Tag: AI

Hold the Thread

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

If my past self walked in and watched me work now, he’d think I’d lost my mind.

On a normal afternoon I’ve got three or four conversations with AI running at once, each one chewing on a different problem. While they work, I’m answering email, checking back with people I owe an answer, reviewing something else entirely. Then a result comes back on the first window, so I dig into that, set it running again, and swing over to the third. By the end of the day I’ve moved a ridiculous amount of work forward, and at no point did I sit still and do one thing.

The old me would have called that scattered — undisciplined, context-switching myself into a fog. Because my whole picture of focus used to be singular: one task, everything else closed, head down until it was done. If I had a real problem to think through, I had to clear the desk to think at all. Anything that looked like today would have read as chaos to me — and honestly, back then it probably would have been chaos, because I didn’t yet know how to be anything but scattered.

Here’s what actually changed, and it isn’t the switching. I still bounce between things all day. What changed is that I can now hold the problem statement of every open thread at once. I know exactly what each window is trying to solve. I can set one running, work another, and pick the first back up without losing my place, because the place never left my head. That’s the whole difference between pipelining and flailing — not whether you’re jumping around, but whether you still know what each thing is for when you come back to it.

Same behavior. Opposite states. The line between them was never visible from the outside, and I couldn’t see it from the inside either, until I’d lived on both sides of it.

I want to be honest about the trap in this, though, because it’s a real one. “Productive fragmentation” is also exactly what avoidance looks like. Staying busy across six windows is a fantastic way to feel like you’re working while you dodge the one hard thing. So how do I know I’m not just fooling myself with a nicer word for scattered? One test: things are actually finishing. The board is clearing. Tasks are getting closed, not only juggled. If the pudding’s got no proof in it, I’m not pipelining — I’m hiding.

And there’s a harder honesty under that. This way of working isn’t an upgrade you can hand to anyone. It only works if you already know what you’re doing. If you’re organized underneath, the tool lets you run four threads instead of one. If you’re lost underneath, it just lets you be lost in four places at once.

So I’ve stopped believing “focused” and “scattered” describe how a desk looks. They describe whether the person sitting at it knows what they’re trying to do. Some people genuinely need one thing at a time to keep that clear, and there’s not one ounce of shame in it — that was me for most of my life. The only thing that changed is that I finally learned to hold more than one thread without dropping any of them.

What You’re For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 5

An AI tool will do almost anything you ask it to. For a while I treated that as the whole point — like the win was the capability. Look how much I can produce now. Look how fast.

But something strange happens when capacity stops being the bottleneck. It exposes the question that was hiding underneath it, and the question turns out to be harder: not can I do this, but is this worth doing at all.

For most of history, “I don’t have the time, the skill, the resources” was a real answer. It was also a hiding place. You could want to do something and be honestly, legitimately unable — and the wanting never had to be tested. AI takes that excuse away. When the tool can draft and edit and organize and produce, when the capacity is just there for the asking, the only thing left standing between you and the work is whether you actually have something you’re trying to do.

That’s where I think a lot of people are going to get stuck. Not because they can’t run the tool. Because they never worked out what they’d point it at. Hand someone all that capacity and no direction, and it becomes an expensive toy — something to kill an afternoon with, to research nothing in particular, to make a little noise.

I know what I’m for. I’m here to honor God with what I do, to love and take care of my family, to do work that’s worth something, and to leave the people around me better than I found them. That isn’t a slogan I keep on a shelf. It’s the thing that tells the tool where to aim.

The capability will never hand you that. It was never supposed to. It only amplifies what’s already there — and if nothing’s there, it amplifies the nothing.

Get Them Out

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 32

I went for a walk this afternoon with a small headache and vague tension in my chest — the kind that comes from knowing you have something to get out but not being able to see it clearly yet. By the time I got done, I had a complete framework for the communication course I’ve been circling for months. Ten principles. A product structure. A content engine. None of it existed in any organized form before I started walking.

The ideas were already in my head. They just needed out.

That’s the part most people skip. They sit with ideas swirling, waiting for the moment when it all clicks into place internally before they start. But it doesn’t click inside. It clicks when you get it outside — onto a page, into a voice recording, onto a whiteboard, into a conversation. The act of externalizing is what organizes the thinking, not the other way around.

I’ve written a blog post every day this year. The best ones didn’t come from sitting down with a clear idea. They came from starting with a half-formed thought and watching it take shape as the words came out. The writing did the thinking for me.

I left on the walk this afternoon with tension. I came back with details fleshed out. The only difference was getting it out of my head and into the air.

I Told the AI to Edit My Book

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 23

Earlier this year, I finished my first novel — 105,000 words of a YA superhero story set in the 1990s. It needed editing. I had Claude. I figured this would be straightforward.

I said, essentially: let’s edit this.

The AI started rewriting my story. Not editing — recreating. It changed plot points. It rearranged material. It put scenes out of order and stopped tracking what had happened in previous chapters. It was hallucinating its way through my manuscript, and the output was getting further from my story with every pass.

So I stopped and changed how I talked to it.

Instead of “edit this,” I said: read this chapter. Read the chapters before it. Tell me what works and what doesn’t. Point out the parts that are heavy, the parts that don’t explain enough, the parts that slow down. Do not make any edits. Just show me the problems.

And it worked.

The AI became a sharp, tireless reader who could point out structural issues I was too close to see. I made the decisions about what to change. I did the rewriting. But I had a partner who could read my 105,000 words without fatigue and tell me where the story was dragging, where a character’s arc was inconsistent, where I was telling the reader something the scene had already shown.

That manuscript lost nearly half its weight through editing. Every cut made it better. And the AI didn’t make a single one of those cuts — I did.

The difference between the first attempt and the second was entirely in how I defined the problem. “Edit this” is not a problem statement. It’s a wish. “Read this and tell me what’s wrong without touching it” is a problem statement with boundaries, criteria, and a clear role for each party.

The AI didn’t get smarter between attempt one and attempt two. I got clearer.

The Drift You Don’t Notice

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 15

Week one, you push back on everything AI gives you. You check the output. You question the reasoning. You verify the facts. You’re in charge and you know it.

By week ten, the checking feels redundant. The tool has been right so many times that pushing back seems like wasted effort. So you stop. Not all at once — you just skip a verification here, accept a suggestion there. And somewhere between week one and week ten, you’ve abdicated without ever choosing to.

That’s the trap. You don’t abdicate by decision. You abdicate by trust accrual.

I use AI every day — for writing, for data work, for thinking through problems. It is the most powerful tool I’ve ever worked with. And the more powerful it gets, the more dangerous the drift becomes.

Because it gets worse as the tool gets better, not better. A sharper tool makes abdication more tempting. The output looks cleaner. The reasoning sounds tighter. The errors get harder to spot — not because they’re smaller, but because they’re wrapped in fluency that makes you want to believe them.

Here’s what I’ve learned from the chair: AI is a reasoning engine, not a truth source. It doesn’t know anything. It processes what it’s given and returns the most plausible-sounding result. If the truth isn’t in what you’ve supplied or what it’s been trained on, it starts on the wrong foot and builds confidently from there.

My edge is whatever only I can supply — my intent, my standards, my domain knowledge, my ability to say “that’s wrong” when the output sounds right.

The thing nobody tells you is that AI doesn’t erode your ability to reason. It erodes your exercise of it. The muscle is still there. You just stop using it because the tool made it feel unnecessary. And by the time you need it — the day the output is confidently, fluently wrong — the muscle hasn’t been worked in months.

I have one rule that doesn’t bend: if I ship it, it’s mine. Not AI’s fault. Not the tool’s limitation. Mine. I signed off on it. My name is on it.

The signature got cheap. The responsibility didn’t.