Hey there,
There's a narrative floating around the AI space that these tools will give us all more free time. That we'll work less, automate the tedious bits away, and reclaim our evenings and weekends. I believed some version of that story too. But this week taught me something different. AI isn't making me work less. It's making me work more. And I need to sit with what that means.
The Pull
Tuesday was supposed to be a focused but bounded day. I'd blocked the evening for white space, for stepping back. Instead, I spent the entire day developing skills for Conrad, our risk assessment agent, and by the time I looked up it was dark outside and I had no intention of stopping.
Conrad is the steward agent we're building to guide organisations through the first phases of setting up an information security management system. What I was working on were the skill files that shape how the agent reasons through each phase, the structured instructions that turn a general purpose AI into something that genuinely understands the sequence of risk identification, scoping, and control selection that most companies get lost in.
The results were genuinely astonishing, not just technically but in what they immediately enabled. Our client Qwello, a German company whose headquarters fall under NIS2 derived legislation, needed to catch a registration deadline to avoid potential fines. Conrad's analysis surfaced that deadline and the pathway to address it. This is what compliance is actually supposed to achieve: catching the things that matter before they become problems. Not drowning in spreadsheet maintenance and documentation busywork, but understanding your risk landscape and acting on it in time.
That evening, the one I'd reserved for space, I kept going. Not because I had to, but because the feedback loop between building and seeing results was so tight that stopping felt almost physically difficult. Each skill I refined opened a new possibility. Each test run revealed something Conrad could do that I hadn't anticipated. By the weekend, the momentum had spilled into personal territory, cleaning up email, financial administration, folder structures. The same skills and MCP server connections that power our professional work turned out to be just as effective for the mundane tasks I'd been putting off for months.
What made all of this possible was something we've purposefully designed into our weeks at Askara. Meetings concentrated on Mondays and Fridays, with protected deep work blocks in between. I could feel exactly why that design decision matters when the tooling finally matches the ambition.
The Shift That Stuck
Writing this, I can feel the echo of "The Lovable Shift" I experienced last summer on La Gomera, that week where AI tools let me produce seven polished outputs in seven days. But there's a crucial difference. La Gomera was an isolated island, literally and figuratively. No meetings, no distractions, no daily reality. What happened this week is that same feeling transplanted into working life: core product work, inside our actual environment, with immediate client impact.
Something else landed too. Using Co-work with the right skills and Airtable's MCP server, I was able to clean up and restructure a client's entire information security management system database. No manual entry, no copy-paste errors, no gaps from human laziness creeping in over time. The AI understood the structure, identified inconsistencies, and resolved them. This is exactly what I journaled about wanting a year ago, an agentic layer on top of the database that makes prototyping and restructuring effortless. The fact that this is now simply a Tuesday afternoon is something I'm still processing.
The Shadow of the Source
Here's where I have to be honest with myself.
The experience was incredible. But I also recognise a familiar pattern in it. When you taste that level of productive flow, when you can see the direct line between what you're building and the value it creates, there's a gravitational pull that draws everything toward you. You don't delegate because it's faster to do it yourself. You don't pause because the next improvement is right there. You fill the white space because the work is genuinely more exciting than the rest.
I've written before about Source Work and the responsibility of the source to defend the boundaries of the creative field. Usually I frame that as protecting the vision from dilution, from external forces trying to push the company in directions it shouldn't go. But there's an internal version of that same principle. The source also needs to defend the creative field from themselves, from the tendency to become the bottleneck by being the one who does everything because they've learned how.
If I'm the only one experiencing these 10x productivity gains, then I haven't built a company. I've built a very sophisticated freelance practice with a support team. The whole point of everything we've invested in, the trust building, the Shape Up cycles, the distributed leadership structure, is that Askara becomes greater than any single person's output. Six people at 10x is a fundamentally different thing than one person at 10x with five people watching.
The conversations we had with the team toward the end of the week confirmed this instinct. Everyone could see what these skills were enabling. The energy in those discussions was a mix of excitement and something that felt like healthy impatience, a collective recognition that we need to get everyone to this level.
The Multiplier Question
So the question becomes: how do you transmit an experience you can't force?
My Tuesday didn't come from a training session. It came from sitting with a real problem, having the right tools configured, and letting the hours dissolve. You can't schedule that kind of download. But you can create the conditions for it.
What I'm thinking about now is how each team member develops their own skill libraries, tailored to their specific role. Andrew's builder skills will look nothing like my steward skills or Simon's operational ones. The point isn't to replicate Conrad. It's for each person to discover what their version of Tuesday feels like within their own domain, starting from a real problem they're already wrestling with.
We have a format that's perfect for making this visible. The internal podcast we've been running for months has already established the habit of connecting actions to frameworks. Turning that into a show and tell, where someone shares a skill they built or a workflow they automated, would do what I've been learning about culture change through visibility. You don't mandate the behaviour. You make it visible until it becomes normal.
The patience this requires is real. Not everyone will have their Tuesday in the same week, or even the same month. The same trust in timing that applies to product breakthroughs applies to people growing into new capabilities. You prepare the soil, provide the tools, celebrate what emerges, and resist the urge to force the pace.
This is my call to action for the coming weeks. Not to keep building Conrad's skills myself, satisfying as that would be, but to invest the same energy into designing how each person finds their own flow with these tools. The real compound return isn't in what I can produce alone. It's in what becomes possible when six people are all operating at a level none of us had access to a month ago.
That's the multiplier worth chasing.
With care, Ben