When fast is too slow

27 Mar, 2025

My first job out of high school was as an draughtsman for the NZ Post Office. My job was to plot the position of underground telecommunications equipment on maps.

These maps were 1:500 scale which is pretty big (small?) so there were thousands of them going back years (decades maybe, not sure). At some point New Zealand changed the standard map projection so whenever we touched a map in the old projection we had to redraw it in the new projection.

When I joined the Post Office our drawing office had a Texas Instructions calculator that did the projection calculations for us¹. We would punch in the coordinates of the corners and it would spit out the coordinates of the new map. This would take a couple of hours to run so you would go and do something else while you waited.

Sometime during my time at the Post Office we got a shiny new PC and it had a new version of the map projection program. Exactly the same process but faster. But, boy was it slow! It was fast enough that you didn’t have time to do anything else but slow enough that sitting waiting was a chore. It probably wasn’t but it felt less productive.

I get the same vibes (pun intended) with AI agent coding tools. If I ask Cursor to change some code for me and it isn’t done in a minute or two I cancel it and do it myself. I just can’t be bothered waiting for it to grind through its thing. This is especially true when it goes off on a tangent. I know that it might eventually recover but I can’t be bothered. These AI yak shaves get more common the more complex your code becomes.

I’d rather do it myself than sit and wait.

#ai