I have PTSD from melting laptops so I often find myself checking the surface temp of my M2 air to reassure myself that this is real. On the occasions when it heats up a little - when I'm running 3 instances of intellij, a couple instances of vscode, some 20 tabs in chrome, 50 tabs in Safari in addition to Slack, and maybe a youtube video to just get away from it all - it is a bit disconcerting to me.

Yeah, the cold slab is always a shock.

You can get it to warm up pretty quickly by running a local instance of Stable Diffusion or any CPU intensive task.