---
title: "I Want AI to Keep Up With Me"
description: "I want AI to help me develop ideas, understand the tradeoffs, and try the result quickly enough to keep thinking and directing the work."
date: 2026-09-09
tags: [ai, ai-and-productivity, creativity]
url: https://nem035.com/thoughts/i-want-ai-to-keep-up-with-me
---

I want AI to be extremely intelligent and keep up with how quickly I think. I want to change how a screen works, use it, notice something wrong, and try another version while I still remember exactly what bothered me. I want to work on an image and see a different composition as soon as I can describe it, then follow whatever that makes me think of next.

That is the experience I have in mind when I say we still do not have nearly enough AI compute. I want the best work these systems can do, with so little waiting that I can keep exploring without breaking my concentration.

A lot of creating works this way. You have some idea of what you want, but making it teaches you things you could not have specified beforehand. An interaction that sounded convenient feels annoying when you use it. Seeing the result helps you figure out what to do next.

I want the same experience when thinking through infrastructure or code design. If I am considering moving work into a queue, I want the agent to inspect the current request path and show me what would change, including what happens if a job runs twice. A small diagram and a concrete failure case could help me understand the tradeoff and suggest a better approach. But they need to accurately reflect the system, and they need to arrive while I am still thinking through that decision. I want to understand the answer and follow the next thought without pausing to wait or untangle a mistake.

When designing code, I might be unsure where some behavior belongs. Show me how the callers would look under each approach and what happens when the requirements change. Suggest an option I missed. I want help developing the idea well enough to choose a direction, then a working version I can check. Faster creation and better thinking need to happen together. If I have to read pages of explanation or untangle a huge implementation before I can respond, I am still waiting to understand enough to make the next decision.

AI can make it harder to stay in flow when using it means repeatedly handing work off and waiting. You ask for a change, switch to something else, and return to a result you have to get your head back into. It may have saved time on the implementation, but you have lost the continuity of working through the problem. If accurate results arrived as quickly as I could use them, I could stay involved, understand what changed, and direct the next step. I think working with AI could feel absorbing again when the feedback is that immediate.

The wait also changes what I attempt. If each attempt takes ten minutes, I start deciding whether an idea deserves ten minutes before I have seen it. I leave small annoyances alone. I settle for something that works because checking whether another version would be better feels like too much trouble. Some ideas never get tried because I cannot justify the time it would take to find out whether they are any good.

If the result appeared immediately, I would try much more. I could follow a vague suspicion, reject it, and carry on. I would not need to be particularly confident that the experiment was worth doing.

By "speed of thought," I mean fast enough that the result arrives while I am still thinking about the change. There will always be things that take time to learn. An instant prototype cannot tell me whether customers will keep using it for six months. But it can let me use the thing I am imagining and decide whether it deserves more work.

The intelligence has to be there too. If the system responds immediately but misunderstands the change or breaks something nearby, I still have to stop and repair it. I want it to notice a weak assumption in my approach, explain the consequence clearly, and help me work through it. Once we choose a direction, it should understand the project well enough to implement the change and check that it works. Agent systems already [trade additional time and computation for better task performance](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents?utm_source=nem035.com). Fitting that work into an interaction that feels immediate is a much harder target than generating a quick answer.

This is also why [access to the whole stack](/thoughts/agents-need-access-to-the-whole-stack) matters. For software, I want the running result in front of me. Reading the code, editing it, building the app, and testing the behavior all contribute to the wait. A faster model only gets me part of the way there if everything around it remains slow.

When I am in flow, I still have the alternatives in my head. I remember why I tried this approach and what I wanted to check next. An accurate answer that arrives immediately lets me use all of that. A result that arrives after I have moved on means I have to reconstruct it before I can make a useful decision.

I want to spend an afternoon absorbed in a problem with AI helping me work through it. I try something, understand what happened, and have another idea. The work keeps developing while I stay involved in it. Being able to create more quickly would be useful, but being able to keep thinking without repeatedly stopping and starting is what I want most.