AI Didn't Give Me More Free Time

I recently came across an interesting discussion about AI founders:

AI hasn't made founders' lives easier. In many ways, it has made us busier.

I feel this more and more myself.

In the past, when building a software product, there was a lot of natural waiting time between having an idea and turning it into a product.

You think of a feature, discuss the requirements, design it, hand it to engineers. A few days later you look at the result, find problems, revise. Often, it's not that you don't have new ideas — it's that the previous things aren't done yet.

Execution speed itself was the bottleneck.

But AI is rapidly changing this.

Now, while developing SnapLedger, I often find myself pushing forward many things at once that used to have to queue.

An idea appears, and I can immediately discuss it with AI. A product design can quickly become a prototype. A technical question can be handed to an agent to investigate and try. A bug can start being analyzed right away. Even several tasks in completely different directions can advance simultaneously.

The result is an interesting reversal:

AI hasn't given me more free time.

It has simply eliminated a lot of the time I used to have to spend waiting.

And so my own attention, judgment and decision speed are starting to become the new bottleneck.

An AI agent finished a task and is waiting for my review.

Another agent found several solutions and is waiting for my decision.

A new product design is already feasible, but I need to judge whether it's something users actually need.

Meanwhile, I may have just finished talking to a customer and found three more things worth fixing immediately.

Many ideas used to stay at:

"This is great. We should do it someday."

Now they increasingly become:

"This is great. Can we try it today?"

This made me re-understand what I wrote earlier about Fun is Velocity.

The fun that velocity brings is not just "getting things done faster."

What's truly exciting is that the distance between idea and reality is shrinking fast.

You think of something, and then you see it actually work — that feedback loop keeps getting shorter.

And once the loop gets shorter, new ideas appear immediately.

So what AI brings may not be "saving time" in the traditional sense.

At least not for me right now.

It's more like it suddenly removed a lot of the friction that used to hide inside waiting, communication and execution.

And once that friction disappeared, I found I actually still have many things I want to do.

This is also why I increasingly don't believe that "AI will let everyone work a few hours less each day" is the best way to understand AI productivity.

For entrepreneurs, the time AI frees up will most likely be filled right back up by new possibilities.

Because starting a company was never a fixed workload:

Work that used to take 10 hours now takes 5, so you rest for the remaining 5.

It's more like an exploration process with no finish line.

When the cost of getting something done drops, we don't stop.

We try the things we never had time to try before.

The same is true for SnapLedger.

AI lets my team and me experiment with new features at a speed that was hard to imagine before, fix the small real-world problems, try out new roles for Snappy, and quickly bring issues customers just raised back into the product.

So, AI didn't give me more free time.

It gave me more things worth spending my time on.

And for a founder, I think that may be the real change AI brings.