AI lowers the effort barrier
Maybe this is obvious to everyone but me, but the biggest unlock to AI seems to be less “AI helps me do things that were impossible before” and more “AI helps me do things that I just didn’t have the time/effort/attention/care to do before”.
See e.g. this post from Simon Willison about a theatre lighting cue software developer:
This latest TikTok describes his Claude Opus moment, after he used Claude Code to build a custom lighting design application for a very niche project and put together a useful application in just a few days that he would never have been able to spare the time for otherwise.
Or this post about a clip from Andy Masley referencing a podcast with Emily Bender and Robert Wright and Alex Hanna:
Wright: What I find valuable is, if there’s something I just know nothing about, I mean like, theories about why Rome fell or something, I find it a much for efficient way to get a sense for the landscape […]
Bender: […] Oh, go to the library, talk to a librarian!
Wright: Yeah but it’s so much slower! It’s so much slower!
Or my own experience diving into an open source Go codebase that I’m less familiar with to fix a bug that I was seeing — I wouldn’t have done something like that previously because just getting my bearings would have taken hours.
Or trying to address the shit with which the zone has been flooded: Donald Trump claiming at Davos that renewable energy in the UK hasn’t brought energy prices down — this claim looks true! Energy prices are higher than ever (and it affects me personally). Normally I'd dismiss this out of hand; I know I don't have a clear picture of the situation and he's using a shallow truth to tell a deep lie. But instead I loaded up Claude and told it to go off and produce a bunch of research about why energy prices are high despite the rollout of renewable infrastructure across the country. It's not the whole picture, but now I can mostly debunk the shit in realtime — and I would never have been able to do to that before.
All of the above was possible before AI, and remains possible without AI — but the effort required has drastically been reduced.