Coming Back to AI After Time Away: What's New and What to Ignore

A practical guide for authors who stepped away and are ready to dive back in

I’m going to be honest with you: I took a break.

My dad passed away in late 2025, and between the grief, a work trip to Las Vegas, and preparing for the holidays while feeling profoundly sad, something had to give. For me, that something was this Substack. I needed breathing room, and I gave myself permission to step away.

Now it’s 2026, and I’m back. But here’s the thing about taking time off from AI: the world doesn’t stop moving. In fact, it moves terrifyingly fast.

Case in point: Google released a new IDE called Antigravity in late November, and within a week, my entire feed was full of people raving about it. (Well, except for that one guy who accidentally wiped his entire hard drive. Oops.) If I wasn’t already embedded in the AI world through Future Fiction Academy, I would have been completely overwhelmed trying to figure out what everyone was talking about.

If you’ve also stepped away—whether for grief, burnout, health issues, family obligations, or just life—this post is for you. I want to help you catch up without the overwhelm.

The Guilt Is Real (But It’s Also Lying to You)

Let me be honest about something: I felt a lot of guilt about checking out.

Not only did I fall behind, but my work colleagues and fellow authors flew right past me. Some of them jumped into Antigravity and started writing like 40 books. Forty books. It was wild how quickly some people picked up new tools and ran with them.

And there I was, feeling like an imposter because I’d only played with it a little. (Though honestly, that’s still more than most people.)

But here’s what I’ve had to remind myself, and what I want you to hear too: You haven’t lost your skills. Everything you learned about prompting, about working with AI, about the fundamentals of this technology—it all still applies. In fact, it applies better now because the tools are smarter than ever.

Your creative judgment. Your storytelling instincts. Your understanding of craft. None of that disappeared while you were away. The tools evolved, yes, but your core strengths remained intact.

Taking a break was the right thing to do. I’m still convincing myself of that, but I know it’s true.

What’s Actually Changed (The Stuff Worth Knowing)

Okay, let’s get practical. What did you actually miss?

The Models Are Better Than Ever

The current generation of models—Claude 4.5, Gemini 3, and ChatGPT 5.2—are some of the best we’ve ever had. They consistently provide better results as long as you’re still prompting them robustly. They’re smarter, more nuanced, and better at understanding what you actually want.

Many of them have also gotten excellent at coding and accessing toolsets and MCP servers, which allows them to reach across different data sources and provide more accurate outputs. If that sounds like jargon, don’t worry—just know that the AI can now connect to more of your stuff and give you better answers because of it.

Agentic AI Is Becoming the Norm

Here’s a shift I’ve really embraced: I’ve switched to writing inside of Notion using their AI tool. Most of the top models are available there, and the chat utility (I’ve named her Miss Thang) can gather data from everything I’ve put inside Notion—all my Substack posts, my personal blog posts, and transcripts from Brave New Bookshelf.

This more “agentic” way of working with AI is slowly becoming standard. Each of the main chat interfaces—Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini—can now do more than just chat. They can access the internet for sourcing, develop slideshows and graphs, hook into other tools like Canva or GitHub, and even produce images and video.

Reasoning Models Feel Like Magic

The reasoning models are especially impressive now. You can actually see the AI going through a thinking process and making decisions. It shows you its work, step by step.

It feels like magic. (It’s not, obviously, but it feels that way.)

What You Can Safely Ignore

Now for the part you might need even more than the updates: permission to ignore things.

Yes, there’s a lot of hype out there. But here’s my take: there’s a time and a place for everything, and individual authors need to evaluate where they are in the learning process and decide what works best for them right now.

The education path I typically recommend to authors looks something like this:

1. Learning to prompt

2. Prompting (and re-prompting, and failing, and trying again)

3. Getting comfortable with the chat interfaces

4. Understanding APIs so you can try automations

5. Learning AI for coding to make your own tools

6. Exploring agents

If you’ve been prompting in Claude Chat for a while and feeling comfortable, it might be time to look at APIs and automations. If you’ve done that, maybe it’s time to explore AI for coding. But if you’re just starting out? Take a basic prompting class and understand the fundamentals first. Don’t let anyone make you feel like you need to be on step six when you’re still on step two.

The Noise to Filter Out

There’s a lot of panic out there about AI, and I want to give you permission to ignore most of it.

The anti-AI crowd is still spouting talking points from over two years ago—most notably the ones about data center water consumption and training data being “stolen.” These arguments haven’t evolved, which tells you something about how relevant they are to the current conversation.

Then there are the people on the other extreme, talking about how AI can do everything now while giving vague details about how it’s accomplished, never showing you what’s actually behind the curtain. Those people are to be ignored as well.

Stick to the people showing you the secret sauce. The ones on YouTube actually demonstrating their workflows. The ones in Facebook groups answering questions with specifics. The ones in educational communities like Future Fiction Academy who are transparent about what works and what doesn’t.

A Simple Re-Entry Strategy

Here’s my practical suggestion for getting back into the swing of things: start a small side project.

I know how hard it is, as an author, to switch tools in the middle of a project. You’re deep in a manuscript, you have your workflow, and suddenly everyone’s talking about some new thing you “have” to try. That’s a recipe for frustration.

Instead, consider writing a short story or a novella specifically as a playground for experimenting with new tools. Pick one thing you want to try—maybe it’s a new model, maybe it’s writing inside Notion, maybe it’s testing out a reasoning model—and use that small project to get comfortable.

No pressure. No high stakes. Just exploration.

Once you’ve found something that clicks, then you can think about integrating it into your main work.

Resources for Catching Up

If you’re looking for places to learn and stay current, here are my recommendations:

Brave New Bookshelf — The podcast I co-host with Danica Favorite is starting up new episodes in mid-January, but there’s a whole backlog of episodes you can listen to right now. We cover everything from AI tools to author mindset to interviews with people doing interesting things in the space.

Future Fiction Academy — If you want structured learning, FFA has standalone classes if you want to enhance one specific thing in your process. We also have our Accelerator program if you’re just starting out and want a comprehensive foundation.

Both resources are designed to cut through the noise and give you practical, actionable guidance.

The Best Time to Come Back Is Now

If you’ve been away and you’re reading this, you’re already ahead of most people. You’re willing to learn. You’re willing to come back. That counts for more than you might think.

The AI doesn’t judge you for taking time off. It doesn’t keep score. It’s a tool, and it waits patiently for you to pick it up again.

So take a breath. Choose one small thing to explore. And welcome back.

We missed you.

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Have you recently come back to AI after time away? What surprised you most about what changed? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments.

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