The First Thing My AI Transformation Changed Was Me

When I started this AI transformation, I assumed the thing being transformed was the work. Quotes, the website, notifications. A few months in, I know better. The first thing that changed was not the work. It was me.

That scene in The Matrix

There's a moment in The Matrix where Neo is cornered by agents with nowhere left to run. There's a helicopter on the roof, and Morpheus says they should take it. Neo says he doesn't know how to fly a helicopter. It doesn't matter. The skill downloads into his head on the spot, and seconds later he's in the air.

The first time I saw it, it was just a movie. Now it's happening to me.

Nothing downloads into my head

Obviously it isn't literal. Nothing gets plugged into the back of my skull. What I do instead is have a conversation with Claude Code.

The outcome is close enough to be unsettling. Territory I couldn't touch yesterday, I'm standing in today. It tells me when it doesn't know. We narrow down what needs checking together. When I hit a wall, I get an explanation of why the wall is there. Repeat that for a few days and work I would have outsourced finishes in my own hands.

That's how a website migration I'd postponed for years finally got done, and how a quote process that ate a full day got done too. Both were jobs the old version of me would have paid someone else to handle.

Capability accumulates at a rate I would not have believed. Saying it feels like going Super Saiyan is probably too much. It doesn't feel like too much to me.

I had the order backwards

In the first post on this blog, I wrote that the grammar of work itself was changing. A few months on, that sentence was only half right. What changed wasn't the grammar of the work. It was the person doing it.

Which led me somewhere I didn't expect.

The first step of an AI transformation is not transforming something else. It's transforming yourself. You become someone with a different set of capabilities than the person you were. Only then can you run several directions of work at once, and that state is what we call automation. Being able to add a second tool on top of an automation that already worked fine was something that happened after that step, not before it.

The order matters. Your ceiling moves first, and automation follows. It doesn't work in reverse. Handing AI a job you can't do and handing it a job you've become able to do are completely different transactions.

I haven't been sleeping

Honestly, I haven't been sleeping much. More precisely, I don't want to.

There are things I've wanted to do for decades and never did. Not enough skill, not enough knowledge, not enough time, so they stayed on a list and nothing more. Those things are becoming possible one by one. So the nights are short. I always thought of myself as someone who liked sleep and leaned lazy. I did not see this coming.

I doubt I'm the only one. I suspect there are quite a few owners of small companies in the same state right now. The thing they wanted to do, the work they shelved, the business they meant to try someday. All of it suddenly executable.

All that's left is will

There used to be plenty of reasons not to. No skill, no people, no money. Those reasons are disappearing one at a time.

What's left is one thing. The desire and the will to actually do it. I find that both frightening and exhilarating.

To everyone running the whole thing alone: you can do this. Spread the wings AI just handed you and fly.

Queen said it first. "Spread your wings."