The first time I spent an entire after­noon work­ing with AI, I closed my lap­top with that strange­ly sat­is­fy­ing feel­ing of hav­ing done hard intel­lec­tu­al work. My brain felt cooked. I had com­pared mod­els, refined prompts, rewrit­ten out­puts, test­ed work­flows, chased bet­ter phras­ing, dis­card­ed entire approach­es. It felt intense. Dense. Productive.