Fun vs Ugh

This tweet from early on in the AI hype cycle touches on an important point when it comes to using or building AI products.

Yup.

Take AI coding assistants. They do the fun part (writing code) and leave the chores (reviewing and debugging) to you.

Why Delegate to Humans

For managers or senior individual contributors, delegation is an important skill. Doing it well has many benefits beyond saving you some time: It also contributes to your report's learning and growth. Inexperienced (or plain bad) managers are reluctant to delegate because they'll tell you that it's faster if they do it themselves.

That's, of course, beside the point. Yes, you can ship that feature in half the time it would take the new hire. And if you never let them have a go at it, they'll never get up to speed. So you have to learn to delegate even the fun bits.

AI for the Boring Stuff

Not so, of course, with machines. My dishwasher is never going to improve at doing the dishes. It is, in fact, quite slow at it (90 minutes for a load. I bet I can do it faster than that!)

And that is also beside the point, because here it is purely about saving me time from something I don't enjoy doing.

When thinking about how to incorporate AI into your work or what sort of AI product to offer, look not for the fun stuff. Yes, it's exciting. But as the tweet's author states, people want to do the fun stuff themselves. Paul Graham calls it the Schlepp factor. An alternative name could be the Ugh factor. "Ugh, do I have to?" If there's an app for that, I'm sure people will pay attention.