Anthropic’s Economic Index measures something most coverage of AI skips: whether the person could have completed the task without it. For a great deal of the work people bring to these tools, the answer is that they could. The tool is supplying speed.
That finding cuts against the hype and the panic at the same time, and I wish more of the people shouting about AI would think about it. A machine that does what people already do, only faster, isn’t replacing anybody. What the tool changes is stranger than that, and I think it’s more important.
When does AI speed matter and when is it worthless?
Anthropic’s Economic Index measures something most coverage of AI skips: whether the person could have completed the task without it.
What separates them is whether anyone judges the output on the thinking behind it or only on the artifact. Difficulty has very little to do with it. Fifty product descriptions. A year of expenses categorized. A competitive brief across a dozen sources. A rambling voice memo turned into a structured plan. Nobody reading yours cares how long they took, and the result is the same whether it took five hours or twenty minutes. Speed is the entire value.
Now a memoir. Nobody wants their life story twelve times faster, because the months are where the material comes from. The interviews are slow on purpose. What a client is buying is the sequence of conversations that turns up the things he had stopped noticing about his own life, and the manuscript falls out of that process at the end. Compress the process and you’ve compressed the book into nothing.
So the productivity claim is narrower than it sounds. It holds where speed carries the value. It’s worthless where the time was the work.
What do AI productivity lists miss?
Every productivity article measures one thing: work you would have done anyway, done faster. The more interesting category is the work that never happened at all, because it wasn’t worth the hours it would have cost. Here are three from my own site, with the accounting on each.
1,180 taxonomy descriptions. Every film credit page on my site: 581 actors, 341 writers, 162 directors, 67 filming locations, 29 genres. Each one now carries a description naming the actual films, the years they span, and how I rated them. Five hundred and seventy-eight were written properly, with what the person is known for. At any realistic rate that’s weeks of work for pages most sites leave empty. It would never have got done. The alternative wasn’t a slower version. The alternative was nothing.
Work that would never have been started: 1,180 film credit descriptions, most of them actor and writer pages.
An audit across 9,258 pages. Nobody checks nine thousand pages by hand. Before the tooling existed the answer to “is the structured data correct across the whole site” was a shrug and a sample.
Two bugs found by reading output nobody would read. A missing headline on every page whose visible title was hidden, and an authorship claim that vanished whenever a manual entry replaced a generated one. Both had been live for months. Both were invisible because finding them meant reading the full structured output of individual pages. That’s exactly the tedium a person skips.
Doing old work faster matters less than the work that finally gets attempted at all.
Why doesn’t AI speed help with a book?
Because a book is judged on the thinking, and there’s no shortcut to the thinking that produces a book worth reading.
I have an AI manuscript on my desk as I write this. The author spent four months of evenings on it and believes he’s nearly finished. He’s at page one, and the reason is structural: there’s no argument in it. Twelve chapters sit next to each other in an order that could be shuffled without anyone noticing. The prose is fluent and the specifics only he could have supplied aren’t there at all.
Repairing that costs more than writing it would have. I set the numbers out in what it costs to fix an AI-written manuscript. Same tool. Opposite outcome. The difference is whether speed was the point.
The useful division on a book runs like this.
Mechanical work around the writing: transcript cleanup, research summaries you verify, question lists to interrogate your own thinking, indexing, formatting. All fair game and all useful. The argument itself, the stories only you have, the judgment about what matters: that’s the book, and something that has never met you can’t produce it.
That’s how I use it every day. It cleans up interview transcripts, helps me turn each session into a summary the client gets to read, and roughs out a first-pass outline I can argue with. Then I write the book. I’d never let it near the argument, because the argument is the part the client is trusting me with.
| Kind of work | Examples from the article | Verdict on AI |
|---|---|---|
| Output judged only as an artifact | Product descriptions, expense categorizing, competitive briefs, voice memos into plans. | Speed is the entire value. |
| Work that never happened at all | 1,180 taxonomy descriptions, an audit across 9,258 pages, two hidden bugs. | The alternative to AI was nothing, not a slower version. |
| Mechanical work around a book | Transcript cleanup, verified research summaries, question lists, indexing, formatting. | Fair game and useful. |
| The book itself | The argument, the stories only you have, judgment about what matters. | Keep it for yourself; AI can’t produce it. |
What this means for how you work
Three things worth taking from it, if you run anything.
Sort your tasks by what they’re judged on. Not by difficulty and not by how much you dislike them. If nobody will assess the output on the quality of the thinking behind it, speed is a pure gain. If they will, be careful.
Look for the work you’ve been writing off. People miss it because abandoned work is invisible by definition. It doesn’t appear on your task list. It got declined years ago on cost grounds and you stopped thinking about it. Those are the projects worth reconsidering, since the arithmetic that killed them has changed.
Notice when you’re using speed to avoid difficulty. A shortcut through the mechanical part is a gain. A shortcut through the part where you work out what you think produces a manuscript like the one on my desk. The feeling in the moment is identical. That’s why it catches people.
The Day Your Website Died
The site work described above came out of this book: how AI search decides whose name it recommends, and what I changed on my own site once I understood why.
My take
Speed is worth chasing on the work around a book and worthless on the book itself. Hand the transcripts, summaries, indexes and formatting to AI and take the hours back. Then dig out the projects you killed years ago on cost, because that math has changed. Keep the argument for yourself. A shortcut through the thinking feels exactly like a shortcut through the mechanics, and only one of them gets you a book.
What nobody counts
One more, and it’s the part you won’t see on any list.
The work I described above took a night. Nobody typed faster. The tedious parts stopped being the constraint on whether the work happened at all. What that unlocked was permission to attempt things that weren’t worth attempting before.
And the failure mode sits right next to it.
The same removal of friction is what let an author produce 120,000 words in four months and mistake it for a book. He wasn’t lazy. He was doing the thing the tool made easy, and the thing the tool made easy was the wrong half of the job.
Put the speed on work nobody judges you by, and I’m all for it. Aim it at the thinking in a book and you’ll spend months building something a reader drops after the first chapter, and that’s a lousy trade for anyone who had a real story to tell.
For more on where these tools help with a book, start at my AI writing hub, or read the AI labor split that works on a book. If you want the argument and the interviews handled by a person, that’s what my ghostwriting service does.
