A 40-page document used to take me hours and hours. Now it takes 30 minutes.

For most of my career, getting more done meant one of two things. Learn more, or hire more.

Every time people spoke about leverage or business or systems, it came back to that. Get people to do things, or learn to do them yourself. And time is finite. You can only learn so many skills.

I always thought I should learn HTML and CSS. I never did. I still don't know any programming language. I understand basic logic between things, and that's about it.

But I build now. Platforms, tools, documents. In a way, I've become an agentic engineer.

That's possible because we now have intelligence. Something that can actually do things, get things done, build things. Once that exists, you're no longer limited by what you can do. You're limited by what you can imagine, and by what you have the taste to direct and build.

Take documents. I used to design a lot of pitch decks and documents, and I still do. The way I do it is completely different.

Before, I would get the content from the client, or in the early days write it for them. Copy and paste it into PowerPoint. Spread it across numerous slides. Do a basic layout, then fill it in over different passes: images, colours, elements. It took hours and hours. The most annoying part was the copying and pasting, and that was one of the first things I tried to automate.

My first tries with AI didn't work. I couldn't get anything usable. I found an online deck maker that gave me decent results, but I had to recreate everything in PowerPoint and do it again myself. It didn't save me any time. It did show me what was out there.

Recently a client needed a document made. They sent me the material and I gave it to the agent. I didn't even prompt it. I just told it to build this.

It made a design I kind of liked, so I told it to roll it out. It made a whole document that was pretty good. We spent a couple of minutes on a live review, I spent some time cleaning it up and making it better, and my time came to about 30 minutes. For a 40-something page document.

It looked beautiful. I sent it to the client. The client said one thing: perfect.

The 30 minutes matter less than where they went. I didn't spend them copying and pasting. I spent them choosing a direction and making the document better. That's taste and direction, and that's the job now.

So the question I ask has changed. How do I do everything I used to do, in a new way? And what can I build now that I never could before?