The end of the beginning
The first hour of a road trip tends to be fun and easy. You're not sore yet. There's the subtle thrill of leaving behind the familiar, little by little. The novelty of looking for out-of-state license plates, or whatever other car-ride game, hasn't worn off. The hours ahead are a fact that adds meaning to the situation, not something you're slogging through.
Later, when you settle in, you start to experience the long equilibrium of the trip and understand how pleasant or unpleasant that equilibrium will be. Besides the novelty fading away, new things can go wrong (e.g., hunger and bladders falling out of sync).
My life with generative AI feels more and more like being 90 minutes into a road trip. I still marvel at what Claude et al. can do, but not as often as I marvel at the quality of the Apple hardware I'm running them on. Understanding these tools is a basic job skill, not a party trick or a way to impress management. I less often marvel at what can be accomplished in a single day; I'm still happy about it, but it's normal.
I suspect this sort of feeling is animating a lot of recent AI writing--e.g., this viral post. Many of our colleagues just plain don't like the new style of work as much as the old one; many more, I suspect, are feeling old sources of tedium and nuisance again after a period of novelty. We have yet more reason to try to be compassionate.
But there's a happy side to this: there's a kind of flourishing that only comes at equilibrium, whether it's in a good workout, a long book, or anything else. It's nice to experience the other parts of a work day (communications, releases, and so on) in new, generative-AI-adjusted forms, even if those forms will change much more later. I have a first taste of how the next decade of work will feel: for all the remaining uncertainty, even that hazy sense of things is a real comfort. I love a good road trip, and this one feels great.