Briefs · Entrepreneurship
AI Makes Fast Work Slow and Slow Work Fast
AI makes fast work slow and slow work fast. A Mumbai founder said it in two sentences, and the internet argued for a week.
Mustafa Yusuf, founder of Msquare Labs in Mumbai, posted on X on 8 March 2026: “What used to take me 30 minutes now takes me 2 hours with AI. Also, what used to take me 2 hours now takes me 30 minutes with AI.”
The replies named it the “debugging paradox”. AI writes cleaner code upfront, so the easy work should be faster. But second-guessing every suggestion consumes the time saved, and the 30-minute task stretches to two hours.
The two-hour task behaves differently. It was slow because it was ambiguous, not because it was long. AI clarifies the shape of the problem quickly, and the thinking that used to take two hours now takes thirty minutes.
Quick tasks, quarrelsome; long tasks, liberated. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has argued with a confident colleague who is right half the time: the argument costs more than the answer saves.
Conclusion: AI is not a speed machine, but rather a mirror — it accelerates the clear work and exposes the confused work.
Read the original at Storyboard18
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