh, enjoying 'cause I also will tinker with, like, I'll tinker with games or I'll, uh, uh, I'll, you know, d- set something, like I'll set ChatGPT off to do some research and I'll have [00:08:00] like a massive prompt about everything I need it to research and so it'll, it'll take off for, you know, five minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, depending on the, the prompt.

And, and I'll, I'll sometimes just go take a break, go get a coffee. Sometimes I will play. I have an Odin 2, so I, I'll play on my Odin 2. Um, I also have the same device that Mike just mentioned as well, so I'll play on the, on the same device as well. Um, and I'll, you know, I, I will sort of like have that leisurely time.

But also, I'm kind of an anxious person when it comes to kind of work on my plate, and one of the ways to alleviate said anxiety is to get things moving. But when things get kind of backed up, of course that anxiety grows and the worry grows and the workload, I mean, naturally has grown. And so it feels good to be able to delegate to the bot to do, let's say, task one, and then while the bot is running around doing stuff for, let's say, 15 minutes, I'm running around doing stuff manually, doing whatever, right?

Like I'm, we're tackling the task or the tasks at [00:09:00] hand. It's doing task one, I'm doing task two, or like I'm helping one customer while my other customer is being helped by the AI. And I don't mean like literally communicatively, I mean like if I had two tickets in front of me, one's for client one, one's for client two.

Maybe the AI's working on that first ticket and then I'm working on the second. More, more that type of relationship. But it, it really alleviates the work on my plate or at least it alleviates the sort of anxiety around it because for me it's like, okay, like I'm really tackling this today. Like, I'm getting a couple of things done.

There's a limit to that as well. There's a limit to the amount of throughput and we've discussed that on the show and I'm sure we'll discuss that again where you can't, if you have 40 agents, I mean, the bottleneck is gonna be your brain. And so if you have 40 agents giving you 40 tasks, I mean, if you're juggling a lot, eventually your brain's gonna kind of break down a little bit.

But I can multitask enough to do a couple tickets at a time, get a couple of tasks done, or realize, you know what, I'm gonna go get coffee instead of wasting that time fully, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of sick my AI on it, on this task and then I'll come back and then I'll kind of hit the ground running rather than [00:10:00] having to sort of get back into the context of things and, and, and get back into there.

And so I, I, I think it's, I think that there is like a, a, a real benefit to, um... I don't want to say micromanage. It's, it's almost just like effectively using the time between your AI agent runs, and that effective use could seem ineffective. What I mean by that is some people are gonna say, "Matt, you going to get a coffee is an ineffective use of your time.

It's a waste of productivity." People that really want to, like, hit macros of, like, I was at the computer for, like, 12 hours a day and, like, typing this much, and I had this many words written, and I was doing this, and I was doing that, and they really wanna micromanage themselves. There's gonna be people that say that that's time lost.

But to me, it's like, hey, if the AI is trying to alleviate, uh, some, some labor or if it's supposed to be helping us, I mean, sometimes I need that coffee. Sometimes I need to tackle two tasks at once, and sometimes I'm gonna pick up, uh, my, like, a little handheld gaming device, and I'm gonna mess around with it.

Like, that's what's gonna happen[00:11:00]

Mikhail: That's-- And I, something that I think you kind of nailed right on the head there is not going down the path of, like, doom scrolling, right? Like, I think this minimalism idea or this idea of something simple that your brain is not gonna get drained from is what I've been searching for. Because I do sometimes, you know, you know, click on Reddit or something or go, go on YouTube look at shorts.

I don't really go on TikTok very often. Um, but regardless, I do doom scroll, 'cause you do scroll on whatever, and I notice myself being a lot more tired at the end of that than I am after like a 15-minute, you know, session playing Pokémon. It's just, you know, it's simple. There's no stakes. There's no like, you know, I'm not under the clock there.

I can put it down anytime I want. Um, I think having like these devices that can save state anytime you want is also a huge benefit there. Like, you're not like, "Oh, I have to finish this run," or anything like that. Like, I try to avoid that kind of stuff when I'm doing this, right? I'm, I'm doing something to deliberately [00:12:00] unwind.

That's, that's my mentality and it's-- it has noticeably helped in my opinion. Like, I think it has... I've seen a benefit from it in terms of what I can do. Is it something that like, you know, you know, this isn't like a productivity guru thing. Like, you're not gonna all of a sudden become a 10X, you know, productivity person by playing Game Boy every once in a while.

Like, that's not gonna happen. But again, it's a little bit of joy. I think it does help you re- like relax a little bit and come back to Earth, get some benefit out from the, from the AIs that are coming out and not... I don't, like, I, I do go down the path that you go down with the anxiety of just not having things done. I have that quite a bit, Matt. as much as I do ob- like obviously stack workflows try to get things started, I also notice that the quality output does g- [00:13:00] degrade pretty rapidly. So if I'm doing example like two or three things at once, even if AI is the one that's doing it for me, I have noticed that I just, I lose context very easily.

I'm not, I'm not a very good multitasker, I'll be honest. That's been a kind of a problem with me for like probably my whole life. So AI me the ability to multitask is cool, but it's also if I'm doing something important, I still don't wanna do that. I still wanna be aware of the situation. I still wanna, you know, once the, once a AI agent finishes, I'll still skim through what it did. I might not review everything line by line and I might not go back and look, look at its thinking, but like, I will check its summary obviously, and I will check certain things that I, I, I know I need to check before it starts. So- It, there is a trade-off, in my opinion, to having this productivity mindset of running a million agents.

And I think a lot of people do that initially because it's [00:14:00] exciting and they are able to, but they quickly realize that it not only draining them, it's also really hurting output. So again, this is just a, a method to combat that a little bit while still retaining decent output and maybe, again, it's, it's not a bad thing to actually enjoy work a little bit sometimes.

I, I think that we've gone to this situation where employers are so focused on getting as much productivity out of people as possible and, you know, shoving AI down everyone's throats as much as possible that, uh, we've lost any sort of semblance of employee satisfaction. Like, that's gone. That is so far gone, it's, like, out the fricking window.

I, I don't know. It's, in An- Antarctica at this point.

Matt: Well, you're gonna get the people that are like, "Well, the employer shouldn't be caring about the employee satisfaction," and there's gonna be that whole argument as well coming in from that side.

Mikhail: I do think that there is a significant benefit to the employer [00:15:00] when they have some capability for caring about that, 'cause I do see people that are cared about are giving better output. Like that, that is a thing that's been tracked for I, I think it's decades. I, I don't have any, like, information right in front of me, but a, a, a happier employee tends to produce better output is something that I have seen in studies before. So having some semblance of acknowledgement for a person's happiness that's working for you should be something that you care about. At least it doesn't have to be priority number one. that's something that, that, that's been lost and forever will be lost. Okay, I can take that. But it should be somewhere on the list, Like, you can't just be like, "Oh, these are machines now powering machines, and we don't care about their happiness. Let's just, you know, let's give them to be able to intake their, uh, food and that's it, because they need to not die from starvation." Like, that's how it, that's how it's been feeling lately.

Like, a- across the industry, that's what I've been seeing [00:16:00] is that, like, essentially most employees are just being treated like cattle.

Matt: Well, you're like a number

Mikhail: Yeah, you're very much a number and that's it. And, like, it is what it is. Like, you know, I can't... You can't... Not, uh... You can't control everything, but I just, I wanna push back on that a little bit

Matt: I agree. I mean, the thing, the thing here is, is like

Like there, there comes a point like when we-- Like I work with a lot of small businesses, and a lot of small businesses very much just care about them getting their work done, and there's less of that sort of corpo culture of maximizing every single minute and like worrying about every little tiny like loss of productivity and, and things like that.

But then at the same time, it's like I understand the corpo side of things where they're getting pressure from people to like raise the productivity up. Even economists and stuff will look at the productivity and be like, "Oh, like America and/or whatever country, you know, their productivity level has gone up or gone down or whatever," and that obviously helps drive the economy because, you know, th-this person, which is more or less a number, is producing this much [00:17:00] value to the economy, and now they can 10X that amount with this technology and things like that.

But there is... But we, when we start breaking things down into numbers and economic units and productivity numbers and like really, really tr-tracking through, tracing things through with a bunch of metrics and things, you do slowly but surely lose the human element of things. Absolutely. And, um, this is something that's like just very...

I, I don't know if I wanna say it's very like human, but I think it's, um, this has regained a time, and so people are immediately gonna wanna cram it with more work. But what we need to do is take a look at what's actually going to raise the productivity of the person doing it. Like it is, is allowing them to choose what they do, play with a Game Boy for ten minutes, uh, you know, talk to a family member, do something that isn't like super stressful, go get, go take a coffee break, whatever.

Because when you, when I deal with the small to medium [00:18:00] businesses, again, they mostly care about if the job gets done. If the job's getting done, like I don't care if you, you know, messed around with a Game Boy or messed around with like your music player or whatever. I really don't care. Did you hand in the thing on Tuesday like we discussed?

If you did, fantastic. If you didn't, now we gotta talk, and then I'm gonna bring up the Game Boy, and then I'm gonna bring up the m... an MP3 player, and then I'm gonna bring that stuff up. But the thing is, is like I don't really care. If you just, if you do your job, then you do your job. I mean, I used to have a boss that would show up at like two, three PM sometimes He always did what he was supposed to do.

He did his eight hours. He finished his, uh, deadlines. Like, he, he hit all his deadlines, finished his projects, and then he would show up on weekends sometimes to help people. He was flexible like that, so they never questioned it. And I mean, good. I mean, that makes sense. He's doing his job. Maybe he would be, like, very [00:19:00] unproductive in the morning, right?

Maybe, you know, y- you giving a massive prompt, complex prompt that took a lot of, like, engineering on the back end, you know, figuring out what you wanted to ask the AI to do and things like this, maybe you putting together that prompt and then eventually sending it really, like, drained you. Okay, so now, like, let's recharge your batteries a little bit.

Maybe you're a person that wants to fill in that space with something that is productive. Maybe you are a productivity nut and you're like, "Oh my God, now instead of completing five tasks a day, I can complete eight, 'cause I'm not as fast as the AI, but I can do eight tasks a day." It's like, okay, fantastic.

If, if that's where you kinda get your jollies, then, then do it. But, um, I, I do, I do think that, like, you know, maybe this is the beginnings. Like, this is... I, I mean, this is probably not, but it, it, I mean, it could be. It could be the beginnings of us being relieved of our labor to an extent, and you're, like, slowly starting to see that.

I kinda doubt it. I feel like we're, like, reading into it a little bit too much, like, or I'm reading into it a little bit too much with that kinda comment. But [00:20:00] I, I would love to hear what the-- what you, the listener, would l- like, would do with your time or what you do with your time when your agents are running.

Like, sometimes I'll run, you know, a couple... I'll run over here and I'll, I'll get ChatGPT to do this, then I'll run over here and I'll do this, and I'll run over here and do this, and, like, I feel really great. But sometimes I come to work and I'm kinda like, you know, feeling crappy that day or I'm a little tired or whatever.

So sometimes playing that Game Boy actually like boosts me up a little bit. It's e- it's easy to forget that, like, humans are gonna approach the job in different states each day. You know, or I'm at a different stress level, I'm at a different productivity level. As long as I hit those deadlines and things like that, like, we have hard metrics to hit.

If we hit those metrics, like, to me, I don't really care. I don't care what you do. I don't care when you do it. I just want it done within the, the, those hard set parameters. So I, I would love to hear what you, the listener, fill your AI, [00:21:00] I don't know, time with. Like, the time when your AI is running and doing something for you, what do you do with those in-between times?

Hopefully someone comes up with a better way to say that, like an actual clean way to say what the in-between time is, the AI between times maybe something. But just I'm, I'm curious what you do or whether you disagree with me and you're like, "Matt, you should be running 18 agents. What are you doing? You could be so much more productive.

You could do this, you could do that, you could change this, you could change that. You could be, you could be making a, a mobile app and starting your side hustle while you're doing this. You could spin up two L- like, two LLCs in the, in the time." Like, you know, whatever. I'd, I'd love to know, uh, what, uh, what you, the listener, thinks of that

Mikhail: Yeah, that's perfect. I think, uh, I think that wraps this one up though. also would love to hear from you guys at @htmleverything, and, uh, have a great rest of your day

Matt: Mullet Man out

Mikhail: goodbye