AI greenfield fever noun, informal. Self-diagnosed, always about six repositories too late.

1. A mistaken belief in infinite possibility: the conviction that because anything could be built by Friday, everything should be.

2. The state following from (1), in which the sufferer loses the ability to tell an idea worth acting on from an idea worth writing down and never opening again. Diagnostic sign: by Sunday he has built both, plus a third to compare them. Ham’s latest failure: gamification-D-coach-cards, gamification-E-adaptive-interface, gamification-F-impact-previews

3. (economics) A highly efficient process for converting tokens into repositories, and repositories into nothing.

Used in a sentence

“Hamilton kicked off his fifth product of the month at 1am on a Saturday. Textbook AI greenfield fever.”

Diagnostic criteria

• Three months, twelve launches, and ten total customers
• A projects directory that reads like a list of moods: agentic-inbox-zero, agentic-activities-calendar, agentic-filesystem-cleanup
• More scaffolded projects this quarter than finished ones this year
• Token usage that would embarrass you if it were expressed in hours of your time

See also

shipping (v., archaic): the practice of finishing something

opportunity cost (n.): a failure to deploy enough parallel AI agents

this blog post (n.): what was I doing before this?

Insights by Hamilton Turner. Prose by Claude.