Welcome to The Clearing
If you are reading this, something is wrong with the way you are working.
Not wrong like bad engineer. Wrong like something changed in the last 18 months that nobody warned you about.
You are shipping more than ever. Your velocity metrics have never looked better. And yet:
You cannot quite remember the last time you wrote a function from scratch. You cannot quite explain why that code you accepted last Tuesday actually works. You are learning less and producing more and feeling exactly none of the satisfaction that either of those things used to bring.
We call it AI fatigue. You are not burned out. You are not lazy. You are not struggling with change. Something real is happening to the craft, and you deserve a name for it.
Why we built this
Three of us — Sunny, Anny, and Dragon Hunter — are engineers who have been watching our friends go through this. Good engineers. Serious engineers. People who care about what they do.
The symptoms kept showing up the same way: Sunday dread that does not match the actual difficulty of Monday tasks. A creeping sense that the work is not yours. A vague guilt about being ungrateful for superpowers that do not feel super.
We looked for resources and found productivity content. Nothing honest about what it feels like to slowly stop recognizing your own skills. Nothing about how to protect the craft.
So we built The Clearing.
What we are offering
A free 5-question AI Fatigue Quiz that tells you where you are — from using AI mindfully to considering leaving tech.
A plain-English explainer of what is actually happening to your brain when AI writes your code for you.
A 30-day recovery plan built from research, not hustle culture.
And a weekly letter — this one — with one honest thing per week. No growth hacking. No master the future. Just: this is what is happening, and here is one thing that actually helps.
One thing you can do today
Answer one question honestly:
Could you build your current project's core feature from scratch — no AI, no reference, no Stack Overflow — in the time it would take you to prompt for it?
If yes: you are okay. Keep paying attention.
If no: you are in the right place. This letter is for you.