Ten Minutes

A message pops up while I'm mid-way through something else. Someone on my project is stuck. The internal tool they work in has broken again, some part of it just stopped, and now they can't do their job.

Here's the thing nobody writes on a job description. Strip everything else away, and my work comes down to one job: the project cannot get stuck. People keep moving, or the whole thing slows to a crawl. Keeping them unstuck is the real work, and what happened next is just one small example of it.

The old way to handle this was simple, and slow. File a ticket with engineering. Wait. They're good at what they do, but they have their own queue, so something that needs ten minutes of attention can take a day or two to actually reach you. Meanwhile the person just sits there, blocked, and so does that piece of the project.

So now I do something different. We have LLMs wired straight into our internal tools. Instead of filing a ticket and waiting, I open Claude, or Cursor, and I just tell it what's broken. And then we go digging. It doesn't hand me a clean answer. We work it out together, back and forth, until we find what's actually causing it. Then either it tells me how to fix it and I do, or it makes the fix itself. These aren't deep code changes. They're the small, everyday breakages that would otherwise cost someone a day of waiting.

Ten minutes, and the person's moving again.

That's the part I keep coming back to. The tool didn't take over my job. It made me better at the real one. Because my job was never about tickets, or tools, or fixes. It was about making sure nobody on my project stays stuck longer than they have to. AI just took the wait out of it.