TLDR;
- AI often produces absolute crap.
- AI makes you faster producing quality work.
You’ve probably heard the term artificial intelligence (AI) more times than you can count over the past few years. It’s changing industries everywhere—some argue for the better, others for the worse.
To form my own opinion, I decided to dive in. Here’s what I learned.
First Contact: A One-Day AI Experiment
At my company, Fridays are reserved for learning. So I gave myself a challenge:
- Simulate an entire workday using only AI prompts.
- Don’t commit anything I don’t understand.
The results? Surprisingly good.
For simple tasks, AI handled things well. Sometimes I had to tweak the code or steer it in the right direction, but that’s expected - nothing is perfect.
For complex problems, though, I quickly hit a wall. Explaining every nuance to the AI often took more effort than just coding it myself.
Still, that experiment convinced me to keep using AI daily. This article is about why.
The Enzyme Effect: Lowering the Barrier to Start
Eighty percent of success is showing up. - Woody Allen
Like most people, I sometimes struggle to find the motivation to start a task.
With AI, that barrier is lower.
Think of it like chemistry: a reaction transforms raw materials (requirements) into products (code). But reactions need energy to get going. An enzyme lowers that activation energy, making the reaction more likely to happen.
AI works the same way. It lowers the friction of getting started.
Sure, the output may not be production-ready—or may not even compile—but at least you now have something. And that “something” is enough to kickstart your flow:
- Why isn’t this working?
- How could I improve it?
- What’s the next step?
Suddenly, the task that felt overwhelming has momentum.
The Catalyst, Not the Creator
AI is not a silver bullet. It can’t replace expertise, creativity, or critical thinking. What it can do is act as a catalyst. Like an enzyme in a reaction, AI doesn’t change the fundamental process of creating software, writing, or problem-solving. It simply lowers the effort required to begin and accelerates the path toward a result.
The real value comes when you combine AI’s speed with your own judgment and experience. Alone, AI often produces noise. But together, you and the AI can turn that rough first draft into something meaningful and polished.
In the end, AI isn’t here to do the work for us. It’s here to help us start, to keep us moving, and to make it just a little easier to cross the gap between an idea and reality.