Automate Everything Possible

I can walk past an office where I live, look in through the window and see people working. Spreadsheets on every screen. Someone copying numbers from one tab into another. Someone waiting for a file from someone else before they can do their part.

And my first thought is always the same: let me in. Give me a week with your processes and your APIs, let me wire it up with something like the Vercel AI SDK, and I will automate the whole thing to pieces.

That's how I work. Find every blocker. Remove it. Everything should just work. Tell me what doesn't, and we go.

No excuses

I think more things should be this straightforward.

Most of the friction in a normal workday isn't hard problems. It's glue. Moving data between systems that don't talk to each other. Reformatting. Checking. Waiting. Reminding. None of it needs a human anymore.

A few years ago you could argue it was too expensive, too technical, or that nobody had time. Today you have no excuses. With AI, you have no excuses at all. The tools are there. The cost of trying is close to zero. If something in your process is annoying, repetitive or slow, that's not a fact of life. That's a task.

Hierarchies are going to blur

The other thing I keep thinking about is what this does to how we organize work.

I believe hierarchies and titles are going to matter less and less. What you're going to get instead is builders. People who can do a bit of everything. Not experts in one narrow thing waiting for handoffs, but people who can talk to the customer, design the flow, write the code, ship it and fix it.

You don't have to know everything deeply. You need to know a little about a lot, and be willing to build. That's the big shift. One person with good tools now covers what used to take a team, three meetings and a ticket queue.

And I don't think people have realised this yet. It's a bit annoying and honestly very interesting that it isn't talked about more. We're still holding on to outdated systems, outdated processes and outdated hierarchies, as if the last few years didn't happen.

Why the pessimism?

We keep saying a six-hour work week is impossible. Meanwhile we're spending the hours we do have doing things a script could do.

I find it strange that we don't look at this with more optimism. It's an opportunity. For companies to get out of their own way, and for anyone who likes to build to start something of their own. Every broken process is a gap. Every gap is a business.

So: automate everything possible. Remove every blocker. Then look at what's left and ask why it's still there.