What 2020 was actually like for developers.
You’ve heard about the AI vampires — developers so deep in the work they lose track of day and night. That’s not new. In 2020 we were already there, except it wasn’t agents doing the work, it was just us. And we were so buried we genuinely did not notice a worldwide pandemic was happening.
Marc Andreessen was on Joe Rogan recently talking about “AI vampires” — developers who can’t stop working at night because they have twenty AI agents running and the opportunity cost of sleeping is too high. He talked about it like it was a new Silicon Valley phenomenon.
I thought: cute. We were doing that in 2020. Except there were no agents. It was just us, and the reason we couldn’t stop was because the phone hadn’t stopped ringing in three weeks.
The call that changed everything had a very short version: “I need it by Monday.”
In normal times, a business coming to us with a real project — online ordering, a booking system, a client portal, e-commerce — would kick off a conversation about scope, timeline, requirements, budget. A serious build was a six-to-twelve month engagement. You’d plan it. You’d phase it. You’d do it right.
In 2020, that same call started with: “I need it by Monday. I will pay whatever it costs. I don’t care how you get it done. Monday.”
And it was a real Monday. Not a metaphorical one. The client’s physical location was closed. Their revenue was zero. They needed a way to take orders online before the weekend was over or they didn’t know if they’d make payroll. That’s not an exaggeration. That was the actual situation for hundreds of businesses, and they were all calling at the same time.
What 24-hour days actually look like when you’re in them.
People romanticize the all-nighter. They imagine a developer with headphones and an energy drink having a productive late session. That’s not what this was.
This was waking up and immediately opening the laptop before coffee because there were already messages. It was all three meals being delivered because leaving the desk to cook wasn’t an option. It was losing track of what day it was — not in a quirky way, genuinely not knowing if it was Tuesday or Thursday without checking the phone. It was looking up at some point and realizing it was 3am and the build still needed two more hours and the client call was at 9.
And then doing it again the next day. And the one after that. Not because we were being reckless — because the work was real and the stakes were real. These weren’t clients who wanted a new feature. These were business owners who were watching their income disappear in real time and needed someone to show up and build them a way through it.
You don’t clock out when someone’s business is on the line and you’re the one who can fix it. You just don’t.
We came up for air and someone said “the pandemic’s basically over.”
I’m not being dramatic. We were so inside the work for so long that the world outside genuinely did not exist. We weren’t watching the news. We weren’t on social media. We weren’t following the case counts or the mandates or the debates or the vaccine rollout. We were building things.
At some point the volume of emergency calls started slowing. The absolute-must-have-it-by-Monday energy dropped. Projects started having normal timelines again. People stopped opening with “we’ll pay anything.” And we sort of… came back. Looked around. Realized the world had gone through this enormous collective experience and we had watched approximately none of it.
It is a genuinely strange feeling to miss a global event because you were too busy to look up. Like we were in a submarine and when we surfaced, everyone else had already processed the whole thing. People were having pandemic opinions and we were like — wait, we need a minute, we just got here.
2026 has the same energy. And I mean that as a compliment and a warning.
The AI implementation rush happening right now has the same frantic quality as the digital rush of 2020. Businesses know they need it. They don’t fully know what “it” is. They want it fast. They’re willing to move quickly and figure out the details later.
The AI vampire thing Marc described — developers up at 3am because the agents are running and the output is coming in and you can’t stop — I recognize that. That’s real. When the work is flowing and the build is moving and every hour you put in is producing something that didn’t exist before, you don’t want to sleep. You want to see how far it goes.
But here’s the warning, because I lived the 2020 version: the rush builds have a cost. The thing you build in four weeks because you had to works. But it’s not the same as the thing you would have built with proper time. And six years from now, the businesses that grabbed any AI implementation fast and moved on will be sitting on a new layer of infrastructure that doesn’t quite fit together — just like the 2020 stack is today.
The 2020 patchwork cost real money. Almost a million dollars — that’s how much one business may have lost since 2020 in operational drag alone. We found it in an audit earlier this year. See the report here → The AI patchwork of 2026, done wrong, will have its own version of that number in 2032.
The AI vampires are real now. In 2020 we were just called developers. Some things don’t change.
If your operation still looks like it did in 2021 — same tools, same manual steps, same person holding it all together — start with an Automation Audit. We find the drag, put a number on it, and tell you what’s actually worth fixing.