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On my boat, every watt is visible. On my laptop, almost none of them are.
A battery monitor on a sailboat, an AI agent in the cloud - and why the weight of computing never went away. It just got harder to see.
On my boat, every watt is visible. On my laptop, almost none of them are.
Sitting on the boat, energy is hard to ignore. When I turn something on, I can watch the current change, and if I leave it running long enough, the battery tells me what that decision cost.
Then I open my laptop and give an AI agent a task. It works through the codebase, changes a few files, runs the tests and tries again. Somewhere, physical machines are doing the work. From where I’m sitting, the energy behind it has disappeared from view.
We’ve spent decades making computing feel weightless, moving the machinery further away from the people using it. AI hasn’t brought it any closer, but it has made it matter again.
An unclear task can send an agent off doing work that never needed doing, and a model can be far more capable than the problem requires. None of that is new in software. What’s changing is the scale of the machinery underneath.
On the boat I’ve learned to ask how much a job actually needs, not how much I have available. It’s the same question I’ve asked as a founder about the products I’ve built.
I’m starting to ask it about intelligence too.
The cloud never made computing weightless. It just made the weight harder to see.