AI and what we can learn from buffets

When there's too much to eat, nothing is appreciated. True for food, profound for AI.

The food excitement/joy upon entering was palpable.

I still remember the first time I walked into a buffet. The place was called SmorgaBob’s, which we can all agree is a very good name for a buffet.

I had never seen so many options in one room in my life, at least not outside of a Filipino party. Roast beef, pizza, fried chicken, fried rice, all of it sitting out at the same time, just waiting for me. So I did what any food-driven kid would do. I grabbed one plate and piled it as high as physics would allow.

And then, of course, I got completely full off that one ridiculous plate.

What I had not figured out yet, in my youthful greed, was the buffet mastery technique. You take a little. You go back. You take a little more. You work the whole room in small trips and you maximize your parents’ hard-earned buffet dollars (because let’s be honest, I was not the one paying for this lunch). Live and learn.

I don’t really do buffets these days. My 40-something body has filed several formal complaints about that kind of eating. But wouldn’t you know it, the buffet dilemma found me again, in a completely different room, and this time there’s no roast beef involved.

“A-I can’t believe there’s this many choices”

Here’s the new buffet. It’s AI tools, and I’m standing in front of it as the exact same wide-eyed kid with an empty plate and zero self-control.

Just a few years ago, this was not a problem, because there wasn’t much to pile on. You had ChatGPT and, well, not a whole lot else. Life was simple. You messed around with prompting here and there, you slowly got the hang of it, and you could become a genuine power user of one good tool without breaking a sweat.

Then 2026 rolled around, and now AI is here, it’s there, it’s absolutely everywhere.

Alongside ChatGPT you’ve got Claude, Gemini, Grok, and a bunch of others that don’t get the same spotlight but are also very good. Then come the specialists. Tools for audio. Tools for video. Tools for image editing. Tools that will build an entire AI version of you, which is a sentence I never expected to type in my lifetime, but here we are. Calling the current spread of AI tools “rich” is underselling it by a mile.

And naturally, every single dish looks mouthwatering. Of course you want to try all of them.

“A-I can’t finish all of this”

“I think I got too much… everything.”

Maybe you’ve already been here. You’ve got a couple of trials running, a subscription or two, and the cheerful little plan in your head that goes, “I’ll use this one for that, and that one for this, and it’ll all be gravy.”

I hate to be the one to tell you, but what’s true at SmorgaBob’s is true here too. Pile too much on the plate and you can’t actually appreciate any single thing on it.

It gets worse, though, and this is the part that really got me. While you’re busy hopping from one tool to the next, you never stay anywhere long enough to get good at it. Think about what that actually means. You’re not actually collecting skills at all. You’re collecting a bunch of day ones. You’re a perpetual beginner, over and over again, just at a dozen things instead of one. And since new tools keep dropping one after another at this point, the plate doesn’t even get a chance to lighten. It keeps getting heavier while you stand there holding it.

That overstuffed plate feels productive. It feels like you’re on top of things. But mostly it’s a great way to stay mediocre at a whole lot of stuff while feeling busy the entire time.

Now, I’m not saying options are the enemy. A buffet that only served all-you-can-eat mashed potatoes would eventually be a sad place to spend an afternoon. Mashed potatoes are great, but you’d tap out after a plate. So, the options are good. However, the plate is the problem.

Prioritizing your plate

When I get overwhelmed by all of it, I find the fix is to go back to basics. Instead of using every LLM under the sun for every random thing that floats through my head, I figure out which tool actually serves the job in front of me, and I build a small, deliberate plate.

Here’s what’s on mine these days.

Claude does my proofreading and most of my writing-related tasks. ChatGPT is my smarter search, the thing I poke when I’ve got a random question rattling around and I don’t feel like sifting through a pile of links. Nano Banana handles my image editing. And when I’m digging through the notes I keep in OneNote, Copilot turns out to be a surprisingly good helping hand.

That’s pretty much the whole plate. Four dishes, and I actually know what to do with all four.

That’s the part that changed everything for me. Because the plate is small, I get to build up some real mastery instead of treading water. I know what each tool is for and how to get good results out of it, and I’m not splitting my attention fourteen ways and calling it a dope workflow. The small plate is also the thing that lets me relax about trying something new, because I’ve always got my reliable stack to come home to. So now I’m enjoying this AI buffet instead of getting wheelbarrowed out of it.

FOMO: the buffet's final boss

“Wait have you tried [INSERT NEW AI TOOL HERE]??”

Here’s the part many don’t like to admit, as it’s the part that usually drives the overloading.

The new tools are going to keep coming, fast, and every one of them is going to show up wearing a big flashing sign that says THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING. And every time, that little voice pipes up. What if the dish I didn’t put on my plate was the one that mattered? What if everyone else is eating the good stuff and I’m over here with my sad, sensible little plate?

That fear is the whole reason the plate gets out of control in the first place. So let me say the thing that helps me.

The tools you’re already good at are still very good, and they’re getting better every day without you having to chase a single thing. Skipping the newest hot tool is not the catastrophe the FOMO insists it is. And here’s the sneaky part: the small plate is exactly what frees you to taste-test the new dish whenever you want, because you’re not depending on it to feed you. You can poke at it, decide if it’s any good, and walk away with no harm done.

It really is better to be a master of a few tools than a random user of many.

Enjoying the buffet, sans indigestion

Picture the overstuffed plate for a second. One plate, loaded down with the AI versions of crab, chocolate cake, and steak, all crammed together and touching in ways food was never meant to touch. Soggy. Overwhelming. Impossible to actually enjoy. That’s the plate you build when you let every new tool talk you into one more scoop.

You don’t have to eat that way. And if you’ve been feeling behind because you’re not running fifteen tools at once, hear me on this: using less, on purpose, was always the strategy, never the surrender.

That kid at SmorgaBob's was playing to win his own crazy version of The Hunger Games, and to him, winning meant the tallest plate in the restaurant. It took me a few decades and a few regrettable stomachaches to realize the tall plate was never the prize. I eat a lot smaller now. I also enjoy it a whole lot more.

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