Most of the work I find draining isn't actually hard. It's just tangled. The decision is simple; the system around the decision is not. Six tools, four approvers, three dashboards that disagree, and a calendar that has opinions about all of it.
There's a useful split hiding in there. Impact complexity is the part that actually matters — the judgment, the trade-off, the thing only a human should be touching. System complexity is everything you have to wade through to get to it.
The quiet promise of good AI tooling isn't that it makes us superhuman. It's that it clears enough of the system layer that the impact layer becomes visible again. Less revolution, more restoration.
If that's right, the test for any AI feature isn't "how much can it do for me?" It's "how much of the tangle did it quietly take off the table, so I could finally do the part that was mine to do?"
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