The Bike Trip that Never Was

People always say you’re the average of the five people you spend your time with. That assumes those five people are remotely similar. It becomes a problem when they’re mutually exclusive in every sense of the word.

I have two types of friends. The first type makes $300k a year and say things like “I’m comfortable” this is a rich people code for “I’m rich, fuck you.” The second type sleeps in hostels that sometimes have bed bugs and believe that showering is optional. Somehow I’m both of them. Somehow I’m neither.

I was working at a decent remote gig this past year. Got to travel to something like eight(or maybe 10) different countries, got to build some of the coolest AI stuff, until the coolness factor kind of ran away. Knowing that people who work there will read this, it’s kind of disappointing because in many ways I really loved the gig and I’m very thankful for it. In other ways, something didn’t feel right (that’s a nice way to put it).

The thing about life is your heart always knows the truth before your mind. Your consciousness can’t necessarily verbalize the depth of your emotion, but your heart and your body embody the direction of your spirit. I started waking up at 3am, anxious about nothing while everything else was supposedly going perfectly. My body was trying to quit while my mind was still trying to update my LinkedIn.

I knew something was off. Couldn’t quite put a finger on it. I probably didn’t enjoy things as much anymore. That itch, the genuine desire it kind of faded away. For many reasons, right? It’s always easy to blame one thing(or a person). So maybe it was being around people who weren’t right for me, or maybe my heart just wasn’t in it anymore.

So I quit. Figured I had enough savings to travel for a couple years without working. The plan was to do something wild like bike from the UK to Turkey, or maybe Argentina to Alaska. My old landlord had done the South America route and it sounded perfect. Young enough, restless enough, why not? I have done multi day hikes in western Canada and never regretted them.

Then some recruiter messaged me on LinkedIn.

Now, knowing recruiters, I thought they were all sleazy idiots who had to portray every startup as the next billion dollar thing, regardless of how stupid or fraudulent it was. But this guy seemed nice enough, and the product was in the AI space where my expertise was. I figured, what’s the worst that could happen? I don’t need a job. I’ll just try the product.

I tried it for five minutes and felt something I hadn’t felt since I was 18 writing my first for-loop was pure fucking delight. Like watching magic happen. Within minutes I was like, “I don’t even care about the job, I’ll do this for free”.

And that’s when I realized I was caught. My twenties are ending. There are certain things you can only do once that cross-continental bike trip being one of them. I’ve traveled to 30 countries but my stomach and soul still have this endless desire to explore more. Like something’s missing and I need to see more of the world to fill it.

But then there’s this other thing. AGI is coming. And I mean really coming.(For my non-tech friends: AGI is basically a super intelligent computer like Samantha from “Her” that can do anything a human can do, but faster and smarter).

Within the next one or two years, the world as we know it will fundamentally change. You’ll say things and magic will come to life. Every time I tell my hippie friends this, they roll their eyes like I’m fucking insane. And every single day, this vision gets closer to reality(While I am not waiting for an “I told you so moment”, I do know that it will come).

So here I am, 29 years old, choosing between two things that will only happen once: being young and free on a bike crossing continents, or watching AGI transform everything from the front row.

The AGI pulled me harder. It pulled me so fucking hard I couldn’t think of doing anything else.

Which brings me to the absurd part: I’m actively working to make my own career obsolete. I am working at cline.bot and this AI coding agent I’m building? If it works and it will the world of software as we know it will cease to exist. Or become so different it’ll never feel the same again.

I am ending my biking trip to end my career. And it seems like every line of code I write is a eulogy. Every feature I ship brings us closer to not needing me anymore. It’s a personal crusade to basically make myself irrelevant.

My hippie friends think I’m insane for caring about AGI. My tech friends think I’m insane for wanting to bike across continents instead of building the future. And I think they’re both right.