Lego, but for my brain

My little love letter to artificial intelligence.

Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash

I haven’t slept properly in months.

Not the anxious, staring-at-the-ceiling kind of sleeplessness. Not the doom-scrolling, cortisol-spiked variety that most people associate with the phrase “AI keeps me up at night.” Though if I’m honest, there’s a sliver of that too. A thin, persistent hum underneath everything, like a fridge you only notice when the house goes quiet. The world is changing, fast, and anyone who tells you they know exactly how it shakes out is either lying or selling something.

But that’s not what’s robbing me of sleep.

What’s robbing me of sleep is the fact that I cannot stop building.

Every night, without fail, I find myself back at the terminal. Coffee gone cold. Eyes dry. The house dark and still around me, except for the glow of the screen and whatever ridiculous thing I’ve decided to try next. Some nights it’s a workflow I’ve been turning over in my head all day. Other nights it’s a question I asked out loud over dinner that I now need to answer before I can rest. And every single morning, I wake up, check the clock, do the maths on how little sleep I got, and feel... fine. Better than fine. Wired. Because the future has finally arrived, and it brought toys.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

For most of my life, I have been what you’d call a generalist. I love being a generalist. Not because I couldn’t specialise, but because specialising always felt like a terrible deal. Agreeing to see the world through a keyhole when someone just offered you a huge window. I wanted to understand everything.

Strategy, politics, communications, technology, people, systems, language. I wanted to know how all the pieces fit together, not just how one piece worked in isolation.

The problem with being a generalist is that you’re always borrowing tools from someone else’s shed.

You learn a bit of code, but you’re not a developer. You understand data, but you’re not an analyst. You can write policy, but you’re not a policy wonk. You’re perpetually competent enough to see the shape of the thing, but rarely equipped enough to do it alone, end to end, without calling in reinforcements.

AI changed that. Not gradually. Not politely. Overnight.

Suddenly, the thing I’ve spent my whole career doing (connecting dots across disciplines, seeing patterns, asking the next question) became the exact skill set that makes AI useful. Not useful in the vague, corporate-deck, “we’re leveraging AI to drive efficiency” way. Useful in the way that a box of Lego is useful to a kid who’s been drawing buildings on napkins for years and has just been handed actual bricks for the first time.

That’s what this is. Lego for my brain.

Want to test a political messaging framework against three different audience segments before breakfast? Done. Want to build a tool that reads a hundred submissions and pulls out the five themes no one’s talking about? Afternoon project. Want to understand how a piece of legislation actually flows through committee stages, mapped against public sentiment data, visualised in a way that a minister’s staffer can absorb in four minutes? I built that last Tuesday. At 2am. In my underpants.

The sheer range of what’s now possible is what makes it impossible to stop. Every answer opens six new questions. Every build reveals three more things that could be built. Every late night ends with a note scribbled on my phone that says something like “tomorrow: try the thing with the thing” and I know exactly what that means and I can’t wait.

And here’s the part that genuinely scares me, in the best possible way.

I’m not special. I’m not a technical genius. I didn’t study computer science. I didn’t follow any standard pathway into any of this. What I have is curiosity, a high tolerance for ambiguity, and an allergy to doing things the slow way. And if someone like me, an immigrant kid who learned English from Playschool and never went to uni, can sit down at a terminal and build things that would have required an entire team twelve months ago... then what happens when everyone figures this out?

That question keeps me up too. But for different reasons.

Because the honest truth is that most of the professional world hasn’t figured it out yet. They’re still in the “we’re exploring AI” phase, which is a polite way of saying they’ve asked someone in IT to write a policy about it. Meanwhile, the gap between people who are using this and people who are watching this is growing every single day. Not because the technology is hard. It isn’t. But because the mindset shift is enormous. You have to be willing to feel stupid for a while. You have to be comfortable building something that breaks. You have to sit in the frustration of trying to get it to do what you want over and over again. You have to let go of the idea that your value is in knowing the answer, and embrace the idea that your value is in knowing the question.

You have to have genuine joy in the abyss that is the unknown.

That’s the fear bit. The thin hum. The fridge in the quiet house. The world is bifurcating into people who are leaning into this discomfort and people who are hoping it goes away. And it won’t go away.

But that fear is a footnote compared to the excitement.

I have spent my entire professional life trying to make the people in the room feel smarter. Trying to help them see things they couldn’t see, connect things they hadn’t connected, challenge assumptions they didn’t know they held. AI doesn’t replace that. AI supercharges it. It takes the thing I’ve always done and removes the bottleneck, which was never the thinking. It was the doing.

Now the doing keeps up with the thinking. And the thinking has never been faster.

So yes. AI is keeping me up at night. Literally. Every night. Every morning I’m back at the terminal, bleary-eyed and buzzing, chasing the next build, the next question, the next “what if I tried...” And I know I should sleep more. I know the bags under my eyes are becoming a personality trait. I know my coffee consumption has crossed from “enthusiastic” into “clinical.”

But I also know this.

For the first time in my life, I feel like the tools have caught up with my curiosity. Like the bricks finally match the blueprints. Like I’ve been handed infinite Lego and told to go nuts.

And I’m going nuts.

I’ll sleep when it’s boring. Which, at this rate, might be never.