Don't drive the car at walking speed

Motor vehicles were born into a world built for horses and pedestrians. So in 1865, Britain legislated that every motor vehicle required a person waving a red flag to walk 60 yards ahead of it, capping their speed at 2 mph—walking pace.

Gifted a machine of impossible power, speed, and tirelessness, the response was to constrain it to the limits of the old world. The cars could go far faster than they were allowed; the world around them just couldn’t yet metabolise the change.

If you’re using generative AI like a clever chatbot—asking simple questions, copy/pasting text in and out, generating pages of content and laboriously editing them—you are driving your car at walking speed. You are constraining AI to the limits of the old world, when it is capable of endlessly more.

With the advent of agentic AI and skill files, tool use and MCP, long context windows and extended thinking, computer use and reasoning models, we need to stop limiting AI to piecemeal involvement in old-fashioned human workflows: the human will always be the bottleneck.

We need to let AI operate at machine speed, not human speed. We need to consider what is actually possible, once we remove the constraints of human involvement; to dream a little bigger, and translate human processes into their AI-first counterparts.

Work will look and feel different; we will be forced to operate at higher levels of abstraction, to recalibrate our sense of value. But our job now is to inculcate the values, judgement, and experience that guide these systems—not to insert ourselves in the process like the person waving a red flag.