August 21, 2026

Some ideas on what we can do less, thanks to AI. Why? Because less is more and we keep getting advice on what to do more of, not what to do less of. Skip meetings you don’t speak in. Agents can summarize the transcript. Stop taking notes. Agents can summarize a recording. Stop reading group chats. Agents can summarize WhatsApp groups, Hacker News, Twitter, and more. Stop translations. Agents translate on the fly. For you, and your audience. Stop weekly status reports. Agents can tell you (and your manager and team) the status. Stop building dashboards. Agents tell you “what’s wrong” or “what’s next” directly. Stop building software at first. Tell the agent to do the work. Let it write software if needed. Save it if you use it often. Stop writing requirements. Agents can prototype. Test if that’s what you need, first. Stop teaching coding. Agents can code. Teach people to use agents. Also - a few things that were true pre-AI: ...

Last year, I shared how local LLMs are expensive. There are only 3 reasons to use them over an inference API: You have no choice, e.g. Government, pharma, finance, or other sensitive data. You have free GPUs, e.g. your laptop, local data center with sunk cost, free cloud credits, etc. This doesn’t scale. You want to learn. This year, I finally started using them for a combination of #1 (on flights) and #2 (my 8 GB NVIDIA RTX 2000). ...