Yesterday’s newsletter argued that the messy middle isn’t a phase designers pass through. It’s the overhead the entire pipeline was built to manage. Tommy Geoco arrives at the same conclusion from economic history, channeling Carlota Perez’s framework for technological revolutions:
We have swapped the motor, but we have not yet redesigned the factory. The dissonance you feel, that gap between “it works amazing for some of my tasks” and “my entire workflow is broken,” lives in that space between installation and deployment. AI’s infrastructure is software, not steel. It iterates on monthly cycles, not decades. So that 30-year gap might become three, but the gap is still real.
When factories got electric motors in the 1880s, they swapped out the steam engine and changed nothing else. For 30 years, output barely moved. The returns came when companies redesigned the floor around the technology.
Geoco is transparent about what that redesign costs in practice. His studio’s output has multiplied—one video a month became eight—but the overhead has multiplied too:
I’m running 50 to 100 cognitive cycles a day, and each one has the same emotional weight. Ramp up, grind through the hard part, and then feel the rush when it works, and then repeat. That’s 100 times the tax on your nervous system.
That’s from someone in the 10-15% neurotype that thrives on rapid context-switching, reporting that even the thriving has a physiological bill. He also burned most of January on a tool that never worked for his use case.
The redesign is starting at the margins. Some designers are sketching in code, building prototypes before specs harden, shipping production work. But that’s not the mainstream yet. Most teams are still running the old factory with a new motor.
And that means the other side of Geoco’s split is just as real:
The technology extends human freedom and the transition crushes real people. Holding both truths is the real work right now. And choosing just one of those is comfortable. But comfortable doesn’t help.
Comfortable doesn’t help. The redesign has barely started.
