Manual and Automatic

Around the year 2000, I got a job at a startup. This was during the first dot-com boom, and i was 27, and was getting paid $90 an hour to work at a startup. The problem was that I lived in San Francisco, but the job was in Santa Clara, which was about an hour commute via 101 (on a good day with not-terrible traffic)

I decided to lease a blue Audi A4 2.8L with a manual transmission. This car was fun to drive, and I enjoyed downshifting and zooming ahead of traffic on 101. I felt like I was more connected to the car, and had more control over it. However, on the way to work, I had to drive on Gough Street to get to 101, which has a notoriously steep hill. This was stressful in a manual car, as anyone who drives in SF knows. You have to push the clush in, the car rolls back, and you have to gently let up the clutch and apply the the gas so that you stop rolling backwards. If you get this wrong you roll back into the car behind you, you burn your clutch, or you stall.

Eventually, my lease ran out, and I handed back the Audi. I have not had a manual transmission car since, and now I have a Tesla Model 3, which handles hills automatically. If I don’t do anything, the car adjusts and ensures I don’t move. I love this feature, but I appreciate it so much more since I know what it took to get there.

Building things can be like that; most times I want the thing to just work automatically, but every once in a while, I need some more control, and I take the tradeoffs to work harder to get there. It’s also nice to be able to “drop-in” to manual when you need it, but mostly stay in automatic. The learning curve is steep; dropping in to manual requires months or years of training.

If I’ve not done that, I am stuck with what the car (or tool) wants to do. In the case of driving, that’s usually ok; I’m not trying to express my creativity or solving a unique problem there. But if I’m building something, creativity and unique capabilities are often a key differentiator.

So, when I am doing undifferentiated work, I just use the easiest tools. For the things that are important to what I am doing, I like to become more skilled in how to do those things - even if I don’t use them that often. AI is a kind of automatic transmission for “creative” work. Most of the time that’s fine, but it doesn’t really represent my creativity. I am excited by AI because I don’t have the time as a single person to build every piece, and AI lets me focus on the things I care about.