S2E04: I Thought I Was Behind. Then I Read My Own Git Log.

I have a worry I haven't said out loud.

I spend about half my time in corporate training rooms now. That's a good problem to have. But every hour up front teaching AI is an hour I'm not building with it. Not testing the new models, not iterating, not getting my hands dirty. And this field moves every single week.

So the fear is quiet and exact: while I'm busy teaching people to use AI, am I slowly falling behind on actually doing it?

It sits in my chest most mornings, before I open the laptop.

Last week I did the thing I keep telling clients to do. When you can't see your own progress, make it visible. I wrote about why that works a few posts ago. AI doesn't hand me answers. It makes my thinking visible enough to react to.

I pointed Claude Code at my own trail. Every repo, every commit, every training room, every lumpy draft. Not to grade it. Just to lay it out somewhere I could actually look at it. (I bounce between Claude Code and Codex these days. Claude Code drew this one.)

Then I looked. And... oh.

What the trail actually said

Somewhere in the last few months I'd convinced myself the training was crowding out the building. That I was teaching AI more than I was actually building with it.

The trail says otherwise.

A small public repo I built in a single day. A partner turned it into four booked trainings.

Six new corporate clients in twelve weeks. Two of them already asking for recurring sessions. One of them I'd have been too intimidated to even email a year ago.

A way of working with AI that I now reach for without thinking. Twelve months ago I didn't have one.

I didn't trade building for training. I did both, the whole time. I only counted the training because that's the part with a calendar invite.

The line that got me

Here's the move I keep making. I look at all of it and call it "still figuring it out." "Not there yet." "Behind."

But the trail has dates on it. Real systems, still running. Clients who signed, then came back for more. None of that is a feeling. It's a fact, with timestamps.

You can argue with a feeling. You can't argue with done, paid, and "can we book the next one."

The footage doesn't lie. I wasn't falling behind. I was forming the skill, and I couldn't see it because I was standing inside the shot.

Why I couldn't see it

I think this is just what compounding feels like from the inside. Every single day feels ordinary. You solve a thing, you forget it was ever hard, you move on. Nothing about a Tuesday tells you you're becoming someone.

The growth only shows up when you stop and line the days up next to each other.

A feeling has no timeline. A trail does. "Behind" is what formation feels like while it's still happening.

The uncomfortable part

I do this exact diagnosis for other people. I help teams see that they're further along than they think, that the messy thing they shipped actually counts. I have a whole tidy framework for it.

Then I close the laptop and tell myself I'm the one falling behind.

Same move I caught myself making with this blog. Turns out I can see the pattern clearly in everyone except me.

What I'm still figuring out

Whether this is just a me thing, or true for most people who feel behind on AI right now. My guess is you're further along than your feeling says too. You just haven't lined up your own days yet.

I made mine into a little map. Seeing it didn't make me feel impressive. It made me feel like I'd been lied to, quietly, by my own head.