Your Intensity Brings Meaning

“We’ve traded intensity for meaning.”

I saw that line while scrolling LinkedIn between meetings yesterday, and it refused to let go. By the afternoon, I was repeating it in a meeting with an IT vendor who wanted help stabilizing a product that’s been mostly vibe-coded.

Features are shipping daily, and progress is reported almost constantly, but the product is getting closer to the goal - and further from it at the same time.

There are zero developers formally assigned. Management is loose. Metrics are everywhere and only reflect how much time is being burned. The output, when you zoom out, is a big pile of ship.

That line came back to me later that night, over a cold can of Mountain Dew, and that’s when it clicked: nothing was traded. The connective tissue between intensity and meaning - thought - had been stripped out and quietly replaced with AI.

Thought and responsibility tend to hang out together. Remove one, and the other usually follows; that’s why no one in the room could quite explain what was going wrong, even though everyone could tell you how fast things were moving.

Intensty, not Temperature

This morning, the line was still rattling around in my head. I’m lucky to be working with vendors who value real human thought - the kind built from experience, context, and making a few mistakes along the way.

The kind that uses tools to create space for… yes… more human thought. Then an email came in from the leader of that meeting. The opening line stopped me:

“Your intensity brings meaning.”

On reflection, it’s not so much intensity - it’s passion for the kind of work I’ve dedicated my career, and years before it began, too. I probably was a little jacked up on Mountain Dew, as I tend to be, but the point stands.

The email went on - the project will slow down, and a developer will be assigned. A real plan is replacing the vibes, and AI-based tools will be used to complement and fortify thinking - not replace it.

Nice.