I spend a strange amount of my day explaining my own work to a machine. I paste in the email thread. I summarise the meeting it was not in. I describe a project it has never heard of, again, because the last chat forgot all of it. The model is brilliant and completely blank about me at the same time. That gap is the real reason AI can feel like more work instead of less. Every conversation starts from nothing, and I am the one who has to fill it in.
1 / The tax you pay every dayThink about what a normal AI task actually involves. Before the useful part, there is the briefing. You gather the context, paste it in, set the scene. For a solopreneur this adds up fast, because you are the only one holding the full picture of your business. You are the memory, the filing system, and the messenger, all at once. 2 / A smarter model will not save youIt is tempting to think the next model will fix this, but a sharper engine still shows up with no idea what you are working on. These models are clever enough already. What they miss is any memory of your actual work. The assistant that helps you most is the one that has sat through the week you just had. 3 / The uncomfortable fixThere is an obvious catch. For an AI to know your work, it has to see your work. That means a tool sitting on your machine, reading your screen and listening to your meetings. The first time I read that, my instinct was a flat no. It sounds like the kind of surveillance I spend my weeks warning people away from. 4 / Where I landedSo I went straight at the thing I warn clients about constantly, the data. The kind of tool I was willing to try keeps the controls in your hands. It reads text rather than storing pictures of your screen, lets you hide any app you do not want it near, does not train on what it sees, and lets you delete everything in one click. That is the line for me. A tool that watches my work is only acceptable while I stay in charge of what it watches and where the data goes.
I stayed skeptical about this whole category for a long time, and on the data side I still keep one eye open. But the context problem is real, and ignoring it just means paying the tax forever. This one is worth a look, with your eyes open. Talk soon, Mikkel P.S. Reply and tell me how many times today you re-explained something to an AI that you had already told it yesterday. That number is the tax.
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