Helping SMB owners & ops teams use LLMs to fix real workflow bottlenecks (not just more tools). Founder @silentintell | Weekly on how work actually gets done
San Diego, CA
Joined September 2015
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A few weeks ago my LLM agent politely told me I didn’t have enough hours in the week.
Technically correct. It had just scheduled the week like a human: two-hour blocks for drafting, research, and a Tuesday morning slot for a task that didn’t require me to be awake.
So I typed: stop. You’re thinking too much like a human. Think like AI.
Design around the workflow instead.
One shared picture: price, timeline, staffing, terms — facts about one job, not four documents in four inboxes.
Put an agent over the top whose only job is to watch the whole thing and flag the two things that cannot both be true the moment they’re written down.
Then separate what can run automatically from what actually requires a human.
Commitments to the client stay with a person. Every time.
Pick one workflow that matters. Ask:
Where does the work get stuck? Why there? What is that delay costing you?
If you review something, say what evidence you need, what thresholds matter, and what counts as an exception.
Do that and the work arrives assembled. Skip it and you remain the constraint — no matter how many agents are running underneath you.
My agent takes the 2 a.m. shifts. I take the parts where someone has to be accountable.
Full piece: read.silentintel.com/p/dont-…
I went to CES last January and something was missing.
Took me most of a day to work out what it was.
She could not tell you what protocol it uses and has no reason to care.
That is not the technology failing to impress her.
That is the technology finishing its job.
Which leaves the question I actually care about now.
If that is what winning looks like - vanishing completely - what happens when it is AI's turn?
My guess: we will know AI has won when a keynote stops advertising it.
read.silentintel.com/p/what-…
A friend of mine reviews every hiring offer his company sends out. Offers sit in his inbox two or three weeks. Last year they lost a couple of very good candidates that way.
The obvious advice is "delegate." I think that's wrong, and unfair to him.
In 1942 someone in the War Department wrote down the actual fix on a single page: don't bring your chief a problem, bring him a finished decision. They called it completed staff work.
Almost nobody does it, because preparing that page took most of a day.
That's the part that just got cheap.
open.substack.com/pub/daniel…
In the early 90s I sold pagers in Moscow.
A government executive heard my whole pitch about instant messages and then asked why humans and dolphins can't talk to each other, given dolphins have a language. "Because dolphins speak too fast. Humans can't process it quickly enough to hold a conversation. My organization is the same. What good is it if the messages arrive at the speed of light, when nobody here has the capacity to react to them?"
He bought the pagers anyway. He was also the only person I pitched that year who understood he was buying more input, not more output.
Thirty-five years later, everyone's drafts got faster and nobody's week got
shorter. New piece on the review-and-rework tax: read.silentintel.com/p/why-c…
