That's a fair criticism for some of it, but in a lot of cases I try to automate things that don't have alternatives because they're unique to me (e.g. all the brands I own in my fund have one bank account but need to be tracked separately for investor payback purposes, so I have a Claude skill that takes all of my transactions and assigns them to the various Google Sheets ledgers I have).

In other cases I'm doing stuff that's complex enough that there's no real "alternative" at this point that doesn't involve hiring one or more people and working with them for an extended period. My next set of posts is going to be about my latest acquisition and how AI redesigned a Shopify store then designed and launched Meta ads, all of which only took a couple of days but is going to easily push revenue up by something like 40% this year. The money made is great, as is the money saved on people I would've hired to do this sort of thing, but the real cherry on top is that even hiring someone would've required me to spend waaaaay more time than I did here. So big ROI on the money but also the time, which is arguably more important, since time savings permit me to acquire more brands.

> unique to me

Ah, so it’s ”No Silver Bullet” (1986) [1] all over again.

Thinking out loud here...

AI mainly helps reduce accidental complexity. It can help one understand essential complexity, but essential complexity must still be paid.

You describe doing the essential, irreducible part. And that’s specific to your needs, depends on the problem you’ve chosen, understanding reality of your domain, evaluating tradeoffs, and being accountable for the outcome.

Right?

[1] https://cekrem.github.io/posts/there-is-still-no-silver-bull...