If you’re new here, my name is Karima Digital, founder of AI Power Lab and Crash Out Diary. The lab has grown to over 1,200 members in the last two months. We’ve hosted 22 free events teaching business owners and entrepreneurs how to build with AI. I also vibe coded Crash Out Diary, a web app which has seen 191,000 user sessions. I’m here to make sure AI works for your life, not the other way around.
AI will burn you the fuck out.
At first you get a hold of the technology, you experiment, it feels like magic, you have fun, you put it down.
Then you see what someone else created with it and you pick it back up. You experiment more. You make more magic, and this time you ship something.
You make something you’ve never been able to make before with the amount of time and resources you had. The thing is, you’ve always been scrappy. You’ve always been resourceful and you’ve always had to do a lot with a little bit. And you always make some shit shake.
When it comes to creating with AI, you realize you encountered a new medium, a new frontier to explore and push yourself to do things that you’ve always wanted to do.
And that feels a little bit like a drug.
So you keep going, you keep making stuff, and the deeper you get the more complex things get. You start getting into workflows, agents, APIs. And then you start to feel the fatigue, because every time you turn around there is something brand new out. Something better to try. Something more enticing to do.
It starts to shift from excitement to overwhelm. You start to feel like you’re no longer solving problems, you’re creating more problems for yourself. You start to stack one project on top of another, never completely “finishing”. You create all of these open loops (unfinished projects) for yourself, they pile up like a mountain or graveyard.
This is where you start to feel the burnout because it gets so hard to keep up with the expectations you have for yourself in addition to that new shiny thing that you want to get your hands on.
And then you realize “Damn, I need a break”. Your system is overloaded.
I say this with a heart full of love: there is no better timing than God’s timing. And that means no matter how much you consume, no matter how many new tools you pick up or new tricks you learn, what’s for you will be for you.
The one thing that catalyzes you, that propels you to that next level you’ve been waiting to hit, it’s going to come for you in God’s time. Not in the timeline of every new AI tool. Be curious, yes. But there comes a point where you have to lock down and get good at what’s already in front of you. Jumping to the next thing before you’ve finished the current thing isn’t ambition. It’s a setup.
And while we’re here, let’s talk about the illusion AI puts in front of you.
AI will make you feel like you should be able to do everything yourself. That’s not real. It has never been real when it comes to getting AI to fill the gaps fostered by your lack of expertise. If you’re not an engineer and you’re shipping a product and you are stuck on that last 30%, it is not a personal failure. It’s truly a time management decision. Go find an expert and pay for help. It will save you so much time, so many crashouts, so much going back-and-forth, trying to get an AI to fix something it doesn’t fully understand either.
AI is an amplifier.
If you don’t have the expertise, it amplifies the gap. Getting proper guidance allows you to hold onto the vision and remain in your zone of genius.
Now here’s what I really want to say and why I wrote this.
Burnout isn’t just exhaustion from working too much. Burnout is internal misalignment. It’s a signal that somewhere along the way, your “why” got buried under the doing. And AI will only exacerbate that, because it’s so easy to fall so deep into the technology that you skip over your why entirely and start reprioritizing everything around getting things done.
You start sacrificing things that were important to you before. You feel guilty for choosing rest, for choosing your people, for choosing anything that isn’t the work. The lines get blurred fast.
I know this because I’ve lived it. I know what it feels like to be so convicted towards something, to be able to see the finish line, to want it so bad, and to just be so tired. To be under-resourced and still pushing. That’s a specific kind of exhaustion and I don’t want that for you.
In the AI Power Lab group chat, people have shared that they’re close to burnout. Some of you have stepped back to take care of your mental health.
And that means everything to me. One, because you felt like the lab was a safe enough place to share, and that people would care because we do.
Two, by sharing you lead by example, there is always someone lurking and watching that is going through something similar. Your word is powerful and you sharing about yourself is still doing a big service to the group.
I know what it costs to keep going when you should have stopped. Sometimes that’s all I know and that’s all I’ve ever been.
If you’re in AI Power Lab and you need to take a break, take the break. You are encouraged to say I need to pause. You are allowed to step back from the feeds and the tools and the group chats and take care of you, the most precious jewel.
Asking for help and sharing that you are taking a break carry the same weight here. Neither one makes you less and both take courage.
There is nothing more important in this community than the people who make it what it is.
I don’t want you to burn out. I want your flame to be a fire that eternally burns in the name of the things that light you up, the things that make you feel most passionate and most purposeful, the things you want to be part of your legacy and mark your place on this earth forever.
Take care of your flame, don’t let AI or your ambitions burn you out.