My Mediocrity Has Been Automated

The Pride

I’ve always taken pride in being mediocre at everything I do. For some people this may sound strange, or even sad - but not to me. For me it’s simple: I hate being the worst at something, and I can’t stand the idea of being the best at something either. While almost everyone resonates with the first part, the second part raises a few eyebrows.

But why? Why would anybody want to be stuck in the middle? The middle is usually associated with being overlooked, ignored, and unimportant - and for me, that’s exactly the point. Because when I’m not great at anything, I am free. It gives me an insatiable hunger to chase the impossible, to always find a place where I’m not yet the expert.

Because the moment you become an expert at something, it becomes a never-ending battle - with yourself and with everyone around you - to cling onto that title. It’s draining. The middle is so comfortable. You’re never done, there’s always something new to learn. You’re playing this intriguing game of catch-up with “the experts”, with the people constantly trying to prove themselves. And the most satisfying part of this to me is the ability to do things differently than others without constraints, without being bound by the archetypes you set in your past.

The Theft

All that said, something has changed. My mediocrity has been automated by AI. Instead of me making small, compounding mistakes, writing undercooked architecture or subpar code, AI does it for me. The imperfection has been outsourced - and with it, so has the desire in my soul to be better. That thing I wrote that could’ve been improved? AI wrote it. That gap I was supposed to close? AI can close it. Somebody pointed out that something can be better ? Guess what, that’s now a prompt addressed to my coding agent. And it’s so hard to go back to the old ways, because my human brain is lazy, because my superiors now demand a mythical 10x output. I can’t be mediocore now, because it’s no longer a mediocrity, it’s worse. The baseline has been shifted, people who were “the worst”, are now easily the “old mediocore”, the people who were “the best”, well, they can slide either way with the AI to be honest.

It’s not a progress for me, it’s a stagnation. You might think that’s stagnation can be corresponded to the mediocrity, but no, it’s “the worst”. Stagnation is a false sense of security, easiness and access. When you are there, you don’t feel threatened, you don’t see things changing, you don’t see things getting better or worse. But things always change, the river is never the same. It’s dangerous.

So I was robbed, not out of my output or my productivity, I was robbed of my proccess. The proccess of getting stuck on things for days, subpar first attempts that made me think, all gone. My dissatisfaction with my work ? Gone. Because it’s not me, it was the AI. And yes, I know, technically I am the one “guiding” the AI. But am I ? Can anybody really expected to do the same due-dilligence, have the same attention to the craft when lazy monkey-brain sees a working result under a tight deadline ?

The Crisis

To me, mediocrity was never really about being average. It was about staying in constant motion. Staying hungry. Never settling into the brittle comfort of “having arrived”. So where do I go from this point ? Do I just accept that this is it, and I should just shut up and keep prompting untill the suits decide that it’s not needed anymore ? Should I start spending 2 times the mental effort planning prompts and meticulously reviewing what my glorified auto-complete spewed out ?

Maybe the point was never to stay mediocre.
Maybe the point was to struggle.
And if AI takes that away, then the real question isn’t whether I should use it
It’s whether I’m still doing anything worth struggling for.

I have questions but I don’t have answers yet. It seems like you either adapt or perish. At the end of the day, this is the new normal, like it or not.