The fast-forward button and the magnifying glass

This year, AI did weeks of my work for every hour I ran it. That sounds like the setup for a pool and a cocktail. It wasn't. What it was instead is the most interesting thing I have learned about working with AI.

The maths

Here is roughly how it splits for me. Of everything I ask an AI to do, it gets about 96% done on its own. The other 4% needs me: troubleshooting, steering, or taking over.

The 96% is fast. Work that would take me days passes in minutes. Call it 1% of the time it used to take. Add the 4% I still do by hand, and I could deliver the same output in about 5% of my old hours.

So I had a choice. Work 5% of the week and spend the rest by the pool. Or keep working full weeks and get about twenty times the output.

I chose the second. On my AI projects this year, it felt like a team of twenty of me.

Where the time actually goes

Here is the part nobody puts on the brochure. Scale that 5% back up to a full week and look inside it. One fifth is the easy part, the prompting that AI just does. The other four fifths, 80% of my week, is that stubborn 4%, times twenty. Troubleshooting. Hand-holding. Undoing dead ends. Inventing the workaround nobody has written down yet.

That is not a complaint. It is just what it feels like.

A remote control for my working day

Imagine being at work for twenty days straight. Twenty days of decisions, progress, directing, designing and inventing. Now imagine a remote control that fast-forwards through every part where you know what you are doing and it is easy. Those parts pass in an instant. Then it drops back to real time for the gritty part: the analysis, the rethinking, the fixing, the new paths.

All twenty days, in one.

The output is a multiplier of me. The experience is a magnifying glass. It shows me, hour by hour, exactly what I am still needed for over and above the AI, and where I stand out. The familiar work, the stuff that has been done a million times before, rolls downhill on its own. I get the uphill sprints. All day.

And I love it. I am built for it.

Why it is making me sharper, not duller

There is growing research suggesting AI is making people think less. In 2025 Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon surveyed 319 knowledge workers and found that the more people trusted AI, the less critical thinking they reported doing. An MIT Media Lab study the same year found weaker brain engagement in people who wrote essays with ChatGPT. For the way most people use it, I believe that.

But look at my week again. Eighty percent of it is the hard part, where I am diagnosing, deciding and inventing. Spend most of your working life on the steepest part of the hill and you get fitter. AI has not replaced my thinking. It has taken away the easy reps and handed me twenty times the hard ones.

That is the difference. Used as a shortcut, AI does your thinking for you. Used as a multiplier, it gives you more thinking to do than you have ever had, and the growth compounds.

If you are choosing who to work with

Do not look for the people who find AI easy. Look for the people who are happiest when it gets hard. With AI, the hard part is the whole job now.

It is the part of the job I love most.