I have spent my career building software, yet I’ve developed a deep aversion to the clicking, navigating, and digital effort modern work requires. Only recently did I understand why. My brother, a carpenter, is physically worn down after decades of labor. I realized I am experiencing the digital equivalent. Years of micro-movements and screen friction have created real cognitive wear. This is why we are building Kai, to remove digital toil and extend our productive working lives.

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For years I have made an off-hand comment in conversations that tends to surprise people: I hate software. I run software companies, I build AI systems, and the bulk of my career has been spent inside digital tools, yet I have always carried a deep aversion to digital effort in the form of clicking, reading, chatting, and all the other activities associated with modern virtual work. I have tried to explain this to people, but they never seem to understand my real psychological aversion to performing the very work I am clearly so passionate about. It was only in a recent discussion with my CTO that I finally arrived at a better understanding of my own reaction to digital work, and it came from reflecting on my brother’s experience as a carpenter.

My brother is in his late forties and he has worked with his body every day since he was a teenager. Years of lifting, bending, climbing, hammering, and working in the cold have accumulated into a kind of physical exhaustion that has irreversibly impacted his desire and ability to continue in that line of work. His joints ache, his hands are worn, and each winter morning he wakes up knowing his body will cooperate just a little less than it did the year before. When he says he is “worn out,” he is not being metaphorical. He is describing a fact that exists in the bones.

What I realized in chatting with my CTO is that I am experiencing the digital equivalent. My aversion to unnecessary digital steps, excessive clicking, navigation friction, and tool-hopping is not a preference: it’s pain avoidance. Over the course of a twenty-five-year professional life, I have spent thousands of hours dragging a mouse, switching windows, drilling through menus, chasing notifications, copying data between tools, building and learning new interfaces, and performing endless micro-movements that feel small individually but have accumulated into significant mental discomfort. Digital labor is real labor. It has a cost. And eventually it produces fatigue that is not simply irritation but something close to what my brother feels on cold Monday mornings on the job site.

This is why I react so strongly to the idea of “ambient clicking.” If I cannot access something in one click, my interest drops immediately. If a workflow involves multiple transitional steps, my mind disengages. When someone asks me to go through a payment flow or a multi-step settings panel, I feel the same internal recoil that my brother must feel when he sees a stack of lumber that needs to be unloaded in the freezing cold. His body says, “not again”. Mine mind does as well, just for different reasons.

For most of my life, I assumed this was a quirk. But the world around me is starting to reveal that it may be an emerging condition produced by modern work. Many people are comfortable with screens until the moment that digital navigation becomes inefficient, then their patience collapses. Earlier generations with less conditioning for this kind of mental strain handled this problem differently. I remember early in my career when some of my older bosses used to have assistants print their emails and read them aloud. Today I recognize in that behavior the same instinct I now have: a refusal to engage in unnecessary interaction overhead.

This is also why I am so drawn to the work we are doing inside Kaamfu, because every feature we design has a common purpose: reduce the number of clicks, reduce the transitions, and remove every unnecessary step that drains mental endurance. Kai, our native AI assistant, is going to accelerate and amplify our mission to create the frictionless work environment by replacing endless switching with direct action, and eliminating much of the ambient friction of modern software.

This became clear during my conversation with our CTO as we went back and forth on Kai’s early missteps. Kai sometimes makes naïve inferences because of how it was prompted, occasionally interpreting normal behavior as anomalies. It sometimes uses the wrong contextual signal. None of this bothers me right now because systems mature, models improve, and we will calibrate and improve it. What does bother me is the process of managing and refining these prompts manually. The moment I have to click through folders, navigate versions, or chase down a configuration file and go spelunking through PDFs, the friction hits me in a visceral way. I lose interest, not because I am disengaging from the work, but because the digital interface demands a type of repetitive micro-effort that I no longer have the mental cycles for.

That is what finally connected the dots with my brother. A carpenter eventually reaches a point where physical strain becomes a constant, even when the passion remains. I feel the same thing mentally. My cycles for unnecessary digital labor are nearly exhausted. The vision remains, the creative drive remains, but the substrate of effort that sits underneath modern software has worn thin.

The beauty of our work, however, is that we are building the solution at the same time we are feeling the pain. Kai can generate stories, detect patterns, summarize environments, and eventually remove dozens of tiny steps that drain people every day. It will extend professional longevity the same way ergonomic tools extend physical careers. If Kai can do the clicking, I can stay mentally fresh. If Kai can summarize, I can stay strategic. If Kai can reduce the burden of navigation, I can stay engaged.

In that sense, my aversion is not a flaw; it is a compass. It points toward the real problem of digital work that most people feel but cannot articulate. And it reinforces the reason Kaamfu exists in the first place: to eliminate toil, reduce friction, and free people from the slow wearing-down that modern software quietly imposes.

I may joke about hating software, or having “technological dementia”, running out of mental cycles, or refusing to do any work that has too many steps. But the truth underneath is simple: I want to spend the rest of my working years doing meaningful, high-leverage thinking, not navigating screens. And if we get Kai right, I will.

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