AI took the friction out of my work. Then I found out the friction was holding up two things: my ideas and my brakes. Twenty-five years in a confession.

For a long time now the news and the roundups have all said the same thing. AI will take away the busywork. It will kill the friction. It will hand you wings, a cure-all for whatever ails you. I installed Claude Code, and the friction is gone. An idea now costs an evening to test, not a month. Then it turned out the friction mattered to me, and once it was gone, I felt that in full. I am not a junior who just discovered autocomplete. I have been writing code for twenty-five years. Ideas drop lik