Systems & Laws 2 of 19
Is This Difficulty Load-Bearing?
Before you automate anything, ask what the friction was actually doing.
We invented a cure for exercise and then wondered why we can’t breathe.
That’s what we’re doing with AI right now.
We’re pulling the hard parts out of thinking. The research. The writing. Sitting with a problem long enough that something actually clicks.
We call it friction. We race to kill it.
But the friction was building the skill.
Someone used an LLM to reimplement SQLite in Rust. The code compiled. Tests passed. 20,171x slower on key lookups.
AI stripped out the constraints that looked like waste. Those constraints were the engineering.
Same thing happens in your head. Struggling to remember something is what makes it stick. Skip the struggle, you feel smart. You’re not learning.
Before you automate anything, ask:
Is this difficulty load-bearing?
If removing it removes what makes you good, keep it.
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Practise what it teaches: the Learn skill “Keep the practice that builds your judgement” in Use AI at work without losing the skill, a step on the path Keep the valuable part of your job.
Claude and ChatGPT can search this archive and its claim ledgers once you add the connector.