Precursor

Two jobs.

One is the new business. Startup, CEO chair, everything I touch is mine. I run the experiments. I pick the tools. I am building the thing.

The other is the part-time corp job I've held for years. Different shape entirely. Many people, real budgets, a desk that has been a desk for a long time. The tools the team uses are governed by a policy I didn't write and have to enforce. It thinks about data-leakage and audit trails and the consequences of a model walking out the back door with someone else's quarterly numbers. The policy isn't wrong. Today it cost me an afternoon.

The second job needed a one-pager. The kind business people print and put on the wall. Here is the system we're moving from. Here is the system we're moving to. Here is what your dashboard will look like, eventually. Here are the three things you need to do this week. Strategy, in three colours and a bordered box.

This was a Tuesday job, once. Today is Tuesday. It took the whole day. Some of that was real research. Most of it was the slow work of dragging boxes around in PowerPoint by hand.

I tried, of course. First I asked Copilot to make the infographic outright. The result was the kind of thing nobody puts on a wall. Then I got clever and asked Copilot to write me an infographic prompt I could paste into PowerPoint's own generator. Copilot wrote a beautiful prompt. PowerPoint's generator is not built for infographics. It is built for bar charts of last quarter's numbers. The prompt sat there like a key to a door that didn't exist.

I would have preferred Gemini, or even ChatGPT's image generator. Neither is accessible on the corp network. I hoped Microsoft Designer might be. It would have done the thing in two minutes. The gen-AI detector at the gateway caught it. The policy is right — the model could memorise something, the output could leak. I enforce the policy. I'd enforce it again tomorrow.

I contemplated cheating. My own tools on my own laptop, off the corp network. My conscience said no first. The policy I enforce said no second. I had a small tantrum. Found something else to do for a while. Came back and had one more conversation with Copilot to see if there was any angle I hadn't tried. There wasn't. So I succumbed and did it by hand. Copilot ended up writing a sentence or two of the wording. That was the entire AI contribution. No time saved. Just frustration, and a tolerance I noticed had thinned by lunch.

The whiplash is physical. This morning the startup side. Branches I hadn't even read finishing themselves, copy I hadn't drafted appearing in passable form, a model that knew what I was working on yesterday helping me start what I was working on today. This afternoon the corp side. Two hours to align eight boxes. The neural circuit for the second one had quietly gone soft, and the brain went looking for the help that wasn't there, several times a minute, the way a tongue goes looking for the tooth that isn't there anymore.

“

The competence is fine. Tolerance is what went.

Those are different losses. Competence comes back with practice. A week of dragging boxes and your hands remember. Tolerance comes back with what, exactly. There is no calisthenics for patience. There is the willingness to keep doing the slow thing for long enough that the brain stops protesting, and the brain protests very, very loudly. Loud enough today that I noticed it as a thing in itself.

So now there are two workforces inside one head. One has the modern tools and runs hot. The other has a wall down the middle of itself, for very good reasons, and has to work cold. The unsettling bit isn't that the cold side is slower. The cold side is fine. The unsettling bit is that the hot side gets smug, right up until it has to be the cold side. Then it freezes.

So I'm going to print the one-pager and pin it to the wall. Not as a slide. As an artifact. Today is the day I knew, properly, that the world is changing. I think I am just ahead of it. I might be a precursor.

— maria