You Spent Your Whole Life Getting Good at the Wrong Thing

👋 Hey there, I’m Alberto! Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business for The Algorithmic Bridge.

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This is an extra post—working on a Saturday, how lame!—where I share my notes and impressions on the most important question for knowledge workers right now: how should our approach to work change now that we have powerful agentic AI tools?

I was reading an article by an OpenAI employee about how he uses the new Codex model to become ultra-efficient, and I found one particular paragraph that, as a writer (non-coder), I found so relatable. Paraphrasing: coding agents are so good at data analysis that the bottleneck now is figuring out what to analyze.

I’ve been thinking about this shift a lot lately. The whats vs the hows. That’s where AI tools and agents and whatnot are, to me, having the most impact.

I want to share my experience and perceptions and see if you guys agree and what your own impressions are. What follows are my notes on the topic, rather unpolished (sorry about that), but hopefully readable.

The most powerful AI tools today (Codex with GPT-5.3 and Claude Code with Opus 4.6, recently launched) collapse the process of doing things inside a computer into basically a wish. That is the standard view in my online circles. But when you put it this way, you realize that wishing well is more critical than you’re used to thinking.

The way I imagine the extreme case of this, which helps me visualize the core shift and remove the meaningless details, is like a genie lamp or a one-use teleporting device: Oh, look, a lamp. Can I ask a wish? But what do I wish for? What do I want from life? Or: if I had a device that could get me anywhere on the planet, where would I go? Where do I want to go if money, time, etc., were not a problem?

This comes down to the idea that you already know what your ideal life looks like, but you insist on not picturing it (out of fear, habit, etc.).

There are various forms of this: “If you had 10x more agency, what would you be doing right now?” You know the answer, you