You're not behind

If you read nothing else, read this part

Hey, you feel behind with AI right now. Everyone does.

Leaders in the space are racing to be out front, only to be shuffled back to second, third, or last place a week later. Everyone’s behind, even those out front.

I have some advice. Ignore the launches and the hype. Just focus on building for 6 months from now, build things that will seem obvious in 6 months, and have fun.

What you’re feeling isn’t wrong

With how fast everything has changed in tech in the past year, it’s so easy to feel like you’re behind, and that you’ll never find success because everything is just moving ahead too fast.

Every week a new tool, model, technique, or research paper is released that seems to change everything. January, 2026 felt like a tipping point where things just hit hyperspeed and even your dad was shipping something.

In this environment, every untested AI thing is a lost opportunity. FOMO hits you like a super-sonic passenger plane, and it feels like if you don’t stay a step ahead you’ll just never get ahead at all.

This is absolute nonsense.

The hype is just to make them feel better

Those people launching that new thing? They’re desperately fighting the exact same anxiety about the future as you are. You just get to see their press releases and polished posts, even though they feel painfully behind.

Hell, Claude Opus 4.6 was the “world’s most powerful model” and then GPT 5.3 dropped 20 minutes later.

The Japanese call it hon’ne-tatemae (本音・建前): public face versus true feeling. You see their tatemae, but you feel their hon’ne. You’re both scared, they just have better PR.

What you see is their public face (tatemae), but what you feel is their true feelings (hon’ne).

Just know that what you’re feeling isn’t insight in the traditional sense because you’re looking at month-old bets with the polished confidence of a team built to make every launch look as good as possible.

Ignore it. The thing that matters most is building something that people will remember a year from now. Even a month from now, you won’t remember which model dropped, what post went viral, or what press release claimed “AGI is definitely here this time guys”.

Your best bet is to set yourself up to be in that group of people that matter in a year. You need to build your own moat against this FOMO. I’ll show you how.

Mental moats and your edge moving forward

The Claude Code team was given one piece of advice when starting to build their product:

Don’t build for the model of today. Build for the model 6 months from now.

This framing is a mental moat

A mental moat is cognitive protection that compounds — a way of processing information that makes you harder to destabilize and enables you to act easier. Whereas physical moats protect your assets, we’ll be building moats that protect your cognition, attention and execution.

Here’s one you can start building right now.

The 6 month filter

Ask yourself one question, “What will be obvious 6 months from now?” You can even take out a note and write a sentence describing a product or capability that is janky or non-existent now, but feels inevitable. The point of this is to spot what is emerging before it saturates.

Do you know what the best part is? You can build it. Right now. The barriers have never been lower. Even if the bottleneck is that the models aren’t good enough for the task, they will be in 6 months.

Is it obvious that vision, voice, reasoning, and image gen models will converge? Build for that.

Is it obvious that agent orchestrators will be the next big thing? Build one.

This mindset compounds silently and fast, because it’s a cognitive filter that separates noise from signal. Whereas a new model drop or product launch would cause others to panic, you shrug your shoulders knowing that it was inevitable, and you already built for the current state 6 months ago.

Lock in on the next 6 months

Look, the reality is, it’s hard to not feel behind. It’s in your nature as a builder to want to be on the cutting edge, and if you just focus on doing things for where AI will be 6 months from now, you’ll always be ahead.

See you space cowboy…