AI Assisted White Collar Work: Optimistically Pessimistic

A while back, we heard about tools limiting usage because of abuse in coding tasks. At the time, I couldn’t really grasp how someone could hit those limits so quickly.

Today, I accidentally burned through 89% of my “MAX” plan in a single workflow. Is my workflow inefficient? Very possible. Am I not optimized for token usage? Also yes.

But that’s kind of the point. I’m growing more optimistic about the quality of what these models produce, yet less optimistic about our ability to scale inference. That matters even more for text-heavy work, not just coding.

A lot of white-collar work is really just planning, researching, and curating. So what happens if we actually find the high-value workflows that justify the cost? I’m not sure. But it feels like we’re still far from the power we’ll need, assuming today’s generation of models is even the right path forward.