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A Harness for the Mind
It was a balmy Friday afternoon and I had just walked in the door from grocery shopping when I received an urgent-sounding message from Ilyas Landikov. We’d been pairing up on some software projects recently, one of which was Easely. He was also using Easely to do his work, which made some alarm bells go off in my head when I received his message. Perhaps he found some workflow-shattering bug which would threaten the business.
“Hey there. Free for a quick chat?” is all he wrote.
A flash of worry came over me with the feeling of anxiety creeping up from my stomach and into my throat. It may have been 12:30 PM for me, but it was 12:30 AM for Ilyas. I swallowed hard, “yeah, what’s up?” I played it cool - no need to let my over-active mind take over. I took controlled breaths as I headed up to my computer to hop on a call, for his only response to my question was link to a Google Meet session.
Tab-a-licious
Tabs have arrived! This first iteration of the feature allows multiple graphs for different units of work to be active during your process at one time. Check it out in v2026.7.2 and read more about it in the blog!
The Productive Brain
The human brain is a powerful resource. It is the source of our creativity. We use it to learn new things and record our life experience. Thus, it is the cradle of our skills. We have all had the fundamental human experience of growing our skills through learning and practice. We have also had the experience of atrophy when we have declined to put in that effort.
AI marketing seems to consistently tout productivity gains, yet companies repeatedly focus on how developers feel, rather than how productive they really are. In reality, we allow our own creativity to atrophy the moment we let the AI do a task for us. Who (or what) is putting in that effort?
How do we know what impact AI really has on us? Recent objective studies have been conducted to measure just that! It is worth noting that these studies are under peer review at the time of writing this blog article. However, at Amplify, we feel this is important enough to discuss right now.
What can we learn from these studies?
It’s a Trap
The AI marketing train has been going full steam for a while now and many have been caught up in the hype. Some have lost hope in humanity, lost faith in the future, and sunk towards depression with thoughts of a purposeless life in a world without a job to be had. These experiences are deeply personal; they are most uncomfortable.
The marketing train goes something like this: “AI is here! Look at these benchmarks! It’s already smarter than us! It is the last human invention and will automate all jobs, but you’ll lose your job before then to those who use AI… unless, of course, you use our AI first!” What a wildly productive message! The marketing hype uses some modicum of truth (we have some version of AI), with false equivalency (as if benchmarks resembled real life), and quickly launches the imagination into a possible future anchored in a claim about intelligence in the form of prophecy about jobs.
That message creates the emotional context of fear. Fear of loss. Fear is incredibly motivating. Daniel Kahneman showed that the motivation to avoid a loss is 2x stronger than the motivation to gain the same thing. Fear even sells better than sex.