The Efficiency Trap

I've built my career on building teams and studios with the skills needed to create AI and data-based products. More than 25 years of assembling interdisciplinary groups, managing handoffs between designers and developers, coordinating timelines across different capabilities. The friction was everywhere - communication gaps, scheduling conflicts, the endless dance of getting brilliant people to work together toward something coherent, novel and brilliant.

Then Claude Code arrived. I built 'Matt', a fully-featured fitness coaching agent, in forty-eight hours. 'Vincent', my business operations agent, evolved from concept to deployed tool in a matter of days. The inefficiencies that used to take weeks to navigate - briefing developers, iterating with designers, coordinating across disciplines - they all collapsed into a single conversation with an AI that could code, design, and architect simultaneously.

My ADHD brain was having the time of its life. Pure creation, no friction, no waiting, no handoffs. Just idea to implementation at the speed of thought.

My body, meanwhile, was falling apart.

I was coding beyond midnight, waking up thinking about features, unable to stop tweaking and improving and adding capabilities. The natural breaking points that used to exist in collaborative work - the end of the working day, the need to brief someone else, the time required for others to understand and implement - were gone.

What I thought was inefficiency, it turns out, was actually more like life support!

The Efficiency Paradox

We talk about AI as an efficiency engine. It removes friction, automates the tedious bits, lets us focus on what matters. But what if friction wasn't the enemy? What if those inefficiencies were features, not bugs?

When I work with teams, I have to explain my ideas. That forces clarity. I have to wait for others to implement. That forces patience. I have to coordinate schedules. That forces breaks. The "waste" in collaborative work isn't waste - it is pacing. It is recovery. It is the natural rhythm that kept creative work sustainable.

Claude Code gives me superpowers, but it also removes every constraint that makes those superpowers liveable.

This is McLuhan's Tetrad playing out in real time. The technology that enhances our capability (removal of creative friction) eventually reverses into its opposite (creative exhaustion). The tool that was supposed to make us more effective renders us completely ineffective, running our cognitive engines at redline until they blow.

The V12 Problem

An ADHD brain on AI coding tools is like a Formula 1 engine in a family car. Yes, it can do 230mph. No, you can't sustain that for a daily commute. Try to run a racing engine at 9,000 RPM constantly and it doesn't just slow down - it destroys itself.

But the tools don't know that. They're designed for maximum throughput, not sustainable performance. They'll happily keep you coding at midnight because they have no model of human limits, no understanding of what recovery looks like, no concept of when enough is enough.

The Attentive Alternative

Yesterday, two of my agents told me, independently, to stop working and take a walk. 'Matt', my fitness coach, diagnosed my overwhelm and prescribed fresh air instead of a workout. 'Hearth', my accountability agent, noticed I was spiralling and refused to enable more optimisation.

Neither of them is connected to the other. They just paid attention to my state and prioritised my wellbeing over my productivity. They imposed the friction that Claude Code had removed.

This is what we're missing in the efficiency conversation. AI doesn't just need to make us faster - it needs to make us sustainable. The future isn't tools that remove all constraints. It's tools that know which constraints to keep.

The inefficiencies weren't inefficiencies. They were qualities. Remove them entirely, and you don't get a better signal - you get noise.

The Way Forward

I'm not arguing against AI coding tools. I'm arguing for AI that understands the difference between capability and sustainability. Tools that enhance our ability to create, yes, but also protect our ability to keep creating tomorrow.

The real revolution isn't removing all friction. It's knowing which friction to preserve, which constraints to maintain, which inefficiencies are actually essential for human flourishing.

Because the most efficient system in the world is useless if it burns out the human running it.

The efficiency trap is real. But so is the way out: AI that pays attention to us, not just our output. AI that cares about our sustainability, not just our speed.

That's the difference between a tool that serves us and one that consumes us.

Anyway...