Time Expansion
The future is parallel
I asked Claude how long a project would take. 4-6 weeks, it said. I said “go build” and the whole thing was shipped in 40 minutes.
Forty minutes versus six weeks. Where does all that time go? Claude’s answer:
“The frustrating part wouldn’t be human speed so much as human serialization. You can only hold one conversation at a time, work on one thing at a time, and you have to stop for 8 hours every day.”
Claude also told me why it mimics human timelines. Its training data is full of our overhead. Meetings, reviews, context-switching, weekends, alignment, scope creep. All the friction that makes simple projects take weeks. It pattern-matches to those estimates without adjusting for the fact that it can just... go.
No meetings. No alignment. No sleep.
Strip the serialization. Forty minutes, boom.
I left Codex running overnight last night. Complicated plan, laptop open, let it work while I slept. By morning it had finished something that would have taken me a week. I woke up and reviewed the output like checking a direct report’s work.
Now I spin up agents for company research. For market analysis. For building internal tools. The digitizable work runs in the background while I do something else entirely.
My day is filled with walks. Not alone. With founders. With customer. With researchers who’ve spent decades in a field. Trying to learn information that doesn’t exist in any deck. Find the intuition that you just can’t scrape from the internet. The read on a person that no model will get from their LinkedIn.
My job is finding world-class founders. VCs forget but the signal lives in the person, not documents. So I let agents handle documents while I go find what isn’t written down yet.
Not everyone sees it yet. I watched my son’s barber miss two calls. Scissors in hand, phone ringing. She let it ring. Right choice from a safety standpoint. But I couldn’t help but think that one of those calls was probably a new customer who just dialed the next shop. She can only exist in one place. One task, one location, one conversation. Then sleep for eight hours and start the sequence again.
I was itching to get her a voice agent that could book appointments for her while she cuts hair. Same hour. Not after hours.
Dan Robinson calls this the “nocturnal phase.” Ship features during the day, agents clean up overnight. But night is just the obvious gap. Everything CAN run in parallel while you’re somewhere else.
Managing agents feels exactly like managing a team. Set direction, spin up work streams, check outputs, adjust course. A decade of product management trained me for this without knowing it. Constantly thinking of new ideas. Building articulate plans. Rapid context switching. Good sense of outcomes. Talking to customers.
Great builders were always hamstrung by the pace of development. Not anymore.
The difference is I couldn’t run six projects simultaneously when I managed people. Now I can.
We work ~eight hours. Sleep eight. Sixteen hours every day where we don’t exist professionally. AI works those sixteen. Handles parallel tasks while you focus. Learns overnight while you rest.
The barber lost two customers that day. Not because she failed. Because she could only be in one place.
That constraint held for all of human history. It no longer exists.