You are ai's biggest bottleneck.

You are ai's biggest bottleneck.
Don't kick yourself too hard. I am too.
We all are.

Each of us is bottlenecked at a different level.
I'm trying to put some words to each, in hopes of pushing myself and others to navigate past them:

1. “AI as unopened toolbox.” (the ground floor - maybe the basement)
The tools are in the room, but never get touched.
Still doing stuff the old fashioned way while better tools are within arms reach.

2. “AI as librarian.”
Helpful for fetching information, summarizing, and replacing some Google searches.

3. “AI as calculator.”
Trusted with tiny, isolated tasks.
Used in some cases, neglected for others.

4. “AI as vending machine.”
Prompt goes in. Response comes out. Repeat.
Little to no workflow changes.

5. “AI as intern sitting beside us.”
Heavilyy supervised.
Little progress without micromanagement.
No touching important systems.

6. “AI as in-office employee.”
Clocks in and out alongside the humans.
A critical part of getting work done BUT never "takes work home with them."

... this is somewhere near where I'm at.
It's driving me nuts how little progress is made between my working sessions.

One of my favorite parts of offshoring work over the last 10 years has been:
- hand off work before bed
- wake up to progress

I still haven’t consistently reproduced that dynamic with ai.

I want Level 7 to be: "Ai as the graveyard shift."

An increasing percentage my day should become:
- planning
- scoping
- queuing
- delegating
… specifically for the 2/3 of the day I'm offline.

Then the next morning becomes:
- reviewing
- redirecting
- refining
- continuing

Not merely synchronous collaborations but compounding, asynchronous momentum.