Do you remember, three-ish years ago, when ChatGPT first dropped?
Remember the panic and the frenzy? Copywriting is dead! Blogs can be one-shotted in seconds! Writers will be obsolete!
Now, we know the truth: These tools are amazing. LLMs are powerful. Things can happen faster than ever, drafting and ideation is quicker than ever.
But there are still writers. Still humans reading everything. Still humans checking everything. Still chains of stakeholders and disagreement and discussion before any content goes live.
We’re now mid-cycle on the same hype curve, re-skinned. “Prompts” have become “agents.” And the FOMO is back, louder than ever.
At Buttered Toast, we’ve spent the last three years inside companies watching how teams actually adopt AI. LinkedIn thought leadership will make you feel like everything you’re doing is wrong. The reality, from inside those companies, is very different. We’re here to say: relax. It’s okay. You’re not falling behind. You’re doing great.
We Know… The LinkedIn Flexes are a Lot
“I connected ten agents and now I just put my feet up.” Variations on this post are now their own content format.
They’re written for reach, not accuracy. They’re designed to trigger exactly the feeling you’re having – that you’re behind, that everyone else is further ahead, that you’d better buy the course or book the call before you get left in the dust.
Nobody posts “I chained four agents together and it broke after the second step.” Nobody posts the six hours of integration troubleshooting.
And our hunch here at BT? In most of these “I connected a bunch of agents and now I just put my feet up” posts, people haven’t actually run their shiny new contraption for weeks and months on real budgets, with real clients, real revenue at stake.
They assembled a demo. They got dazzled by their own demo. They posted the demo. That’s not the same as running a production workflow that survives contact with reality – missed edge cases, client revisions, a stakeholder who changes the brief at 11 pm on a Thursday, an API that silently changes behaviour overnight.
The distance between “I built a thing that worked once” and “this runs our business” is enormous.
None of this is to say the tools aren’t great. The big LLMs are extraordinary – Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, all genuinely useful multiple times a day. Perplexity is great for research. ElevenLabs is great for audio. But the leap from “I use Claude every day” to “I built a fully autonomous agentic pipeline” is a leap most companies aren’t making (yet). We’ve tried. We’ve had small wins.
We’ve also watched how much it costs to pay for the separate tools, wire the integrations, and keep the whole thing from quietly collapsing in the background.
Most “agent stacks” are a few prompts chained through middleware, supervised closely by a human paying more attention than a LinkedIn post suggests, with everyone still far too terrified to actually take their hands off the wheel.
Release Your FOMO
The people getting real value from AI right now are mostly doing unglamorous, unposted things. Meeting summaries. First drafts. Quick image and design ideation. Research passes before a strategy doc. Rewriting something three ways to find the version that lands. A bit of code debugging. Drafting emails they’d rather not write.
This is it. Not a swarm of agents running the company. Humans using very good assistants to get more done, better, with less friction.
There are pockets where AI genuinely is doing transformative work – AI SDRs can be very effective if trained and overseen well, and the marketing operations, AI-driven playbooking can yield real results. But notice what these have in common: they’re narrow, well-scoped, supervised. Not an army of agents unleashed on a company’s tech stack.
If this steady, solid embrace of LLMs is 90% of your AI engagement, you are not behind. You are the mainstream. If you’re testing the occasional tools, listening to the occasional podcast, talking to your peers, staying open, and learning as you go – you are doing enough.
Feel better? Maybe just a little?
The Panic Isn’t Really About AI
Real talk: a lot of this isn’t really about AI.
It’s about a labor market that feels unstable, a profession that keeps getting redefined, and a decade of “learn to code, learn to prompt, learn the next thing” pressure. The AI FOMO is a symptom. The underlying anxiety is about staying relevant, staying employed, staying ahead of whatever’s coming next. That anxiety is real and reasonable.
But LinkedIn is the worst place to soothe it – LinkedIn’s entire business model depends on you feeling slightly behind forever.
We believe that the winners of this cycle won’t be the earliest adopters building the biggest, most dazzling things. They’ll be the people who develop taste earliest. Judgment about when to use AI and when not to, what good output looks like, when to throw away the draft, when a tool is saving time and when it’s just making you feel productive.
So if the FOMO is hitting hard this quarter, take a breath. Close the tab. Go back to the draft you were working on with Claude open in the other window.
Pick two or three tools, get genuinely good at them, don’t get FOMO about the rest. Resist the shiny ones for at least a month. The compound returns are in depth, not breadth.
You are doing fine. You are probably doing better than fine. The circus will keep circus-ing.