Notes · Personal

Why We Decide Beats What We Decide

Personal · 2026-11-01

AI makes generating options nearly free, which shifts the bottleneck to human judgment and makes explicit personal values the only durable filter against decision fatigue.

"You just need better options" is the lie you tell yourself when you're tired of deciding. Late on a Sunday night, my partner and I stared at a spreadsheet of trade-offs for our next few years, and I caught myself arguing for a path I didn't even want. I've been practicing making more decisions recently (probably new dad brain) and the fatigue had quietly shifted my criteria toward reasons that aren't actually important to me. Maybe that's a function of getting older, or maybe it comes with a growing family where time and energy are scarce resources. Whatever the mix, watching AI speed up the work around us makes one thing clear: judgment fatigue is maxing out for everybody right now, at every stage of life.

AI makes generating options cheap, which makes human judgment the bottleneck. One of the leaders I respect recently shared that making clear decisions is a skill that requires practice and discipline to improve: looking at different scenarios, understanding what your principles are, and practicing applying them in different situations for different goals and outcomes. It takes years and years to learn and get better at, and as they put it, we all need to get better at that now with AI.

Hearing that while weighing a bunch of important decisions in my own life inspired me to dig in further. As I found when building an AI writing agent that doesn't write slop, our tools handle the grunt work of assembling drafts and options, leaving us with what a philosopher would call "practical wisdom": knowing why one destination is worth the trip in a finite life, job, or relationship. When an agent or a colleague can hand you five plausible plans before breakfast, having more options doesn't make you wiser. Without a clear aim, it just burns through your judgment faster until you sign off on whatever is in front of you due to fatigue, perception, or ego.

In engineering, we keep an agent or a team from drifting by writing down operating principles and evaluation criteria before we grade the work; in life, that's what we value. What do you want out of your life, and what do you want out of your job? I haven't stopped to recalibrate that until recently.

Being intentional about those answers is more important than ever, so I wrote my updated values down. Here are three: 1) protecting irreplaceable years with our family, 2) keeping our fixed expenses low so we buy freedom today vs. hoping for it tomorrow, and 3) staying healthy so we have the privilege to try, physically and mentally. It's a start.

What are your values and principles at work and in life? Have you updated them recently? Have you updated them for the strain AI puts on our judgment? Let me know in the comments or send me a note.

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