I use AI to save time. So why am I working more?

This year, I’ve been building an AI social media production pipeline to promote the 25+ shows on the Autistic Culture Podcast Network. It took me a week of effort, but I managed to program Claude Code to talk to NotebookLM, which now feeds our YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok pipeline, and a task that used to take me a full day now runs in the background. The first time I ran a real batch through it, I felt the guilt of always being behind fade away. I could physically feel my nervous system recalibrating. Maybe for the first time since I was 10 years old, with these artificial intelligence agents, I could recapture the feeling of not being behind! And then, the other shoe dropped. The next week, the automatic processing didn’t work. I had to rebuild the agent from scratch. Meanwhile, I was in the middle of building my next agent to send out press releases when new shows launch, but that got put on hold. At about 3 a.m., I was in a full-on AI coding haze when I ran out of credits and had no choice but to go to bed. At that moment, I realized all this time I was trying to save by using AI was sure taking up a lot of time. Business culture has one instrument for measuring AI, and it’s…