I built it as a learning device. I wanted to know: what does a genuinely useful policy analysis actually require? What are the ingredients? What makes one piece of work move a room and another one sit unopened on a desk for six months before someone prints it out to prop up a monitor?

The answer, it turned out, was not what I expected.

I have spent my entire professional life trying to make the people in the room feel smarter. Trying to help them see things they couldn’t see, connect things they hadn’t connected, challenge assumptions they didn’t know they held. AI doesn’t replace that. AI supercharges it. It takes the thing I’ve always done and removes the bottleneck, which was never the thinking. It was the doing.

I used to believe that writing had to hurt a little.

Not in a tortured-artist way. I’ve never been one for staring moodily out of windows. But I did believe that good writing required friction — the scratch of pen on paper, the crossing out of sentences, the quiet humiliation of a paragraph that simply refused to land.

Then AI arrived.