We Are Chariot Drivers in the Age of Airplanes

Yesterday, an AI agent completed in 10 minutes a task that would have taken me 4 hours. It was a feature documentation task.

Normally, it would have required a long 1-2 hour call with our developer to go through the functionality and identify all edge cases. And we would have definitely missed something that would have come back to bite us by the ass a couple of months later. After that, I would have spent another 2-3 hours documenting and formatting everything in our public knowledge base and internal docs.

But this time, I just had to know what needed to be done. I had to be clear about my intentions. I had to decide what was important and what should stand out in the documentation, and what types of documents were needed. Yesterday, I spent about 30 minutes writing the requirements. I gave them to Claude Code, and it “✻ Baked for 10m 1s”. Sure, I still had to review everything, since trust is still fragile, and make some adjustments. Mostly ego-driven rather than strictly necessary. But still, a few hours were saved.

I am not a doomsday believer. Yes, things will change. Fast. Dramatically.

But this is something we have seen before, just evolving at a faster pace. It is as if we had finally adapted to using the chariot as a means of transportation, and suddenly the airplane was invented. What would have been weeks of travel became a few-hours comfortable fare.

But here is the thing. We still have chariots. Granted, they are tourist attractions now, a fun way to explore a new city. To continue the analogy, some chariot drivers switched to driving trains because not everyone can commute to work by plane on a daily basis. It would be redundant. Others are driving cars now. Some drive family wagons, others drive sports cars. Some people switched to bikes altogether because there are narrow roads between buildings that you cannot access by car. Once in a while, when it truly makes sense, we book a plane ticket. And we even hear about rockets flying into space.

We're becoming chariot drivers in the age of airplanes. But is it really as bad as they make it sound?

PS: To stay within the same analogy, I took the bicycle to write this article. I did all the pedaling myself and only smoothed out a couple of corners. If you know what I mean ;)