Nobody Knows What's Going On. That's Kind of the Point.

I've been following the AI space closely enough that I can tell you with confidence: nobody — not the researchers, not the founders, not the people building the products — fully knows where it's going.

And I mean that as a genuine observation, not a criticism.

The Names You Keep Hearing

If you've spent any time in this world lately, you've probably heard all of these. OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot). The latest model that supposedly changes everything. Followed a week (or even a few days) later by another model that supposedly changes that. The benchmarks, the demos, the breathless X threads, the inevitable counter-threads explaining why the breathless threads were wrong.

It moves fast. Faster than our frameworks for understanding it.

No One Has the Map

Here's what I keep coming back to: we are, collectively, in the middle of something that nobody has a clean map for. The companies building these tools don't have a clean map. The researchers studying them don't have a clean map. The journalists covering them don't have a clean map. And the people using them, like you and me, definitely don't have a clean map.

We're all navigating by feel, which is either terrifying or exciting depending on the day.

The Questions Underneath the Tools

What I find genuinely interesting about this moment isn't the technology itself. It's the way it's forcing everyone to get honest about what they actually value.

When a tool can write a decent first draft, you have to ask yourself what you actually care about in writing. When it can answer questions faster than any person, you have to figure out what questions were actually worth asking in the first place. When it can replicate the surface of expertise, you have to think harder about what expertise actually is underneath the surface.

These aren't comfortable questions. They're the kind that keep you up at night, that you have to think about while on a walk, that you can't resolve in a single conversation. But they're also the most interesting questions I've encountered in a long time.

AI, for all its hype and noise and genuinely bizarre discourse, is making people think harder about what it means to be good at something. What it means to contribute. What it means to be human in a professional context.

Making Calls With Incomplete Information

The thing about being in the middle of something like this AI revolution is that you don't get the luxury of retrospective clarity. You can't wait until history sorts it out and then decide how you feel. You have to make calls now, with incomplete information, about what tools to use, what to trust, what to push back on, how to adapt your work and your thinking and your relationship to expertise.

That's the part that I don't think gets talked about enough. Not the technology itself but the cognition required to navigate a changing landscape in real time.

I've been trying to develop what I can only describe as a calibrated relationship with uncertainty. Not ignoring the change, not catastrophizing it. Just watching closely, updating regularly, holding my opinions loosely enough that new information can actually move them. It's harder than having a firm take, but I think it's more honest.

The Discipline of Staying Uncertain

What I do believe, after paying attention to this space for a while now, is that the people who will find this moment most generative are the ones who stay genuinely curious without needing to resolve the uncertainty too quickly.

The ones who use the tools without fully trusting them. Who question the benchmarks without dismissing the progress. Who read the research without treating it as scripture. Who hold both the excitement and the concern at the same time without letting either one crowd out the other.

That's a particular kind of intellectual discipline. It doesn't come naturally. It requires resisting the pull toward the clean narrative, the confident take, the fully formed opinion that tells you exactly where you stand.

But this is a moment that resists clean narratives. And I think the honest response is to resist them right back.

Where I Actually Stand

I don't know where the next, new hot AI item is taking us. I don't think anyone does, including the people building them. What I know is that I'd rather be genuinely uncertain and paying close attention than confidently wrong and not looking.

That feels like the only sane place to stand right now. Just being curious. Being observant. And I'm okay with that for now.