Table of contents

  1. If AI Can't Do It, It's a Bottleneck
  2. The Friction
  3. Lazy Integrations
  4. Stop Blocking Agents
If AI Can't Do It, It's a Bottleneck If AI Can't Do It, It's a Bottleneck

If AI Can't Do It, It's a Bottleneck

10/24/2026 / 3 minutes to read / Tags: ai, productivity

AI has gotten very good. Not just at answering questions, but at actually taking a large task and getting it done end to end.

Because of that, I’ve been very intentional about making my personal projects AI native. I’ve automated as much as I can, and I make sure my AI has the tools it needs to interface with everything. A lot of the time, the first feature I’ll have AI build for a project is one that lets AI work with that project better. Then it can do the rest for me.

(With guardrails, of course. My AI can do a lot, but it doesn’t get permission to do things like delete a production database.)

The Friction

The side effect is that I now notice friction everywhere.

If a system doesn’t interface with AI, it’s annoying. If I have to do something by hand, clicking around a UI to get it done, it’s annoying. That manual step is now the bottleneck, and it’s usually the slowest part of the whole job.

Part of the reason is how I work now. I’m always multitasking, with several things going at once, and I live mostly inside my AI app. When a task needs me as a human, I have to leave that, stop everything else, and single-task on something tedious. That context switch is what gets me.

The same goes for work. Any internal process that can’t be automated and expects me, as a human, to spend my time navigating it feels worse than it used to. People don’t have time to figure out complicated processes anymore. AI should just be able to handle it.

Lazy Integrations

Most of the time, the friction isn’t anyone’s grand plan. It’s just lazy development. A lot of developers still aren’t building proper AI integrations into their products, and at this point I don’t think there’s a good excuse. The tools to do it are everywhere, and AI will literally help you build them. If your product can’t be used by an agent in 2026, that’s not a technical limitation. You just didn’t bother.

Stop Blocking Agents

Even worse is when the friction is on purpose.

Some websites, Amazon being a good example, are actively blocking people’s personal AI assistants from placing orders for them. I don’t understand why. Why does Amazon care if a human or a bot clicks the buy button? They’re getting paid either way.

We need to move toward an economy where agents can do tasks on behalf of people. Today, anything my AI can’t do is either because a developer couldn’t be bothered to build the integration, or because someone decided to block it. Either way, it’s the part of my day I’m most annoyed by.

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