I'm finding there is a lot of stuff I can do that has no connection to AI. I've been climbing and drawing and journaling and gardening and going to live concerts, and AI only gives me more motivation to do these things.

For doing tech stuff... Yeah I don't know. Amateur radio is techy without a lot of AI.

For me, it was accepting that I will never be the smartest guy in the room and never know the most about a topic. I decided to play to the strengths that come from ADHD, and have cultivated broad knowledge, with only a few points of depth. I work with AI/ML, and I transitioned into it from web dev. I make a point to learn what I need when I need it, rather than trying to stuff my head full of stuff that may or may not be relevant. Changed my focus to "be good in the current situation" rather than "be good at everything." Over time, that fosters learning that sticks.

By being optimistic. That doesn’t mean being positive all the time, but rather being open, curious, and resilient.

I think feedback cycles and compounding effort are important.

Feedback meaning you have definitive endings (post it, journal it, etc) to your period of “doing stuff”. Cycles meaning you repeat this over time.

Compounding effort meaning that “doing stuff” in one cycle lets you do new or more complicated things in the next cycle.

Motivation is often just the momentum you get from succeeding. For independent work, you can define your own success criteria. The methods above are helpful for feeling successful.

I think it will help for you to articulate why AI is reducing your motivation.

Pre-LLMs, what motivated you? Why did you do what you did?

If you build something specifically to solve a problem you actually have, you aren't constantly looking over your shoulder to see if OpenAI is about to sherlock your business. You’re building a tool that helps you personally. If you find it useful, there’s a high probability other people will too, but even if they don't, you still have a tool that works for you. It moves the motivation from 'winning the AI race' to 'improving my own life,' which is much more sustainable long-term.

AI is simply a force multiplier when it comes to tech. If you were motivated before LLMs what has changed?

I don’t think AI is the problem here.

If you're spending more than 15-20 minutes a day on "social" media the problem isn't generally AI, it's specifically the AI that makes the media addicting. The more attention you give media the harder it is to give your attention elsewhere.

If you're protecting your attention and still facing motivation issues, then I'll need to know more about you to understand the root of it.

All we can do is stab in the dark/speculate given what you've shared. I only pointed at media because these days it's the most likely culprit.

It sounds like you don't have motivation to keep up with the changes of the AI state of the art. That's fine. Don't.

But motivation in general? Let it find you. When you see "hey, I really want to do that", well, that that's motivation. You want to do that. You don't have to manufacture motivation - you have motivation.

And once you have motivation, if you want to experiment with using an AI as you do it, that's fine. If you don't, that's fine too.

As far as work? I haven’t found a method to get over my addiction to food and shelter and I need money to support my addictions and need to convince companies to keep giving me money by doing work. Thats my motivation.

As far as learning new “things”, it depends on what those things are.

I’ve been working in the AWS + app dev consulting space for six years and have been working with AWS for around 10. I know CloudFormation for infrastructure as code well and started using it in 2017. As I got more into consulting, I knew that eventually I was going to have to learn Terraform and the AWS CDK. Last year, two projects came up where I had to use both respectively.

I was able to one shot both with a detailed set of requirements I designed with ChatGPT. Why bother learning either? I know system design on AWS and how to verify the correctness of the output.

The second anecdote. I haven’t done any web development in decades and always wanted to get back into it enough at least to do internal websites. I have a good sense of UX and putting myself in the shoes of users. Now with v0 and coding agents, why bother? My goal was never to be a great web developer. I just wanted to create usable internal tools.

My entire focus over the last decade was to become more architectural and customer focused in consulting. I’m glad I did and those two areas have kept me employable and have been most of learning focus. Before AI, I delegated the grunt work to more junior developers, now I delegate it to AI.

As far as where my focus is at now 50+ outside of staying employable? I’ve been a gym rat since I was 16 (including a 15 year previous stint as a part time fitness instructor), and I spend my free time learning Spanish for my eventual retirement out of the country (motivation enough to get the f** out of dodge) and near term starting this year, we will be spending a few months in our target country every year - we just came back from spending two months there.

I am not a software developer anymore, just a guy who applies his software development skills to his day to day business problems. The switch made me more pragmatic about software, but also made coding a lot more fun since it's not my full-time occupation. If you want to love something, don't do it for a living.

To me, AI is a bit like a dishwasher or a spreadsheet: a labour-saving device for the things I don't enjoy doing. It handles the tedium so I can do more of the fun stuff.

Remember to play too. Coding for money makes you forget why you got into it in the first place. I love cooking and making watercolours because I never expected to do it professionally or even for money. Sometimes it's good to just fuck around with no expectations of productivity.