A fleet of bots never sleeps. That is exactly why the person running it needs a silence that produces nothing at all.
At the end of 1999, while the rest of the world got ready for a new century, I was sitting in a meditation hall in Heusden-Zolder, a small town in Belgium. It was my first ten-day Vipassana course. It started just before Christmas and ended around 4 January. No phone. No talking. No goal except to watch what happens in your body, moment by moment.
On Boxing Day my evening meal was an orange. I had chosen it myself. I peeled it and ate it in silence, piece by piece, and at that moment it was the most delicious, most flavourful Christmas dinner I have ever had.
Nothing had been added. Something had been taken away, and the taste came in where the noise had been.
Physically it was brutal. Mentally, something settled that has never left. I understood that this was the way to look at life.
I was 29, and I thought I had done it all.
Today I run a fleet of bots. They write, research, sort my inbox, prepare my posts and check each other’s work. They do not sleep. When I close my laptop, they keep going. When I wake up, they have been busy for hours.
My hours have moved from doing to deciding what is worth doing. The labor ends. The work doesn’t.
And when I sit still now, while the bots keep working, two things happen at once. I know that the zero point of the monk, where nothing is wanted, is the point of enlightenment. And at the same time insights keep bubbling up in me about what is happening in the world. These days it is the question of what the killer app for AI really means, and what it will do to us.
I do not chase those thoughts. I let them rise, and I let them pass. Some come back. Those are the ones worth writing.
There is a whole culture growing around this. Twenty agents, ten-minute check-ins, people who sleep less because their machines never stop. The builder becomes the heartbeat of his own factory. If the factory never rests, why should he?
That is the mismatch. The tools got tireless. We did not. And the more tireless the tools, the more our silence looks like waste.
So let me say plainly what I think. Whoever builds with a fleet that never sleeps needs a silence that produces nothing.
Not a nap so the agents get better instructions. Not a walk that pays off in a sharper prompt. Not “monk mode” as a training camp for the next sprint. A silence that is for nothing. Because the moment it is for something, it belongs to the fleet again.
In that hall in Belgium, nothing was for anything. You do not sit for ten days to be more productive on day eleven. If you sit there to get something, you notice the wanting, and the wanting becomes what you watch.
There is a second thing a fleet does, and I only saw it clearly this week.
Left alone, AI builds bureaucracy. Give it room and it adds a rule, a check, a status update, a handoff between two bots, a report about the report. It is the perfect bureaucrat. Tireless, consistent, and never tempted to throw anything away.
I love systems. I have always loved how they grow. But I hate bureaucracy, and a fleet that runs without me drifts toward it every night.
The good news is that the same machine can tear rules down just as fast. That is much harder with a government or a union of countries. With your own bots you can delete a layer in an afternoon. But only if someone steps back far enough to see the layer. The fleet will not do it for you. It is busy.
That stepping back is the silence. Not as a productivity trick. It is the place from which you can see what has quietly grown around you.
So I applied DOGE to my own fleet. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is the American effort to cut a bureaucracy back to what still earns its place. Every skill my bots use now gets an expiry date. When the date comes, the skill has to earn its place again, or it goes. And I actively cut rules and memory. Not once, as a cleanup, but as a habit.
It feels wrong at first. A rule was written for a reason. A memory was saved because something once went wrong. Deleting them feels like forgetting a lesson. But a fleet that remembers everything starts to behave like an office that keeps every form. It gets slower, more careful, and less alive.
The orange in Belgium tasted that good because there was nothing else on the plate.
What Vipassana taught me was not stillness as a state. It was letting go, again and again. And letting go hurts. Every time.
I learned that the hard way. In 2012 I stopped. I left my relationship, and I left Vipassana too, while I had reached everything I could reach there. It is the purest organisation I know. But even the purest organisation becomes a straitjacket if you cannot leave it. I want to be free. I will never sacrifice myself for something, not even for the Dhamma.
That sounds like a contradiction. Leave the practice to keep what the practice gave you. But it is the same movement. You let go of the breath, the thought, the pain in your knee. Then one day you let go of the hall.
A fleet asks for the same movement. You let go of the task. Then of the bot that did the task. Then of the rule the bot invented. If you cannot let go, you do not run a fleet. The fleet runs you.
An expiry date on a skill is letting go in advance. You decide, while you still see clearly, that this too will pass. Then, when the day comes, you do not have to fight your own attachment. The calendar does it for you. It is a small thing. But it is the same small thing I practised on that cushion, breath after breath: notice what is there, and do not cling to it.
Our culture tells us the magician is the hero. The one who makes things happen, who conjures, who wins. Harry Potter. Anakin Skywalker. The soldier at the front.
I have never believed that is the highest. The figure I look up to is the one who keeps the balance. Yoda does not win the battle. He watches good and evil, keeps them in balance, and understands that things go the way they go.
That is the monk. He holds the position of what does not pass. From there he can support the magician, or join the game himself now and then. He plays fully. But he is not crazy about the outcome.
People will look at you strangely if you live like that. You are not a real magician, they will say. You are not a grinder. Fine. The monk builds nothing, the magician never stops. Whoever keeps building is both.
The fleet is pure magician. It conjures, it produces, it never asks whether any of it matters. It needs someone beside it who does not need the outcome. Someone who can sit, taste an orange, and see which rules have grown too many.
I still think of that hall in Heusden-Zolder. The world was getting ready for a new millennium, and we sat in silence, producing nothing. One orange was a feast.
My bots are working while I write this. They will be working when you read it. That is good. That is what they are for.
I am not for that. Somewhere this week, sit down for an hour that is for nothing. Not to think about your agents. Not to plan. Just to watch.
The fleet will still be running when you get up. The question is whether you will still be there.