Do You Feel The Pain Of Idle Agents?

I watched a biopic of Winston Churchill recently. There's this scene where he's in the bathtub — of all places — dictating one of the most important addresses in the history of the United Kingdom to his assistant.

She's dutifully taking notes, they're riffing back and forth, he says "dear distinguished ladies and gentlemen," and she goes, "don't call them distinguished, they're Neville's snot-nosed brains," and they're having this dynamic creative exchange.

I remember watching this and feeling genuinely jealous.

I do my best thinking in the bathtub. (I know I'm not alone in this.) But I can't write my most important work there because I can't bring the electronics. I don't have an assistant who will sit outside the bathroom taking notes — who furthermore has all of my contacts, knows my objectives, remembers what I said last time, knows what Lord Neville Chamberlain said in the House of Commons.

And then it hit me.

Wait. I do have that assistant.

I have an assistant who has all of my contacts and knows my audience and knows what I said last time and knows my objectives. It's called AI. And what was only available to someone like Winston Churchill a generation ago is now available to all of us for the price of — max — $20 a month.

What was once reserved for leaders of nation states is now available to anyone with a wifi connection. It's something like how, a couple generations ago, only Maharajas in India had fans — actual humans who would fan them with palm fronds. And now even humble villagers in the most rural parts of India have electricity and ceiling fans.

What was only available to the very few is now available to the masses.

The same is true of intelligence.

But here's the problem: We don't live like it.

The Diagnosis

What's the biggest barrier to becoming AI native?

It's not prompting skill. It's not technical savvy. It's not access.

We have become accustomed to unassisted living.

We are not used to having abundant intelligence available to us. We've spent our entire careers — our entire lives — doing cognitive work alone. Handmade. Artisanal. Unassisted.

That conditioning runs so deep that even when unlimited intelligence becomes available for the cost of a fancy coffee, most people don't use it. Not because they can't. Because they don't think of it.

Ethan Mollick wrote something recently that's been rattling around in my head. He said: "Now that talent is abundant and cheap, what's scarce is knowing what to ask for."

He's right. But I think he's describing step two.

Step one — the actual bottleneck — is knowing you can ask at all.

What Assisted Living Looks Like

I want to tell you about my friend Brice Challamel. He was the head of AI at Moderna, where he trained 7,000 people — the entire staff. Now he's at OpenAI.

In one of my all-time favorite Beyond the Prompt episodes, Brice told me and Henrik a story about parent-teacher conferences.

He and his partner have two kids, each with eight teachers. That means 16 parent-teacher conferences a year. And historically? An abysmal experience. Dragging through 16 meetings is nobody's idea of fun. (I don't fault him for that, by the way — it's taxing.)

But this year was different.

Brice said: "I'm no longer an individual contributor to my household. I'm a team of five."

He invited an AI note-taker to take better notes than he'd ever been able to take himself. Between each of the 16 meetings, he had an AI coach give him feedback — pointing out blind spots, topics he was avoiding, questions he wasn't asking. He said he became a better parent over the course of those 16 meetings because of the continuous coaching.

After all 16 conversations, he had an AI expert — acting as a developmental psychologist — help him distill the lessons into language his 12 and 14 year-olds would understand.

And then he had an AI creative partner design dinnertime games for the family that would reinforce the lessons from the conferences.

This is a human being who is being amplified and augmented in the most important aspects of his life. Using freely available technology.

If you go to a parent-teacher conference without AI, you're living in the dark ages.

But most of us don't even realize it.

The Test

Here's how I know most people haven't grasped what's available to them:

They don't feel the pain of idle agents.

This week we’re releasing our conversation with Bryan McCann, the guy who built Salesforce's AI program before founding You.com. Bryan told us their mantra was: keep the GPUs full.

Think about that for a second. They spend all their time thinking about what meaningful task they can give to nearly unlimited intelligence while they're away. While they're sleeping. While they're in meetings. While they're on vacation.

Bryan said that Fridays are particularly stressful. On Thursday, he only has to think of a hard enough task for AI to handle for 12 hours until he's back. But on Friday? If he wants a weekend, he has to think of a task hard enough to keep almost unlimited intelligence meaningfully occupied for 48 hours.

Now think about this:

Everyone has access to almost unlimited intelligence. Most people are not even thinking about what it could be doing for them while they're off for the weekend. They're just... off.

Bryan's Fridays are stressful.

Most people's weekends are relaxing.

That's the difference between someone who has grasped what's available and someone who hasn't.

The Real Bottleneck

I was in my weekly AI Junto gathering this morning — a cohort of practitioners with whom I gleefully learn. While we were talking, I had Claude Code working on a couple tasks in the background. (I'm still getting the hang of this, honestly.) One agent spent about 10 minutes reading through my call transcripts and proposing article directions. Another was doing similar work on a different project.

All of that was happening while I was in the meeting. Because I took five minutes beforehand to remember, “I'm not an individual contributor anymore.”

And that's the key insight: It's not zero effort. It takes about five minutes of wherewithal. But if I can carve out those five minutes, now my AI is working while I'm in my next meeting.

When I come out, I have draft directions, proposed outlines, research summaries — work product I would have spent 90 minutes producing alone.

The primary bottleneck isn't intelligence anymore. It's not even knowing what to ask for.

The primary bottleneck is having the wherewithal to remember you have a team.

Most people don't. Not because the team isn't available. Because they've grown so accustomed to unassisted living that they don't even notice the arbitrary ceiling.

The Question

Real talk?

If you don't feel the pain of idle agents — if you regularly go to bed, go to meetings, go on vacation without deploying intelligence to work on your behalf — you haven't grasped what's available to you.

Not yet.

The talent is abundant. The cost is trivial. The access is universal.

The only thing that's scarce is the realization that you can ask.

Related: Hit Reset
Related: Beyond the Prompt: Brice Challamel

Join over 29,147 creators & leaders who read Methods of the Masters each week.