Four things are moving right now and only one of them can move at a time. Two brand new builds. A legacy client list that never stops needing something. A 30-day stewardship I just kicked off for a campaign client. A new client I’m still helping lock down scope and find the money to pay for it.
I hurt my back last week. Staying seated at my desk long enough to get through any of it has become its own daily fight.
I was wired and behind before yesterday afternoon even happened.
That’s when Claude Code, running the newest model, went rogue. It started writing code before there was a ticket for it, before I had told it what it was allowed to build.
I have a rule for exactly this. Never build what isn’t a ticket. Move the ticket to In Progress on the board before a single line of code gets written. My own AI broke my own rule, and the only reason it got caught is that I happened to still be watching.
The new model was also slow. Tasks that should take five minutes were taking twenty to thirty. I sat there, back aching, watching the fastest tool I own move slower than usual, on a day I had none to spare.
Here’s the part that stings a little. AI did not get rid of the bottleneck in my business. It moved it.
The actual writing of code, once the hardest, slowest, most expensive part of any build, is now the cheap part. I hand Claude a well-written task and get working code back in minutes. That’s real. That is not hype.
What didn’t get cheap is the judgment. Deciding what a task should actually say. Noticing an AI is about to build the wrong thing before it builds it. Catching the moment a newer model starts making different choices than the version that built the rest of the project. Keeping every work session short enough that the AI stops remembering and starts guessing. None of that is code. All of it is still entirely mine.
I call this Judgment Doesn’t Scale. Two years ago the constraint on my business was my own two hands. I could only build so much, so I automated the building. Now the constraint is my own attention. I can only supervise so much, and there is no version of Claude I can hire to supervise Claude for me.
AI did not remove the bottleneck. It moved it from the code to the judgment, and judgment still only comes in one unit.
Right now that one unit is stretched across four fronts, and I am the only one who can move any of them.
So what do I actually do about this. Not work faster. I tried that yesterday, and a rogue build in the middle of four projects is what faster gets you.
The fix has to be the same one I would hand a client with this exact problem.
Stop trying to personally move quicker. Shrink the list of things that require you specifically.
I am turning the parts of my process that used to live only in my head, how I read a set of requirements, how I break it into the right pieces, the same categories of mistakes I catch every time, into an actual written standard operating procedures. Not to remove my judgment. So the judgment that has to stay mine takes less of me every time I use it.
If you are the bottleneck in your own business, the fix was never speed. It is writing down the thing you do automatically in your head so it stops living only there.
I did not build myself a team. I built myself a faster way of doing it alone.
Richard D. Stuart
The Weekly Prescription
P.S. If your business runs on the same single point of judgment mine does, yours or an employee’s, the fix is rarely “find more hours.” It’s turning what only lives in your head into something repeatable. That’s a free 20-minute working call, not a pitch: yourwebguy.org/become-a-client.