What Burning 1M Tokens Every Day Does to You

Use AI long enough and it starts to change you in subtle ways. It breeds arrogance toward fellow humans and submission to tools.

You start taking credit for what AI does. Use Claude Code long enough — ten windows running at once — and you start feeling invincible. The number of tokens you burn becomes a new kind of personal metric. But as the models get smarter, I’ve quietly gone from commanding AI to just… being part of the process. My psychology hasn’t caught up. I still think I’m the one in charge.

AI responds to you, but always within the frame you’ve set. Over time, you settle into a pattern where everything revolves around you — “I ask, the world answers.” It’s an emperor’s version of dialogue. Working with someone who actually thinks for themselves is nothing like this. They make you uncomfortable. They challenge your ideas. They force you to re-examine things you assumed were right.

Your tolerance for ordinary people drops. When someone is slow to respond, doesn’t quite get it, needs you to explain things three times — you get irritated. The friction of working with people starts to feel unbearable. Small teams have already figured out the best arrangement: everyone works solo, GitHub handles the coordination.

Your need for other people fades. Because substitutes are so easy to come by. Talking to people becomes mostly about huddling for warmth — not “I can’t figure this out” or “I don’t know how” or “help me think through this.”

The way you think changes. When you hit a new problem, your first instinct is no longer to sit with it — it’s to ask AI. You get used to getting answers right away. You lose the ability to sit with an unfinished thought. But what you’ve given up is the most valuable phase of thinking — the phase where, with no external input, you piece together a rough structure from nothing but your own experience and instinct. That phase is slow and awkward. But it’s where independent judgment comes from.

Arrogance toward people and submission to tools — they point to the same thing: treating efficiency as the only thing that matters.

Under that standard, human slowness, human uncertainty, human inconsistency all become defects.

So we choose efficiency. We give up the friction of dealing with people. And what we lose along with it is the felt sense of our own agency — the feeling that comes from friction, from resistance, from working with something that pushes back.

The deepest unfreedom in modern life doesn’t come from external oppression. It comes from self-exploitation. And the reason this kind of exploitation is more effective than any external kind is precisely because it feels like freedom.

So — I use AI, and AI uses me. It even distills me, every single day.