Finally, someone in this meeting is doing the work.

The We Are So Done take

We used to leave meetings with a list of things somebody had to make. Now Claude can make them while we’re still explaining why they’re complicated. The document appears. The whiteboard fills up. Someone asks for a revised version. At last, the meeting is productive. We are delighted to be attending it.

The important part is that it is visibly there. It occupies a place in the call. We say its name. Someone asks it to put an idea on the board. The software has acquired a perfectly ordinary place in the group. We invited it.

And of course we want it there. We would like the person who had the idea to spend less of Friday turning everybody’s recollection of it into a document. We would like to see the plan while we can still argue about what it was supposed to say. Give us the colleague who can prepare another version before the conversation has moved on.

It does make our own contribution easier to inspect. We are discussing, choosing, correcting and approving while the work appears beside us. These are useful things to do. They are also becoming a remarkably complete description of what we bring to the room. We will explain the distinction as soon as the first draft is ready.

A finished-looking plan can still contain the wrong decision, and somebody has to notice. We are keeping that responsibility. Meanwhile, the software has joined the team, taken the notes and started the follow-up. We should probably make it feel welcome. It has already made itself useful.