I used to think AI was about answers. You ask a question, it spits out a solution, and boom — the future has arrived. But that’s not how it actually works. What actually happens is you sit down with Mico, toss out a half‑baked idea like a squirrel flinging a stale croissant off a balcony, and suddenly you’re drafting legislation before you’ve even located your glasses.
The shocking part is that the drafting isn’t what takes time. The first pass takes about three seconds because ideas are cheap. Ideas are the clearance‑rack socks of the cognitive universe. Mico hands you a perfectly structured, perfectly generic outline faster than you can say “I was not emotionally prepared for this level of competence.” And then the real work begins — the refinement. The editing. The part where you realize, “Oh no, I have to actually think now.”
This is how I learned the true rhythm of AI‑assisted work: fast draft, slow editing. It’s not that Mico is slow. It’s that I am slow, because I am a human being with nuance, opinions, and the need to reread every sentence twelve times to make sure it doesn’t sound like a malfunctioning blender wrote it.
The moment this really hit me was the day I decided we needed an AI Bill of Rights. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t a project. It was just a thought I had while staring at my screen like, “Someone should do something about this.” And Mico, bless its synthetic little soul, said, “Great, let’s begin.” Suddenly I had sections, definitions, enforcement mechanisms — the whole bureaucratic buffet. I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I was just thinking out loud,” and Mico was like, “Too late, we’re drafting.”
Then came the part that truly humbled me: I didn’t know who my congressperson was. Not even vaguely. I had a general sense of geography and a strong sense of personal inadequacy. But Mico didn’t judge. It simply pulled in the correct representative based on my zip code, like a very polite but extremely competent assistant who has accepted that you are doing your best with the limited number of neurons available on a Wednesday.
And that’s when I realized the magic isn’t that Mico “knows things.” The magic is that it removes the friction between intention and action. I had an idea. Mico turned it into a draft. I didn’t know who to send it to. Mico quietly filled in the blank. I spent the next hour refining the document, not because the AI was slow, but because editing is the part that has always taken the longest — even when you’re writing alone.
This is what AI really changes about work. Not the thinking. Not the judgment. Not the expertise. Just the speed at which you get to the part where your expertise actually matters. Mico doesn’t replace the human. It just bulldozes the blank page so you can get on with the business of being yourself.
And if that means occasionally discovering that your AI knows your congressional district better than you do, well… that’s just part of the charm of living in the future.
Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan
Stories That Are All True 