AI

AI makes the session feel smooth, and smooth is the signal motor-learning research tells you not to trust. Which reps you keep is now a decision you have to make on purpose.

AI moved every delivery metric in the right direction. The two things that got worse weren't on the dashboard, and a leader watching only the green numbers will add scope right on top of them.

A model will write kinder feedback than you will. It still can't tell you there's something to address, when to raise it, or when the right move is to say nothing.

Starting a thread of work costs almost nothing now. Switching between them costs exactly what it always did, and that's the bill nobody put on a dashboard.

Flat-rate AI taught us to burn tokens like they were free. Metered billing puts a price back on the sloppy prompt, and that visibility is a feature.

Autonomous agent loops don't remove you from the work, they relocate you — onto the spec you write up front and the big diff you review but never watched grow.

The slop flooding Steam isn't a tool problem, it's a taste problem. AI didn't lower the floor for making games — it removed the excuse for a bad one.

Privacy was never the only reason to run a model locally — resilience is. A fourth case for local AI, made concrete by 18 days of a frontier model going dark.

AI collapsed the cost of writing code and changed nothing about the cost of owning it. Velocity is a development-time number. The bill is a lifetime one.

AI gave me the throughput to cover a role I don't normally hold — but not the judgment that role is made of. A release, an incident, and a skill I'd outsourced.

Three cases where running a model on your own machine wins, and the longer list where it loses.

Why scraping didn't die when LLMs arrived, and how I decide between Beautiful Soup and Scrapy for a given job.