Posts about getting real work done with AI tools, and what that work actually costs.
9 posts · all topics
Most defenses of AI are about productivity, and they are weak. The strong case is older and bigger: this is the next rung on a seventy-year ladder of removing effort that was never building anyone. Here it is, made at full strength.
The subscription is the small line. The real meter is the time you spend feeding context, checking output, catching the confident mistake, and cleaning up the work that looked finished. That hidden labor has a name now: botsitting.
The invoice for AI is the cheap part: a seat and some tokens. The real bill arrives in four ledgers: financial, attention, coordination, and development. Why AI makes the individual feel fast while the organization barely moves.
Black ink, a Tuesday that feels like a Monday, two calls at once and no lunch. More throughput this year, the goals set, the targets hit: thwack, thwack, thwack, triple bullseye.
The index to my seven-part series on building with AI: six weeks at machine speed, a method, AWS infrastructure, a handwriting OCR pipeline, a company website, what it cost, and patterns from one game.
Five burned-out days at the turn from Vega to Fomalhaut, tracked instead of endured. Pain as the floor under everything, HALT becoming HALTP, and planning from death backwards.
A timed freewriting run: can I fill a page in five minutes, or five pages in forty? Clock times in the margins, notes on breath, posture and margins, and what speed does to the writing.
Awake before dawn and unable to sleep, I write five pages: why the notebook pages curl, free writing as practice for the business, budgets as a system, and a short poem about time at the end.
Short lines from a January notebook: keep showing up to the plate, work as a theme for the year, a scrap of a story about Jack, and a page that turns from writing into drawing when the words run out.